I’m usually bored by conversations that involve arguments about whether things are progressive or they are not, but I have to admit that I’m at least a little interested in the debate over free college and college loan forgiveness. In this specific piece, I’m temperamentally inclined to call bullshit when a complaint is lodged against a college plan because it doesn’t provide money for people who aren’t going to go to college. Why would a college plan redistribute a bunch of money for things that don’t involve college?
Yet, you can turn things around. Elizabeth Warren wants to pay for her college plan “exclusively from a wealth tax on those with more than $50 million in assets.” That’s a large redistributive policy, and she won’t get multiple bites at that apple. If she could actually succeed in extracting a giant pile of money from the super-wealthy then it’s legitimate to ask whether the fairest way for her to redistribute it is to give it only to people who have the wherewithal to go to college. That would leave a lot of people without a slice of pie.
The problem here is less with the overall debate than the age-old apples and oranges error. One side wants a college plan and the other side wants a broader societal plan that would include college as only one component. The college plan could be progressive in the sense that it’s redistributive, but the decision to spend the money on a college plan instead of some other plan could be comparatively regressive and fundamentally unfair.
I don’t like debates where people talk past each other.
Yet, even within the confines of Warren’s plan, there are still some regressive elements. It’s a problem the free college plans all seem to share:
But in general, the plans make up the difference between financial aid — such as the Pell Grant and need-based aid provided by states — and the published price of public colleges. This means the largest rewards go to students who do not qualify for financial aid. In plans that include four-year colleges, the largest benefits go to students at the most expensive four-year institutions. Such schools enroll a greater proportion of well-heeled students, who have had better opportunities at the K-12 level than their peers at either two-year colleges or less-selective four-year schools.
This probably won’t surprise you, but the more money a family has, the more money they’re willing to spend on college. The result is that there is a big difference in the average tuition costs that people pay depending on which income bracket their parents are in, and this means that any system that covers that net cost of tuition is going to dole out the money in a highly regressive way.
There’s obviously something to be said for designing redistributive policies in a way that benefits the middle class and even some of the upper middle class. It’s important that you have a lot of people who benefit so you’ll have a lot of people who will complain and punish politicians who try to undo your reforms. It’s not necessarily a flaw that a social welfare program is inefficient in getting aid to the people who need it the most. But it’s reasonably to haggle over these kinds of details. You’re effectively asking how much you’re willing to lose in inefficiency costs in order to launch and sustain the program at all.
Generally speaking, the progressive critique of these free college plans is that they are far too inefficient and they take a very scarce resource (rich people’s money) and give way too much of it to people who really can get by without it. In the bargain, you get a decent deal for people who are going to college but you do nothing for people on lower rungs of the economy.
You can design a college tuition plan that is narrower and more tied to family income (ability to pay) but that won’t necessarily have the political support you need to get it enacted. And it won’t be anything but a college tuition plan. It won’t be a plan for helping people who are high school dropouts or going into the economy without a higher education.
The important debate isn’t over what is progressive and what is not. The important debate is over how to get scarce resources and then over how to reallocate them if you succeed. One thing to always keep in mind, however, is that nothing will come of this debate if you don’t get the money. Failure to get the money is not progressive. Failing to get the money because you’re an ideological hard-ass is not progressive.
So, first you figure out a plan for extracting wealth from people with over $50 million in assets. If that plan includes free college tuition or massive loan forgiveness, then it’s probably going to have to have some pretty big regressive inefficiencies. If it involves some plan that doesn’t include the middle class at all? Well, then you’ve done something that no politicians before you could accomplish. You’re a real progressive hero!
Is free college tuition Warren’s only public benefit proposal? If it is then your point would have some merit. We need a lot more distributive justice in this country, not just college. Since the 1980s more and more programs that used to be paid for out of public funds (tax revenue) have been privatized. Why? Because .01% are holding on to more and more of their cash. Everybody has equal rights, except if you want something, you gotta pay for it. And it gets more and more expensive. But we’re all equal under the First Amendment,and that’s why money =speech.
In Europe college is somehow still free or very low cost but not everybody is expected to go. There are many other programs too. So stop breaking my heart about how we can’t afford it.
Sorry, still getting used to the new equipment.
Part of the point is that you don’t get to soak the rich repeatedly, if at all. So, if you get the opportunity, you have to make choices about how to spend the money. Free college is one choice, but it crowds other choices. That’s the main progressive critique, but then even within the college plans, they tend to spend most of the money on people who are currently making a choice to spend way more than they have to for tuition. So, it’s regressive in that sense, too. I actually spend most of my energy in this piece offerer counterpoints to those critiques.
I have no problem soaking the rich by increasing progressive tax rates to alleviate income inequality but not this way. And not to pay for high priced private schools. Maybe start with state schools out of general funds.
Captain Obvious here, but shouldn’t “free college” apply to State colleges only. I am not a big fan of providing free college to Oral Roberts (not that I hate ORU, an evangelical school that I know little about), or Harvard. Especially since many top-tier colleges (I am looking at you, Stanford) do not charge tuition to families making under 100k. Just sayin’
It’s more a subsidy than a simple payment of your bill. If you get financial aid, you need less money. If you’re paying your own way, you need more. In that sense, it’s regressive.
Since Sanders first brought up the idea of Free College in 2016, I’ve understood that it meant “College for All” meaning you could use it if and when, and to the extent that, you needed it. So, like Medicare for All, if you were damaged physically/psychologically and needed something to repair that damage, you get that health care. If you need higher education to realize the opportunities you have the aptitude (grades / SAT scores) and talent (demonstrated ability) for, you get that education. I suppose it would be tricky to figure that out, but no one needs a gold-plated school to fully realize their potential any more than anyone needs gold-plated medical care. The program would set a price-point, wouldn’t it, say, based on the average cost of tuition at public colleges and say, well here’s your $5317 a year for tuition–keep the grades up or lose it! (Shouldn’t be that tricky. LIkewise, it should be funded like Medicare is with it’s own, dedicated, income tax, since education is as important as health to democracy.)
(PS OT but little observation about the comment editor. The html tag buttons at the top are really good, but why, e.g., does the i (italic) button actually insert an em (emphasis) tag? Confusing. I know they’re interchangeable for rendering purposes still, but an i button should insert an italic tag, shouldn’t it? I like the old i tag myself and understand that it’s deprecating in favor of the (supposedly) more semantic em, and guess that’s why the editor inserts em instead of i, but it’s getting to the point, IMHO, where too many buttons everywhere don’t do what thay’re labeled to do anymore.)
I’m not particularly in favor of free college, but I do think we need some kind of student debt relief. I think wholesale forgiveness of debt, although an excellent policy on the merits, is unlikely to garner enthusiasm from the general population, in part because it won’t be perceived as fair (“why shouldn’t people pay their debts?”) I would like to see someone propose wholesale forgiveness of student debt *interest*, perhaps coupled with a provision that the principal is forgiven if you make your payments for a certain amount of time. This would likely be seen as fair, and it would give some relief to people who are stuck in a debt trap where their balance gets larger and larger every year even though they are paying faithfully.
In the broader scheme of things, I worry that student indebtedness is just another way to turn us into a population of serfs, with more and more people only having “rights” in a notional sense. Mass incarceration has already done this for a segment of the population–student load debt could do it for a substantial portion of the rest of us. So as a progressive, I do think this is something that we need to address.
Where in these plans is the issue of in-state vs. out-of-state tuition addressed? Out-of-state is often double in-state, is that fully subsidized as well? Further, all this discussion talks about tuition, maybe fees. What about costs of room and board, which for in-state schools is often half the total cost?
I dislike the idea of taxing a person’s wealth other than upon his death. It is a guarantee those people will retaliate anyway they can, since they have been singled out. Besides, we don’t need a nickel of their money to pay for something. Our currency is freely created in any amount needed.
If income inequality is your case, there are other avenues like increasing progressive tax rates or increasing the minimum wage.
The scheme here smacks of punishing the wealthy on one hand and providing free education on the other. Doesn’t sound good to me. Why not start by paying for local community colleges and trade schools out of general taxes?
What I don’t think you’re getting is just how much money the super-rich have screwed the public out of over the last several decades and ongoing. People say they don’t like the idea of free college. I went through my B.A. and my M.A. virtually for free. Admittedly, you had to qualify. My family was not poor but not rich either. You qualified by performance, and it didn’t apply to all colleges, just the city colleges. The state colleges were quite inexpensive too. People on this thread say they don’t like that. I think they can’t even conceive of it. In my time it was normal. Why the change, what happened too that public money? It now lines the pockets of people who don’t think they should have to pay taxes, and who get their way.