The Problem
College has gotten too expensive. The days when most people could earn their way through college, with a little help from their parents, are long gone. My husband and I both worked our ways through college without parental help, but we were able to live at home (at least most of the time) and bus/BART fare was somewhat affordable. I remember approximately how much I paid--$630/year—because I wrote the checks from my small scholarship and salary. As my “salary” for a part-time job amounted to $2-$2.50/hour, you can see I wasn’t flush. But it was affordable. Tuition and fees at UC Berkeley are now $14, 254. Check out the chart below to see how the costs have grown.
The Free College Solution
Governments love to spend other people’s money, so it stands to reason that their only solution to college unaffordability is to subsidize it (or eliminate the cost entirely, throwing the cost on taxpayers.) No one appears interested in looking at the reason tuitions have grown out of sight. Typically, when you don’t understand a problem, you get the solution wrong. Just remember math classes.
Why “Free” is Bad
How much do you value free things? Studies show that most people don’t appreciate them, except in the few seconds when they receive them. And it’s worse than that. When I trained as a creativity coach, we had to have some clients as part of the learning. Because we never charged them any money, they instinctively didn’t value our work as much, and ended up not doing the homework or really progressing on their goals. Even small fees brought much better results. It turns out that people need to have some skin in the game. As a self-financed college student, I can tell you that I drove professors and TAs crazy, demanding as much as I could get from my education.
Free college would mean students staying as long as they could get away with it, avoiding beginning their adult life in the work world. Useless majors would proliferate, as the hard sciences would demand too much of students. Some people might have the diligence and industriousness to prosper under “free college,” but most would not. I remember seeing a woman at Occupy Wall Street bearing a sign that said, “I have a degree in Ethnic Transgender Studies and I can’t find a job.” Enough said.
Many kids will sign up for college rather than work, even as they have the potential to do great things in the trades. Most of those who have designed apps and games as teens don’t need college to get a great job.
The worst part of this is the dissemination of the cost across people who never had access to college. Why should they pay the entitled ones to years of education when they didn’t have that opportunity? It’s simply not fair.
Returning to the Problem
As a problem solver, I start with trying to understand the basic problem—why is college so costly? Why did the rates go up so fast, much faster than inflation?
Here are some of the causes:
1. The Federal government pays most of the cost upfront by granting loans readily and colleges get it, whether the students finish or default on the loan. The colleges have no incentive to control costs; in fact, knowing that few really pay the cost by writing a check, they grow their budgets astronomically.
2. Students don’t consider the value of their education when getting a loan, so while becoming a doctor might justify the high cost, many degrees aren’t really worth the paper they’re printed on.
3. Mandated, irrelevant coursework takes up time slots that could allow students to move more quickly through the coursework and graduate early.
4. The government has been pushing college for everyone, despite a serious need for personnel in professions that don’t require a college education. And employers often demand degrees for advancement, even as they can’t demonstrate the value these degrees add.
Fixing It
Companies, and particularly HR departments, need to take a hard look at what they need for entry-level positions. I’ve met MBAs who can’t balance a checkbook, let alone manage people. And I’ve had some very talented managers who learned on the job and by reading. Universities should be on the hook for loans. They’d be far more cautious about giving them out, would probably have strings attached and wouldn’t increase their spending as dramatically, not having an endless pot of government gold to draw from.
But an interesting, free-market idea has already taken hold in a few places. Companies, desperate for talent, are making contracts with students to pay their costs upfront. On graduation, the student becomes an employee and over an agreed-upon period of time, “pays off” the loan by their service, all while still getting a salary. Students avoid a life of loan repayments and companies get the people they need. This is a much-needed enhancement of a common employee benefit—tuition reimbursement. Businesses would seek to look for the colleges offering the best programs because they are making the investment. These may not be the ones we think of as “best.” Too much of that is an inherited reputation, one the colleges no longer deserve. With the advent of some great online universities, the competitive pressure would force the legacy, top-ranked public and private universities to compete for the best students, presumably on price.
This approach means that people who see college as an extended journey into majors that don’t translate to work will have to pay the full cost; no one will want to subsidize this. Universities may, for a time, offer loans, but only as far as graduates pay them off completely.
Before we make the critical error of providing more “free stuff,” we need to take a hard look at what is the logical consequences of this approach. Expensive now, college will become a ridiculous luxury, available only because unfortunate taxpayers are stuck with the bill. Don’t believe me? Just compare the price of airlines when the government basically controlled them to the very affordable cost of a Southwest flight. Government makes everything worse and more expensive. Don’t fall for this.
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