The cost of a college education is rising. That fact has led Robert Samuels, president of the University Council-American Federation of Teachers, to conclude that college should be free. To accomplish that goal, Samuels suggests that the federal government should pick up the tab for all higher education costs. George Leef, director of research for the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, discussed the issue with me for Carolina Journal Radio. Here’s part of our conversation.
Martinez: Free, free, free. That sounds terrific.
Leef: Free always sounds terrific.
Martinez: What’s the fallacy in free?
Leef: Well, Milton Friedman put it pretty well a long time [ago]: “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Somebody always has to pay. When you use scarce resources, which includes going to college, that entails real cost, and it cannot be made free. All you can do is shift the cost. Now, the book in question, written by a professor who teaches out at UCLA, … Professor Robert Samuels — who is also a union official, and his union predilections come through frequently in the book — he thinks that there are a lot of problems in higher education. And he’s correct on a lot of them.
Martinez: You agree with that.
Leef: There is a lot of waste. He identifies a lot of waste and inefficiency in higher ed. The trouble is that his solution of having the federal government pay for it so that everyone can go to college is utter folly.
Martinez: Why?
Leef: For one thing, the most important thing is people need to relate the costs versus the benefits of whatever they do, whether it’s buying a car, buying a house, going on a vacation, or going to college. One thing that we’re seeing these days is a decline in college enrollments because a lot of people are coming to understand that costs are extremely high and the benefits are very dubious. Lots and lots and lots of young people have college degrees these days, but they can find no job better than working at Starbucks or driving a taxi or — I saw today, nannies, lots of nannies now have college degrees. People need to relate costs and benefits.
The fact that college costs a lot and has little or no benefit for a lot of people is an important consideration. That’s the most important consideration that’s eventually going to pop the higher ed bubble, in my view. So to make it free to everybody undoes that calculation. Everyone will think, “Well, gee, since it’s free and there might be some benefit at some point in my going, I’ll go to college.” So we’d have a flood of new people entering college when, in point of fact, what we need is marginal students who are now going, ought to be rethinking it, as they are.
