How To Turn American Higher Education Inside Out

According to Jordan Weissmann from The Atlantic, the United States can afford to introduce free education at the undergraduate level, leading to a bachelor’s degree, in all public universities, which account for 75 percent of all undergraduates. How much would that cost? $62 billion. It is less than the $70 billion the federal government currently spends on funding public and private education.*

Where do these figures come from? Higher education in America is for pay, including in public state schools. Tuition levels vary not only between universities, which have a lot of freedom in setting fees, but also within one institution: For example, you can be asked to pay extra for access to sports facilities or better accommodation. According to the Department of Education, $62 billion** is the precise tuition total all undergraduates in public schools paid in 2012.

The second sum, $70 billion, is what the government adds to the system — mainly by providing wider access to higher education for less wealthy students, but also by directly funding private schools. Grants and scholarships for the less well-off and two new schemes for the most gifted students are a basic way of funding education. Almost half of the amount is spent on this. All the rest makes up so-called tax benefits, which allow for deducting some education expenses from income tax payments — the amount of deduction depends on the tuition, and almost $1 billion is spent on work-study programs, or on-campus jobs for students and graduates. Tax benefits help the middle and upper class the most. One of aims of the program is to guarantee that inflation and additional costs will not influence the savings the rich are depositing in special accounts for their children’s education.

It is easy to realize what Weissmann means in just the glimpse of an eye. Since most of the $36 billion reserved for grants goes to public institutions — over 60 percent in the 2010-2011 academic year — as does just as big a part of $32 billion of tax benefits, why not quit charging tuition in public schools altogether? Instead of creating funds, isn’t it easier to simply make education free? Finally, education in state schools would no longer be public only in name. From a fiscal point of view, tax deductions are no different than expenses, and federal grant programs today are a selective, but still direct, way of funding education.

The actual cost of the reform could be even lower than the $62 billion covering tuition fees, given that the government gives no extra money to private schools — $18 billion less, according to data from the 2010-2011 academic year — and it consistently eliminates the need to take out student loans for paying tuition in public schools — the government guarantees loans with a total amount of $107 billion. On a federal scale, it is not much. The state of Washington alone, after cuts in the budget, supports the most common and least prestigious community colleges with $1.3 billion and provides extra money for two of the state universities, in Seattle and Pullman.

So, is it possible to reform American education at its base? It is, writes Weissmann.

His reasoning on the issue of financing itself may be the matter under discussion — free education would mean more students and that means increasing benefits. This, however, is not the biggest problem. The whole American class system is built on education for pay. To make a long story short, if you don’t have enough money to send your children to college, even with the help of state assistance, you belong to the lower class. If you can afford to pay off a student loan, you are in the middle class. If you don’t have to worry about any of these at all because you are a graduate of an elite private school, a donor for a local university or you can simply afford high tuition, you are in the upper class.

Social class status, as related to education, is often hereditary: The third and fourth generations of local elites, which have been supporting prestigious universities for eternity, attend Ivy League schools. On the other hand, first-generation students — one-third of all students — whose parents did not graduate from any higher school, face such problems as worse prospects for employment and internship, or lack of environmental support. Statistically speaking, they manage to graduate from school at the scheduled time less frequently, also because of financial problems.

Tuition for higher education also makes young people dependent on the market. Students who go into debt to pay for school or who work during their studies, are quickly and brutally introduced into the reality of the U.S. economy. If, at the age of 19, you already have a loan on your hands, which you literally need to start paying off in a short while, you will not come up with such ideas as studying philosophy, taking a gap year for volunteer work or starting studies afresh, choosing a different specialization or university. You simply try to get a degree and job as quickly as possible to start repaying a loan — and whole sections of the economy and metropolises take advantage of low-paid or volunteer work by fresh graduates or trainees during their studies. And it works out pretty well for them.

This is why what looks like a small correction in financing, from a fiscal point of view, could really be a revolution.

Exempting public university students from paying tuition would mean that they would no longer be loan slaves and could enter the labor market later. That would equalize chances between groups from different classes. It would also confirm a model of public education, in which a school gets money from large donations but also asks for federal research and scholarship grants. By doing that and admitting less wealthy students, it would get more funds from the government’s budget.

Thanks to such a reform, educational prospects for children would finally be less dependent on a family’s financial situation, and schools for elites would have to consider greater openness to accepting the best students from less wealthy or immigrant families — lest they would risk their migration to public schools, and in the future, from a potential donors’ circle. The federal government, however, would lose the most powerful reason behind recruiting young men and women into the military: a promise to pay for their future studies. Every aspect of such change is revolutionary itself; all together, they would be a real earthquake.

Although the U.S. is proud of its revolutionary traditions, it does not consider this revolution, even in its bravest moves. Free education for everybody would mean turning upside down the basis of a social class system that exists in a society that denies the existence of classes more than anything else.

*Editor’s note: Weissmann places those figures at $62.2 billion and $69 billion respectively.

**Editor’s note: This figure, like the other figures the author cites in this article, is a very near approximation.