Saying that free post-secondary education is “regressive” because rich people will also be able to get in free seems like it’s missing the point. If that sort of thing is regressive, then Oregon’s 0% sales tax is “regressive” (meanwhile most economists agree that a sales tax is itself regressive), and unconditional Universal Basic Income is “regressive”. It reads as an excuse to do nothing to help the less fortunate because rich people will also benefit. If someone can afford $21,000/year to live in Edmonton, but not the additional ~$7,000 per year to go to college (and oh boy, if only college cost just $7,000/year), they’re not going. The rich person was going to go anyway, but by making tuition free, you’ve given the less-fortunate person an otherwise-inaccessible opportunity. Regressive policies put the burden on those least capable of bearing it. Making college tuition free for everyone while also taxing the wealthy to pay for it is definitionally not regressive.
Also, free tuition may be a comparatively marginal cost on top of living expenses in Canada, but the same cannot be said for the US. The National Post article mentions Canada’s “sobering” student debt of $28 billion. Meanwhile as of this year, US student loan debt has hit $1.48 trillion. The problem of affordable education and the burden it places on those who seek to obtain it is literally orders of magnitude greater in the US than it is in Canada.
According to Statistics Canada, nearly 80 per cent of children from the richest fifth of Canadian households go to post-secondary education. Among children from the bottom fifth, the rate is less than 50 per cent. So, by eliminating tuition fees, the benefits would disproportionately accrue to the wealthy Canadians already sending their kids to university. It’s similar to a government program that would subsidize Whole Foods receipts. Sure, some lower income folks would have access to healthier food, but a whole bunch of wealthy kale-eaters in Kitsilano and Westmount would stand to receive four-figure handouts from the feds. The technical term for this is a “regressive” measure; a policy that becomes more lucrative the more income you make.
I don’t know if the author is stupid or intentionally deceptive but that’s not what regressive means. “Progressive” and “regressive” are always relative to your income.
University tuition doesn’t depend on your income, so it’s relatively cheaper the more you make. If a family earning $20,000 a year saves $6000 on tuition, that’s 30% of their gross income. If a family earning $100k a year does, that’s 6% of their gross income. Even if this only helps 50% of that first group, that still averages 15%. It helps 80% of the second group, but that’s still only 4.8%. That’s a progressive benefit, not a regressive one.
Charging people who make under $20k a 15% tax and people who make over $100k a 5% tax means that latter pays more dollars, but that’s the precise definition of “regressive”.
Germany has free tuition. The US doesn’t. It’s hard for me to take the thesis that free tuition is a power force for inequality seriously.
Billionaires in the US aren’t going to send their kids to UCLA instead of Stanford or Dartmouth because the tuition is free. The Canadian model is completely inapplicable, as they don’t have the same network of prestigious private schools. The no-tuition proposals are only for public education.
(As a heavy scholarship student who went to a school with a fair number of wealthy offspring, let me add that having them around and seeing them in a natural habitat was good for my socioeconomic education. Kind of like trips to the zoo.)
I’m unable to argue with your excellent points due to my lack of expertise. However, if it were that easy, don’t you think everybody would be doing it? Every corporation, anyway? I’ve worked for corporations that were incorporated in Delaware, but that was to avoid incorporation fees, not to avoid taxes on revenue. It’s my understanding that’s why Delaware is so popular.
It isn’t particularly easy to set up a trust and it can be expensive to maintain. I suspect the number of people willing to jump through those hoops is going to depend on the estate tax rate.
I think it’s a good idea though and worth trying as long as we plan on revisiting it down the road to make adjustments as necessary.
I remember when CA university tuition used to be “reasonable” as in within a few thousand for a family income in the sub $100k range, into the early 90’s. But then, it took a huge jump, as more Universities were building out infrastructure to accommodate the explosion in CA population. It has apparently see-sawed many times since then. But now, standing at 12 to 15k per year in tuition alone, is, to me, way too high.
This push to make it “free” is excellent. Nothing is ever free. I actually don’t think it should be “free.” It should have some minimal cost per credit, like most community colleges. I mean, on the order of a few hundred dollars a year. That should be within most people’s grasp. I say this, not because I’m a capitalist, but from the standpoint of “Well it should cost people something, so that it’s meaningful. Free implies cheap or worthless.” This might not be founded in reality - maybe the argument holds no water. But that’s how it works in my mind.
In any event, whatever they can do to reduce the tuition from the tens of thousands it now is, to a few hundred or even a couple thousand… would be completely awesome and good for the public. We need more education in this world, not less. And we will have the opportunity to refine how that education can work best for people, too. Rather than sliding ever towards loss of academic rigor. We must improve our academic standards not roll them back.
Yes, this. I don’t think we want a future in which everyone goes to free college for four years, and then a four-year degree becomes a required qualification for every single job.
I wish this proposal was applicable to trades education in addition to university.
“This issue of free college will mobilize young voters and boost turnout for 2018,”
No kidding but is it moral to be allowed to vote on whether you get free stuff taken by force from other people?
It’s always easy to vote in favor of measures that hand you free stuff at someone else’s expense. Tends to be the philosophical argument behind mugging for some: "He had nice things I do not have therefore I am justified in taking some of those things away since life is unfair to me and I should be compensated.
Let’s figure out why, in the late 1960’s, early 70’s when I went to UCLA, sales tax in California was 5%, other taxes were proportionate and UCLA cost something like $100/quarter and the state prospered.
Really wealthy people tend to be smarter than you and I and those who are will establish residency someplace less likely to demand a huge portion of their chidren’s inheritance.
It took me many years to see the useful and useless aspects of my degrees. I had some scholarships and many loans for them. I paid dearly for many years. Without the scholarship portion, I think I would still be paying those loans over 25 years later… (I’m 45 now.) More to the point, there was value in some of the theoretical aspects of my degrees: the classes where we batted ideas around, directed by a good teacher, but the rigor was not measured in scores on multiple choice exams, but rather subjectively. And there were science courses where the rigor WAS in careful discernment of correct answers on multiple choice exams, followed by good debriefings and consultations with the professors.
Useless aspects: sometimes the pile of readings was simply volume for volume’s sake. Some of the courses (the chemistry I took, for example, but not all chemistry, just the stuff I took) was designed to weed people out and make them suck wind and fall to the wayside. That’s not academic rigor. That’s the good old American way of hypercompetitiveness. Useless.
Now, looking back, I constantly use the communications skills and critical thinking skills I developed in undergrad and grad school. Invaluable!!! I view that experience as pretty much learning a trade. That trade was learning to research, perform analysis and to write.
Only 5% of the programming I do now was learned in school. I am 95% self-taught, and the programming is essential to my work in research.
So, I think more emphasis on trades. Trades in the broad sense. It could mean applied math. Anything applied. Anything with a practical edge. I learned more Bayesian stats in a cognitive sci course than my stats classes, for example. A keen eye towards practicality is what I hope our whole higher ed system transforms itself into.
There is still plenty of room for theoretical work, free play of ideas, creativity. But filter it through a skill like honing people’s ability to write or communicate in specific ways.
Farm land runs $5,000 to $10,000 per acre in the upper midwest. In California, with water rights, that would be a complete steal. Even so, going with $10k/acre…$7 mill = 700 acres. Planting corn, you can gross ~$700/acre or $490,000/year IF everything goes right.
OK, a multigenerational family (Father and son farming together) can live comfortably off that, except that was gross. According to U of Illinois (http://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2016/09/2017-crop-budgets-2016-crop-returns-incomes.html) expenses would be about $550, assuming there is no mortgage to pay on the land. So now the income is down to $105,000, again if there is no crop failure, no machinery failure, no new investment…
But now if the old man dies and the son inherits the farm, the son can’t make enough to raise crops, put money away, hire more people to replace the work his dad did AND pay for the loan he had to take out to pay the inheritance tax. So, he sells out to the corporate farm down the road and moves to town to take a job at the high school fixing toilets. That’s the story of most of my high school class.
A farmer doesn’t make money year to year, they only make debt and pay down the mortgage. Their retirement is selling the land to someone, hopefully a child.
Now its California we are talking about, so prices are higher and the situation is worse. $7million in land isn’t enough land to sustain even 1 family much less multigenerational farms.
What about the morality of voting to give yourself more money by lowering taxes? That seems more immoral, IMHO.
UC schools started out free to California residents. In 1966 Ronald Reagan started undermining this public amenity by charging student fees, and since then, the amount that the state has paid into the UC system has only diminished. It must be said that the attacks on state schools only began once as the schools became less white and less male, and the student body more aligned with leftist interests.
Voting to restore free tuition wouldn’t be a moral breach, it would be returning to the original promise of the university.
