Free college. When something is free, what’s there to lose? Shouldn’t this be especially true for expensive services like college education? Populist policies like free college may seem like simple no-brainers at first sight, but this is almost certainly never the case. As a student, you might have heard a classmate jokingly ask the teacher if the topic you were learning would ever be useful in the real world: things like writing poems, tectonics, trigonometry and the list goes on. Although your teacher would have brushed this question aside, it is something that we ought to seriously consider. Not only is free college unnecessary, but it will also end up creating more problems, particularly for those that it aims to benefit.
The Benefit of College
Already from what I’ve said, you might be automatically thinking of the many typically known benefits that studying at a college/university may bring. For example, it could be that it helps to increase your employability in the labour market and get you better pay. I actually agree, but we need to look at why this is true. Employers don’t care about what you have learnt at college, but instead, use the qualification obtained from it to infer things such as how hard-working you are and whether you can manage your time well. This is educational signalling. As the economist Kenneth Arrow put it(cited in Caplan 2012), “Higher education serves as a screening device, in that it sorts out individuals of differing abilities, thereby conveying information to the purchasers of labour” [1].
However, we can acknowledge that the inferred qualities are developed by further education. Arrow also clearly accepts this(cited in Caplan 2012), where he says later on that “Clearly professional schools impart real skills valued in the market…” [2]. In addition, I can also accept that, to an unclear extent, the actual content studied at college does form some kind of foundation for employment in the related industry. This, of course, is more true for apprenticeships and other vocational studies. Before I move on to the negative impacts of free college, I’ll highlight that yes, it is a suitable path for those wanting high-quality jobs-it’s obvious that employers want to see this on your CVs. What I want to point out is first, the unnecessary nature of it and second, how it can harm society and the economy.
Credential Inflation
One issue caused by free college is undoubtedly credential inflation. A term commonly used by the economist Bryan Caplan, this refers to the rapidly growing number of qualifications that are generally obtained from higher education. If we were to provide everyone access to free college, this would accelerate the process. Jobs like academic tutors and directorial positions for federal governments that used to require a bachelor’s degree now require a master’s degree(for example, directorial positions in the Canadian federal government began requiring a master’s degree in the early 2000s). Jobs like junior scientific researchers or sessional lecturers that used to require a master’s degree now commonly require a PhD.
Credential inflation is happening all over the world. For example in 2002, the total number of STEM first university degrees awarded in China was almost half a million. By 2010, this figure had risen to 2.6 million [3]. Elsewhere in the U.S, the percentage of 25-29 year-olds with a BA rose from 24.7% in 1995 to 33.6% in 2013 [4]. This phenomenon has taken the world by storm and has resulted in a growing number of over-qualified students entering the labour market and fighting for a much smaller number of jobs that they find desirable. This makes jobs that aren’t as desirable take longer to fill, leading to shortages in industries such as transportation and social work.
A Waste of Time
A second issue that free college exacerbates is the amount of time wasted for students, who could instead join the workforce earlier. Implementing it will only strengthen the demand from students and employers for more college qualifications, creating a society that fails to understand how much time you’ll waste studying irrelevant modules that does little to benefit the economy. Referring back to Arrow(cited in Caplan 2012), “Higher education, in this model, contributes in no way to superior economic performance: it increases neither cognition nor socialization” [5]. This is clearly true. Bryan Caplan points out that “today’s college students are less willing than those of previous generations to do the bare minimum of showing up for class and temporarily learning whatever’s on the test” [6].
In addition to this, it is almost guaranteed that you will forget most of what you have learned over time, as it simply isn’t necessary information required for the jobs you take on. In 2003, a study by the NCES(National Center for Education Statistics) gave around 18,000 Americans the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. Caplan shows that it found that “fewer than a third of college graduates received a composite score of ‘proficient’ and about a fifth were at the ‘basic’ or ‘below basic’ level” [7]. If colleges can’t even turn out graduates with basic literacy skills, how can we expect those graduates to be able to recall the useless content learnt on top of that?
Remember, this is assuming that students are completing their chosen courses. In the U.S, the overall dropout rate for undergraduate college students is a shocking 40%. 30% of that comes from college freshmen dropping out before their sophomore year [8]. Providing everyone with free college will also result in an overall less motivated group of students that could increase the dropout rate. With all of this taken into account, most of the students within a system of free college won’t even gain a reputable qualification, and for those that do, the fact remains that they’ll have wasted a substantial amount of time and money.
Conclusion
An estimate for Biden’s free college tuition plan in America is $750 billion [9]. Large spending plans have a history of turning out to be much more expensive than they are estimated to be. As the first country of its size to make plans for free college, the socioeconomic damage it could cause is immeasurable. College is considered useful and necessary, but those who call it that are unknowingly doing so for all of the wrong reasons. Yes, it will help a small percentage of top students to gain good jobs, but the same cannot be said for everyone else. Free college is an idea born out of well-meaning intentions but brings with it some unwelcome effects. We don’t need a workforce with an increasing number of college degrees- we just need the former.
References:
[1] [2] [5]Caplan, B. (2012) ‘What Arrow Said About Education in 1973’. Econlib. Available at: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/06/what_arrow_said.html [Accessed 28 October 2021]
[3]Somasundaram, N. (2017). ‘The Job Creation Report’. Business insider. Available at: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-job-creation-report [Accessed 28 October 2021]
[4]Rampell, C. (2014). ‘The college degree has become the new high school degree’. Washington Post. Available at:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/catherine-rampell-the-college-degree-has-become-the-new-high-school-degree/2014/09/08/e935b68c-378a-11e4-8601-97ba88884ffd_story.html [Accessed 28 October 2021]
[6] [7]Caplan, B. (2018). ‘The world might be better off without college for everyone’. The Atlantic. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-college-good-for/546590/ [Accessed 28 October 2021]
[8]Hanson, M. (2021). ‘College Dropout Rates’. EducationData. Available at: https://educationdata.org/college-dropout-rates [Accessed 20 October 2021]
[9]Berger, R. (2020). ‘The surprising cost of Biden’s free college tuition plan’. Forbes. Available at:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertberger/2020/09/04/the-surprising-cost-of-bidens-free-college-tuition-plan/?sh=1fe194af6f7f [Accessed 28 October 2021]