Yes, free tuition is a giveaway to the upper middle class. But the real reason I don't like it is that I think there's almost no chance that it'll actually be matched 1-for-1 by public spending increases. Thus it'll starve universities of resources, which would be quite bad.
Defenders of free tuition - i.e. basically everyone I know - just sort of take an "assume a can opener" approach toward public funding and ignore the evidence of the last few decades, assuming all reluctance to spend will be swept away in a great wave of socialist confetti...
The reality is that our universities are practically the one functional institution we have left, and they're the most liberal institution we have, and they're built on the tuition dollars of the upper middle class. So we monkey with that at our peril.
I mean if I were a sneaky conservative who wanted to smash higher education, I'd support free tuition and promise increased public spending to make up for it, then just quietly fail to do part (B). Then I'd sit back and watch humanities departments implode or whatever...
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