Why free college is bad for everyone

I recently had a Bernie Sanders supporter ask me why I was against investing in our countries future by providing free college for all Americans. Their logic was a portion of society can't afford college so as a nation we miss out on their gifts. For others they are saddled with so much debt that their college loans become their biggest monthly payment, which surely affects our economy in a negative way.

 Free college would hurt the education system similar to how free K-12 has hurt the education system. Now before you start screaming at your computer screen, there have certainly been some benefits to public education being run by the government. But there is no one, and I mean even the staunchest of public education supporters, who would claim free school works as well as paid for private school. Granted one of the reasons private schools are able to offer a better educational experience is because their students come from homes of enough means to pay for it. Meaning they don't have to work with kids who are malnourished or neglected. Also they have a lower teacher to student ratio. They also have better facilities in most cases.

However the reason paid-for private school has better results is also because the parent is paying for a product. And if that product is substandard they will no longer pay for it. That's competition. But no where near enough competition to drive down prices. We'll get to that in a minute. The vast majority of American children receive an education that isn't as good as children in other parts of the world. We know that, because children around the world take the same tests, and ours do worse. Private school is an expensive escape for parents who can afford it. It's expensive because of a lack of competition. Competition drives down costs while improving the product or service. The government acknowledges this because they have anti monopoly laws. US Steel, Standard Oil, AT&T and others have been broken up by the feds because the companies were so big that they were able to squash potential competition which hurt consumers. Free school isn't technically a monopoly, but because it takes most of the potential consumers out of the market, it allows private schools to charge far more than if everyone was in play.

If college became free, the quality of the education would drop significantly. This is not in doubt even among the people pushing for it. To argue otherwise is simply a fairy tale. Some Americans believed that fairy tale with regards to the Affordable Care Act. That somehow we could add millions of people into a system without adding doctors and the quality would stay the same or improve. As for why we can't add more Doctors that answer was provided years ago. As you can see in this 2011 survey of Doctors. Once they saw the details of what the Affordable Care Act meant to them only 26% of Doctors said they would continue to operate as they had before. The majority were opting for early retirement, or cutting back on patients and hours. Still others opted out of the system entirely like my Doctor at Irmo Primary Care.

So the business model for Irmo Primary Care, and hundreds of others who want to provide the type of service they were able to provide before Obamacare, is to no longer accept insurance. Now patients who want that level of care are forced to pay more for a service outside of the government control. Before tax payers covered public education, local communities covered it. The results were a better service at a lower cost. The teachers were paid more, the facilities were better, and the kids learned more. However only the wealthy and upper middle class kids were receiving an education. The trade off was made by voters to get all the kids into the system.

Because government is a filter for money your tax dollars first go to local and federal coffers and then after bureaucracy takes what it wants, it filters the rest back to the schools. In addition to wasting so much of our tax dollars on bureaucracy the lack of competition builds complacency. One way to inject some competition would be the school choice voucher system. So parents could remove their student and bring them to a better performing school. Of course unions have squashed that idea for decades, and so they continue their downward slide. If you were to "make college free" it would then come under the same system that has given us the current mess we have. Curriculum would be brought down. Because it wouldn't be fair for say Clemson to have the best engineering program and USC to have the best business program for the students who can't attend. So the program would become more uniform so the students at not only College of Charleston but say Fresno State to have access to the same education. Forgetting that the reason the engineering program at Clemson excelled was because they have attracted the best engineering students year after year so the educators can further and further in their development. Now we have to make sure the kids who aren't as gifted can keep up in a free federal world. The only way to do that is to lower the standards at the better performing schools.

There would be some schools who try to break free from the system like Irmo Primary Care has broken free from the health care system. But much like the private schools in the K-12 category there wouldn't be enough students to drive down prices. So a good education would cost more. Meaning fewer American's would get one. Meaning the dumbing down of our work force. Meaning the weakening of our country. That is why free college is bad for all of us.

If you want to improve the education system get the federal and even state government out of it. Let the citizens of each community decide how much they want to tax themselves and what kind of system they want their future leaders to go through. To set a safety next there should be some sort of minimum standard required. Does that mean that rich kids are going to have a better education? Yup. Is that fair? Nope. But lowering everyones standards to the bottom so no one can get ahead is exactly what socialism does. Capitalism is about incentives to push individuals further. Parents work longer and harder to get into better school districts, or start at home schools. Those kids then can have a better life than their folks and we all benefit from having better educated people. Communities rally around their schools now. It will be even more so when they have direct control over it. School pride will swell. All of those things are next to impossible when the federal government controls your local school.

The great economist Milton Friedman had a special on education years ago that you might enjoy.