Thread:
Heres the thing on this argument. A “millionaire” ain’t what it used to be, if you are talking about wealth rather than income. A mill a year income, yeah you are a 1%er. But lots of folks have that much in total wealth through 401k and other investment accounts if you are “of a certain age.” A mill total wealth does not even crack 10%er anymore. Don’t get me wrong, still strongly upper middle class, but these are not people buying Ferraris and yachts. And they can still struggle to pay for their kids college. It’s a stupid argument and should be dropped, but it sells, so it won’t be.
Public accommodations and services are public accommodations and services.
Here’s the other thing on this argument:
There’s a reality about kids, money and their parents.
But I thought that rich people took care of their kids and looked after their best interests and it was poor people who abused their kids and didn’t try to provide for them. (/s!!!)
ETA: So obviously on average the richer your parents are the better off you are. But it really is important to not accidentally bake, “rich people are better parents” into that.
NY Times reprint on Yahoo’s frontpage about how Pete is appealing to the boomers
The reality on the free higher education issue is that it is mainly not in the President’s wheelhouse. With the exception of the service academies, universities in the US are state and private, so the states will be the drivers here. There do exist some initiatives for this, such as in California. The federal government can increase some aid programs, such as Pell grants, but the goal of a free higher education program should be to render the need to get such grants obsolete.
More on said plan:
That’s one hell of a rounding error.
Federal financial aid is under the Department of Education. They administer the FAFSA (linked to the IRS) and federal grants and loans.
Expecting the states to make state public university free is a long wait for a train that won’t come. They have already been screwed over by the massive reduction in federal funding since the ‘80s.
Free public university both should and must come from the federal level.
Yes, I mentioned federal grants; the problem with that is that if tuition support comes from the federal level, but university budgets are set at the campus level based on state support and mission, then either the federal funding won’t cover all tuition for all students or institutional funding will be a total mess.
As part of my job I’ve looked in detail at the budgeting of dozens of state universities across the country. The differences between institutions, both similar institutions in different states and different tier of institutions within a state, vary widely based on the nature of their mission, the responsibilities put on them by their state, and the state’s philosophy of public funding. (That’s not to mention private universities, which have funding structures all their own.)
There is no way that the federal government will have the ability for the foreseeable future to bring these structures into any kind of uniform pattern. The best they might be able to do is make money available to states, institutions, and students with mandates as to how that money should be spent, but with structures as they are it will be quite hard to enforce such mandates. (And frankly, the last few years have taught us that it is important not to give too broad mandate power to the Executive Branch.) Moreover, it will be hard to keep the entitlement gulf between public institutions and elite private ones from growing.
We are much closer to the possibility of free public university at the State level than your post would suggest. For example, there is quite a large evidence-based movement in California, with the involvement of free-tuition advocates like Chris Newfield. Meanwhile, bills from progressive legislators (like my own senator) call for State-Federal partnerships, which is a great first step, especially in parallel with Warren’s student-debt-relief plan, but they all involve getting the states to honor their traditional compacts, not to move the system up to the federal level.
While the POTUS can use the bully pulpit of her office to be a driving force behind a move to universal free access to higher education, in practice I simply don’t see much chance for real change coming from that level.
You keep saying impossible, but that’s not true. YOU might not be able to see how to make it happen, but that’s not the same thing as “impossible.”
When it comes to public policy, one can almost universally replace “impossible” with “lacks the will” or “has a vested interest in the status quo.”
Not a word I remember using. I am a big supporter of free public higher education, and think it is within reach, I just don’t see this happening at the Federal level because of the way higher education is structured in the US. This is my opinion based on almost 40 years in the industry, including considerable experience with budgeting practice at the campus level.
As for vested interest, believe me, if there was a way to get this done by Federal mandate people like me would be immediate beneficiaries.
If you will agree that you overstated your point, then I agree it might be difficult.
Here is why it has to be the federal government mandating free tuition. Alabama. Mississippi. Kansas. Wyoming.
As an educator, you probably have also seen that there are students who go to the wrong school for them, just because it’s the school they can afford. The program can’t just be for in-state students. It has to be open for students to cross state lines and go to the school that is the right fit.
As for private universities, they will either adjust or perish. If you take a look at how private universities price themselves, you see a huge markup effect. Universities with a total cost that’s 4x an equivalent public university effectively discount their pricing to students they accept to just a bit above the cost of the public university. A local private university missed it’s enrollment target, and sent a second-wave of “financial aid” offers during the summer to try and draw in students who either decided to do their first year in (basically free) community college or just couldn’t afford to go at all. When public universities are tuition-free, privates going to have to get their shit together, fast.
Middling private institutions are disappearing anyway. With tuition-free publics students from wealthy families could still go to the elite schools, while if anything happens to their revenue stream publics will increase the number of cost-saving measures they’re already taking (large classes, exploitation labor, eliminating majors) with a relative decline in educational quality. It is therefore critical that any program of free tuition protects the revenue levels for the publics.
Tuition subsidizes pretty much all the non-instructional activity on a campus, including state mandates – ag extension, professional schools, research, football – meaning that reform mandated at the federal level will translate into hard decisions about such offerings, decisions that really should be made locally. If tuition was only used for instructional cost, and not so intricately tied into all other university operations, then I think reform at the federal level would be much easier.
With respect to this thread, while the position differences between the candidate positions on this aspect of higher education is great, I think that operationally the differences will prove to be negligible.
Gotta keep them off the roads too.
And an interesting thought:
