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This is still all over my TL this morning so here are some reasons this is the wrong way to think about college. Long thread.
First, let’s unpack it. What Buttigieg is saying here is that college brings $$ to those who complete it. But the people who finish college are, on average, better off to start with. And even if they weren’t, they now have more earning power, b/c college.
So by charging them less than their actual cost of education, we are using the money of poorer non-college goers to pay for the educations of college-goers – who are either well-off to start with, or will be with their shiny new BAs.
Where does this idea come from? This is not really a way people talk about college AT ALL until the 1960s. You need the emergence of human capital theory – that college is an investment that produces future earnings – to conceptualize it this way.
You also need to be thinking of government spending in cost-benefit terms: good policies are ones in which government spends the least possible money to achieve the maximum desired benefit (education).
Liberal economists in government begin advancing this way of thinking about college in the late 60s. College is irrationally cheap. Since individuals benefit from attending – and especially since they’re mostly better-off – they should bear the cost.
Let tuition rise, then ensure students can borrow to meet the cost. It will pay off in for them the long run! But also be cheaper for government. If you want to be really progressive, provide grants rather than loans to the poorest.
This is pretty much the road that leads to Sallie Mae and the long, slow expansion of student debt in this country.
(It also led to interesting – and failed – early-70s experiments like the Yale Tuition Postponement Option – basically human capital contracts – designed by economist James Tobin: yaledailynews.com/blog/2001/03/2…)
There are several types of counterarguments against this approach. The first is that this undermines the argument for all sorts of public services:
Including, say, high school:
Yes. It does. And I am sure you could convince lots of “progressives” to get rid of fire stations if you pointed out that they particularly benefit well-off homeowners.
I get this argument, I have made this argument, but I don’t think it’s particularly compelling. It reinforces the idea that this is the right kind of test for what services should be public, and the answer will be “hardly any”.
The second counterargument I see is “you’re getting the cost-benefit calculation wrong”. This, too, sticks with the microeconomic framing of the problem.
Arguments that emphasize college as a public good (in the economic sense) or the behavioral effects of tuition (poor kids don’t make rational decisions about borrowing to invest in college) are coming from this place.
Again, good points, but they concede too much up front – that we should think of college primarily through a human capital lens. They also assume we can rationally set a policy direction to maximize its production in a progressive and cost-effective way.
To my mind, there are two strong arguments against the Buttigieg view of college. The first is political.
The argument that public services should be means-tested has been prominent among Democrats for nearly fifty years. It is the reason we don’t have free college. It is the reason we don’t have universal health insurance.
Yes, it would be cheaper to just provide these things to poor people and let others pay for themselves. But you know what? We don’t like providing things to poor people. As Wilbur Cohen said way back when, “Programs for the poor make for poor programs.”
(He said it to Milton Friedman, against Friedman’s argument that Social Security should be means-tested – another position many self-styled progressives would agree with: )
So the idea of a world where the high-income pay for their own investment in future earnings while the low-income receive generous public assistance is a political fantasy. In practice, the high-tuition, high-aid model rarely includes the actual aid: theatlantic.com/business/archi…
Second, public services have cultural as well as economic effects. There is real value in a society where people believe they can access education without mortgaging their future. Where they know they have second chances if it doesn’t work out the first time.
And where they don’t have to turn to #LowerEd and “predatory inclusion” to get that second chance.
Those effects aren’t easily measurable. But you don’t think it would make a difference to working-class New Yorkers if CUNY today was what it was fifty years ago – excellent and free – even to the folks who don’t go, but know it’s there?
Public services create solidarity, community, and meaningful civic culture. That’s the real reason we have fire stations, and high schools, and parks, and libraries. Because they create the kind of society we want to live in.
So argue all you want about whether we should have those things at all. But let’s get over the idea that “college is regressive” is actually a progressive policy position. Because unless you look at the last fifty years and see something very different than I do, it’s just not.
