Why I Changed My Mind About Free College

I used to think making college free should be a priority. Now I don’t. But not because I think it’s a bad idea. In short, it would not fix what I think is most in need of fixing, and the money would be better spent elsewhere.

The long version is that there are a lot of really interesting arguments and research showing that free college would not have the impact most supporters hope it would. To understand why that is, it’s useful to list why people think free college is a good idea in the first place. Below is a list of the problems I was hoping free college would help solve. I’ve listed them in order of importance to me, and the rest of the discussion will be based on the priorities in this list.

1. Make college accessible to the poor, which would hopefully reduce poverty.
2. Increase the amount of minorities attending and graduating college (somewhat related to 1)
3. Avoid starting young people off with a bunch of debt, which could help them get on track with retirement savings faster and help them establish themselves earlier.

One and two I think are extremely important. In my opinion the amount of poverty we have is shameful, and we don’t do enough to fix it. It’s extremely hard to escape, and those who are raised in poverty are very likely to remain in poverty the rest of their lives. This fact leads me to believe that society needs to intervene. How can we stand by while poor kids are destined to grow into poor adults, all because of the circumstances of their birth? We have to break the cycle, and a college degree greatly increases the chances of having higher incomes. Minorities are under-represented in colleges, and part of that is because they are over-represented among the poor. So originally I had thought that free college could be a good way to make college accessible to the poor.

But that thinking is wrong. Middle and upper class people make up the majority of college students. So by making college free you’re really just subsidizing people who can mostly pay for it already (we’ll get back to point 3 from the list later). This is a regressive policy. It’s like tax breaks for the rich, and it doesn’t help the people who need it the most. Additionally it seems that there’s evidence that people in poverty have access to college through grants and loans, but often don’t take it or don’t have the skills necessary for college. So making college free wouldn’t increase the proportion of poor people who attend, it would just subsidize the people who can already afford to go. (See link A at the bottom for a good discussion of college attendance and poverty and why making it free wouldn’t help)

But if free college won’t work, how do we fix the problem of poverty and low educational attainment of those in poverty? It seems the answer is that we should focus our efforts at an earlier stage. There’s a lot of evidence that indicates that poverty causes poor educational outcomes. This starts early on in life, and by the time the kids graduate high school they don’t have the skills or knowledge necessary to attend and succeed in college. There are many reasons that poverty causes poor educational outcomes. One reason is that parents have lower educational attainment. Another is just that having less money means there are a lot of things that distract you from succeeding in school (hunger, busy parents, etc.). Another is that you’re likely going to a poorer quality school. What’s really telling is that SAT scores correlate extremely well with family income. The more your parents make, the higher you’re likely to score on your SAT. One extremely interesting study has found that even if you control for the parents education and the student’s success in high school (so comparing kids have gotten similar grades in high school and who have parents with similar education) SAT scores are still lower for students with lower family income. They find that success in high school is the most important factor, but success in high school is likely also related to family income and parental education, so it’s hard to separate the causes. I have only read the conclusions to the study, but it’s really fascinating and I highly suggest reading the conclusions (see link B at the bottom. Also see link A for more information about SAT scores and income).

Knowing this, it seems that the most effective way of improving educational attainment and chance of attending and succeeding in college for kids in poverty is by boosting incomes and high school achievement. Providing poor families with more money is likely to increase the educational attainment of children, which is important to their future income. And the best way to increase success in high school is by focusing early on in school. A charter school known as the Harlem Children’s Zone has been established with this very mission. It accomplishes its goals through a number of focused policies, such as all day pre-k (giving the kids a constructive environment while parents work), workshops for parents to learn how to better teach and care for their kids, extended all day school (same reason as pre-k), among other services. You’ll notice that a lot of these have to do with the social aspect of education. Basically, that providing a good environment for the kids is important, which goes hand in hand with the effect poverty has on education.

So is the Harlem Children’s Zone effective? There is evidence that it is, though it’s still too new to fully evaluate everything. But a paper about it (see link C at the bottom) concludes that the student’s scores are better than those of comparable students in the area after a few years at the school.

But this is just one school. To truly have an impact on poverty, education, and college attendance we would have to get serious about providing these resources and reducing poverty. So I no longer think free college is a good idea. Instead we should use that money and the political effort to provide more schools like the Harlem Children’s Zone, more services for poor families, and to supplement the incomes of poor families. It seems to me that the evidence suggests this would have a much bigger impact on increasing the amount of poor people attending college and reducing poverty overall.

Finally, what about point 3 in the goals of free college, that it seems bad to be starting students out with all this debt? I still think this is important! I’m not against the concept of free college, as I do think the country would be more productive and better off without student debt. But we don’t have unlimited money and we don’t have unlimited political influence. So we should focus on the people that really need help in our society, and on the policies best suited to help these people. Free college does not meet that criteria. After we’ve improved the lives of the people most in need, then we can turn our attention to making things better for the people who don’t need it as much.

And with regard to fixing the college system, making college free will not make it more accessible for everyone. More people will want to go to college, but the universities won’t be able to accommodate them. Already colleges have extremely high demand. That’s much of the reason prices are so high. So what’s one of the best ways to reduce prices? Build more colleges. Right now the universities are full to capacity and trying to expand to keep up with demand. They can charge whatever they want and people will pay it. So to reduce the price, we should open more universities. Increased competition will drive down prices and students will be able to shop around easier for the best deal.

Think how far the 75 billion dollar price of free college could go towards revamping struggling schools to be more like the Harlem Children’s Zone and making them more up to date with the best research. I don’t know the price of that, but I would be surprised if that didn’t cover all or most of it. Increasing incomes for the families of these kids would most likely take some more money, but this seems to be the most effective way to improve outcomes. We should focus our money and political effort on the policies that are most effective and help the people that need it most. Our current policies are failing the least fortunate among us.

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