Keeping up with the costs of a college education has become an increasingly difficult task for millions of Americans across the nation. Countless young adults are being forced to move back in with their parents as they try to escape their repayment bills. And with over $1.2 trillion in student loan debt and about 40 million borrowers, this crisis only worsens. Last August, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proposed a plan that would ease the process of paying tuition at public colleges through major government spending. Although a laudable initiative and contribution, Clinton’s proposal seems to be missing the entire point of the discussion: making college more affordable.
Under the plan about $175 billion would go to the states which guarantee that “students would not have to take out a loan to cover tuition at four-year public colleges and universities.” In return for the money, states would have to increase their budget spending over time for higher education. Although Clinton’s plan is one of the best proposals yet presented by the left, and does not go as far as Sen. Bernie Sanders’ promise to abolish public tuition altogether, it does involve an increase in spending of over $750 billion over 10 years. With college costs only rising, this proposal would impact — and might even exacerbate — the problem. This proposal, then, becomes a somewhat unrealistic solution to a very real problem.
Offering free tuition doesn’t actually make college free — it only shifts the costs from students to taxpayers. College spending, then, is at the mercy of whatever the public is willing to invest, while the institution’s cost per student remains untouched. What happens, then, when the taxpayer money doesn’t keep up with rising costs and demand? The result is an inability to serve more students without lowering the quality of education.
A recent example that illustrates this phenomenon are California’s community colleges, the most affordable in the nation. When the recession hit, enrollment at these colleges skyrocketed while the state’s budget for education was cut by $1.5 billion due to lower tax revenue. This resulted in an increase in tuition and led the colleges to turn away over 600,000 students. Many argue federal policy could force policymakers to increase funding, but that would only mean tying their hands during rough times.
Although one cannot deny that tuition is the largest cost of attending college, and doing away with it would dramatically help a lot of students, it wouldn’t be true to say it is the only cost college students face. This brings up another problem, as it leads many students to still take on part-time jobs in order to cover additional expenses such as books and housing. Covering tuition, then, is not going to make the student loan debt crisis disappear. The Tennessee Promise program, one aimed at providing last-dollar scholarships that cover tuition and fees, is another example of why efforts to make college more affordable to students should not be solely aimed at lowering or eliminating tuition.
Debbie Cochrane, the research director at The Institute for College Access and Success, claims, “What you see is a lot of students enrolling who might not otherwise enroll. But you see really low success rates, and things like students going part-time because they can’t afford the books.” Despite almost free tuition at many community colleges across the nation, only one third of students from the bottom income quartile who began their community college careers in 2003 finished a degree by 2009. This brings up the question of whether programs like Tennessee Promise can help students struggling to pay for books to graduate.
My objective in using the case of Tennessee Promise is to reveal that making college an affordable option for the American people involves and reflects deeper issues than tuition costs. It is evident that eliminating tuition at some colleges would drastically help and improve the affordability problem that higher education is facing, but as Tennessee Promise shows us, getting students at the front gate of a college education doesn’t guarantee them a completely affordable path to a degree.
People should be incentivized — not discouraged — to receive a higher education. One of the most important things to realize about this problem is that offering government-financed free-tuition isn’t the ultimate remedy. Instead of spreading taxpayer money throughout all students, policies addressing this crisis should be centered on aiming those resources towards those who actually need them the most and give them the power to choose the educational option, either public or private, that is best for them.
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