The Great Debate - Free College For All

[Life Long Learning]

Colleges have conditioned and trained Americans its all about them (how much money the student will throw at them) and not about outcomes.  Its a scam the Gov't lets them get away with.

It's PEOPLE who let them get away with it.  As soon as enough people start to say thanks but no thanks to college debt, the landscape will change in a hurry.  If millions decide to only go where they can afford to pay out of pocket, or with financial aid that doesn't include loans, schools will be forced to change their ways.

The government doesn't have to do everything.  Sometimes, market forces can do as much or more than the government can, in less time, and with less disruption.  Counting on the government to fix your problems is a painful way to live.  Especially considering that they helped cause the problems in the first place. The law of unintended consequences...

You make excellent points and I agree with them, but the Gov't-Edu Complex (controlled by Dems/Reps) has caused this as you pointed out and the sheep are too stupid to do their own research.  Folks on this forum do, but 99% of American's have never heard of the Big 3 and they have been around since 1971.  One day the folks here will be bailing out the greedy by paying down THEIR student loans of getting an ivy league level degree in basket weaving and the other half who never completed a degree but have debt.  I have faith in the two corrupt parties to want to get cheap votes.  Your version of individual responsibility is not what they want to stay in power.  I have less faith that the PEOPLE will say no.

I do understand the law of unintended consequences and if they do ever pass FREE public univeristy degrees for all I think all those 1,000 useless small liberal arts colleges who are already starting to die will go away.

I'm not talking about the Big 3 at all, just the cost of college as a whole.

As for small colleges going away, why would that happen if the government paid for people to go to school there?  There's no such thing as free college, or even government-paid college, it's just taxpayer-paid college.  Colleges will be way overcrowded, and students who are serious about schooling will still opt for non-free versions of school (after all, 4-yr state schools are cheaper than private universities, yet many opt for the more expensive version now, why wouldn't they then?).

Here in CA, our CSU-system schools are decently priced, but so full they're busting at the seams.  It is almost impossible to graduate in 4 years - you just can't get the courses you need to graduate.  People are choosing private, out-of-state, UC's, whatever else to get their degrees, because they just CANNOT do anything else.

My daughter's roommates are all from Cali as they can't get the credits from a CSU college to graduate in 4 years.  I am quite aware of the Cali problem.  Think if they become FREE?  

Small colleges are almost non-profit Private colleges and will NOT get the Gov't taxpayer $$$ from like FREE public colleges.  They will dry up and go away.  It's not a bad thing.

[dfrecore]

I'm not talking about the Big 3 at all, just the cost of college as a whole.

As for small colleges going away, why would that happen if the government paid for people to go to school there?  There's no such thing as free college, or even government-paid college, it's just taxpayer-paid college.  Colleges will be way overcrowded, and students who are serious about schooling will still opt for non-free versions of school (after all, 4-yr state schools are cheaper than private universities, yet many opt for the more expensive version now, why wouldn't they then?).

Here in CA, our CSU-system schools are decently priced, but so full they're busting at the seams.  It is almost impossible to graduate in 4 years - you just can't get the courses you need to graduate.  People are choosing private, out-of-state, UC's, whatever else to get their degrees, because they just CANNOT do anything else.

My daughter's roommates are all from Cali as they can't get the credits from a CSU college to graduate in 4 years.  I am quite aware of the Cali problem.  Think if they become FREE?  

Small colleges are almost non-profit Private colleges and will NOT get the Gov't taxpayer $$$ from like FREE public colleges.  They will dry up and go away.  It's not a bad thing.

So I'm saying, if they are overcrowded now, they are really going to be a problem if college becomes "free."  Which means more students will have to go to non-free colleges if they actually want to graduate in 4 years.  Going to a less expensive school but paying for 6 years isn't cheaper than going to a more expensive school and paying for 4 years - it comes out a wash.

If state schools become "free" then it will only get worse, and more and more students will end up going somewhere else and just freaking paying for it themselves just to be able to graduate.  If you go to school and it's "free" but you can't graduate, and you're out of the job market for 5,6,7 years, then someone who pays cash somewhere that's not free will still be ahead of you if they come out in 4 years and get into the job market - even if they have a loan to pay off.  They're making $60k a year and starting their career possibly years ahead of you, and will leave the "free" student in the dust.

[videogamesrock]

There would be so much waste when you remove personal contribution to the cost of college. So many students take Pell and flunk out after a semester at CC just to “try” it.


Sent from my iPhone using DegreeForum.net

[ReyMysterioso]

Not to resurrect an old side argument, but I've lived in Mississippi for over 20 years. It's definitely agrarian and definitely rural. I believe Mississippi's poverty problems are complex. And I do believe elected government deserves its fair share of blame. It was a Dixiecrat state for a long time before the shift to red, and has been poor under both parties. I think the failure of leadership has a lot less to do with party platform or direction, and a lot more to do with corruption, graft, and a focus on power consolidation.

The economy is fairly undiversified. Aside from agriculture, the biggest sector is manufacturing. There's really no opportunities in innovation, tech, and little in finance. As such, we're stuck in this brain drain cycle. Our best and brightest leave the state in search of opportunities elsewhere, and little is done in either the public or private sector to combat this effect.

There's an easy solution to generate revenue practically overnight. Cannabis. Our soil and climate could grow it better than almost any state. Politicians will not legalize commercial growth because it doesn't play well to the conservative and religious base....but I think there's too much money to keep ignoring it much longer.

On the subject of college cost, I listened to Presidential candidate Andrew Yang on the Joe Rogan podcast, and one of his points was that college has gotten twice as expensive in the last 20 years. But as far as anyone can measure, college hasn't gotten twice as good. Nor have the costs actually been sunk into actual curriculum or instruction. Instead, it's almost all gone to bloated administration staff and costs. Yang proposed that if the federal government created a mandate that administrative costs must be below a certain threshold, or else the college in question will not be eligible for federal aid, they would cut them back down to early 90s level pretty quickly. I found that to be an intriguing idea.

I believe if the federal government makes more money available for students, colleges will simply raise tuition accordingly and pocket more money. I believe the unlimited federal money supply has contributed to the high cost of college in the first place. If colleges received no federal aid money via students, and simply had to compete for tuition dollars the same way private companies compete for consumer dollars, tuition might be at record lows now. (But at what cost educationally?)

The problem with "free" college to me raises issues of barrier to entry. With no barrier to entry, you have far more people enrolled than can be reasonably served. The logjam in California would be common and probably worse everywhere.

If cost is removed as a barrier for entry, it might be replaced with higher bars for acceptance. In that case, only the top students (which also happen to often correlate with students who come from families with the most resources) would get in. We might wind up exacerbating existing socioeconomic disparities.

The only way to make college "free" in my opinion would be to radically rethink what college education is and how it is provided and re-engineer it to look more like four more years of high school. There wasn't always free public school in this country. It's not unreasonable to assume one day there will be universal public higher education. Will it make college the new High school diploma? Absolutely. Is that actually a bad thing? I don't know.

I don't know what the answers are. I just know the current situation is not really sustainable.

[sanantone]

Uh, no. When you categorize people by whether they are prone to biases, you are 1. Arguing ad hominem, and 2. Making a false dichotomy - all people are incredibly prone to biases.

Then we're at an impasse. There's a clear difference between ad hominem attacks and observations of another's actions. A statement such as "all people are incredibly prone to biases" is in itself a biased statement.  

He's trying to apply the self-fulfilling prophecy concept to this situation. Since I haven't seen MSK9 participate in political threads or remember many posts from him in political threads, my post was based on him conveniently being temporarily blind when glancing over LifeLongLearning's post AND the quote of what LifeLongLearning said in my post. Could that be the result of implicit bias? I don't know. I'll take MSK9's approach and say that I've found that people who are actually biased tend to miss obvious things.

This is inaccurate. 

You continue to assert bias rather than taking ownership of your political myopia. I don't have a political bone to pick with anyone here, and I typically stay out of the political arena. I directly addressed your post since you attempted to reinforce your overtly political point using Mississippi as an example. 

On most threads, I tend to read the first post, then skip to the last post and work my way backward. You'd know that if you had asked upfront. Instead, you've seen what you've wanted to see and responded according. Projection much?

I believe you've had plenty of time by now to read and respond to LifeLongLearning's post. And, as I said multiple times, LifeLongLearning's post was quoted in my post. You didn't even need to go to his post. His words were right there in the post that you read.

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Not to resurrect an old side argument, but I've lived in Mississippi for over 20 years. It's definitely agrarian and definitely rural. I believe Mississippi's poverty problems are complex. And I do believe elected government deserves its fair share of blame. It was a Dixiecrat state for a long time before the shift to red, and has been poor under both parties. I think the failure of leadership has a lot less to do with party platform or direction, and a lot more to do with corruption, graft, and a focus on power consolidation.

The economy is fairly undiversified. Aside from agriculture, the biggest sector is manufacturing. There's really no opportunities in innovation, tech, and little in finance. As such, we're stuck in this brain drain cycle. Our best and brightest leave the state in search of opportunities elsewhere, and little is done in either the public or private sector to combat this effect.

There's an easy solution to generate revenue practically overnight. Cannabis. Our soil and climate could grow it better than almost any state. Politicians will not legalize commercial growth because it doesn't play well to the conservative and religious base....but I think there's too much money to keep ignoring it much longer.

On the subject of college cost, I listened to Presidential candidate Andrew Yang on the Joe Rogan podcast, and one of his points was that college has gotten twice as expensive in the last 20 years. But as far as anyone can measure, college hasn't gotten twice as good. Nor have the costs actually been sunk into actual curriculum or instruction. Instead, it's almost all gone to bloated administration staff and costs. Yang proposed that if the federal government created a mandate that administrative costs must be below a certain threshold, or else the college in question will not be eligible for federal aid, they would cut them back down to early 90s level pretty quickly. I found that to be an intriguing idea.

I believe if the federal government makes more money available for students, colleges will simply raise tuition accordingly and pocket more money. I believe the unlimited federal money supply has contributed to the high cost of college in the first place. If colleges received no federal aid money via students, and simply had to compete for tuition dollars the same way private companies compete for consumer dollars, tuition might be at record lows now. (But at what cost educationally?)

The problem with "free" college to me raises issues of barrier to entry. With no barrier to entry, you have far more people enrolled than can be reasonably served. The logjam in California would be common and probably worse everywhere.

If cost is removed as a barrier for entry, it might be replaced with higher bars for acceptance. In that case, only the top students (which also happen to often correlate with students who come from families with the most resources) would get in. We might wind up exacerbating existing socioeconomic disparities.

The only way to make college "free" in my opinion would be to radically rethink what college education is and how it is provided and re-engineer it to look more like four more years of high school. There wasn't always free public school in this country. It's not unreasonable to assume one day there will be universal public higher education. Will it make college the new High school diploma? Absolutely. Is that actually a bad thing? I don't know.

I don't know what the answers are. I just know the current situation is not really sustainable.

People tend to focus only on fiscal and monetary policies when it comes to economic issues, but economics is a social science. Human behavior has to be factored into why things are the way they are. Culturally, Mississippi is still in the 1800s along with several other states in the Deep South. Coincidentally, the two most racist regions in the U.S. just happen to be the poorest: the Rustbelt and Deep South. As evidenced by Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia, it's not impossible for a former slave/agrarian/Confederate state to diversify its economy. Mississippi is just so culturally backward and anti-intellectual that it doesn't have to ability to get out of its rut. 

Saying that Mississippi is poor because its economy isn't diverse doesn't really explain why it's poor because it doesn't explain why Mississippi hasn't diversified its economy or taken other steps to reduce poverty. One has to go back several hundred years to understand why the South is the worst region for social mobility. You might remember from history class that the South wasn't really a fan of becoming independent from Great Britain. Not only did they have close economic ties with the nation, but they also had close cultural ties. Southerners were more likely to see themselves as British, and most of the wealthy people in the South were descended from British aristocrats. Much like Great Britain and its history of serfdom, if you were born poor, then you and your descendants stayed poor. The wealthy supported policies that kept people poor based on their bloodline. 

One can argue that the Deep South never changed parties. On paper, they changed parties, but they didn't really change their political beliefs. The South didn't leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left the South as it became socially more liberal. The Republican Party came to the South by becoming socially more conservative. In many ways, the modern Republican Party resembles the old Democratic Party. The Southern Strategy is well-documented and took off in the 1970s. It helped Nixon win the South in 1972, and it helped Reagan win the South almost a decade later. I believe Jimmy Carter was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win most of the Deep South. 


The Republican Party planned to become less appealing to African American voters so that it could become more attractive to southern whites. The electoral college votes were with the southern whites because they made up the majority in southern states. Republicans and LBJ knew that Democrats lost the South after the passage of the Civil Rights Act even though Republicans voted for it. The Civil Rights Act will forever be associated with a Democratic president and a violation of states' rights (which is code for allowing states to violate the human and constitutional rights of minorities). This was immediately realized when George Wallace, an independent candidate and segregationist, won several states in the South in 1968. The Republican Party won the rest of the southern states with the exception of Texas. 

These are words from a former official from the Reagan administration. 

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*gger, n*gger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*gger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*gger, n*gger.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/exclus...-strategy/

Kevin Phillips was a prominent Republican in the 1970s and advocated for winning the South by appealing to southerners' racism, and he said that the Republican Party did not need black voters. 

“All the talk about Republi cans making inroads into the Negro vote is persiflage. Even ‘Jake the Snake’ [Senator Ja cob K. Javitsj only gets 20 per cent. From now on, the Re publicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 per cent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that . . . but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Dem ocrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and be come Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrange ment with the local Demo crats.”

So it is with Kevin Phillips, his defenders say, for contending that political success goes to the party that can cohesively hold together the largest num ber of ethnic prejudices, circumstance which at last favor the Republicans.

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/05/17/archi...harts.html

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This is what a prominent black Republican had to say about the direction the GOP was heading in the 1970s.

That includes Clarence Townes, who served as director of the Minorities Division of the Republican National Committee in the 1960s. Harvard professor Leah Wright Rigueur wrote about Townes in her book "The Loneliness of the Black Republican."

When Nixon disbanded the division, Townes told reporters in 1970, "There’s a total fear of what’s called the Southern strategy. Blacks understand that their wellbeing is being sacrificed to political gain. There has to be some moral leadership from the president on the race question, and there just hasn’t been any."

https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/st...rn-strate/

[sanantone]

Keep in mind that Mississippi is 37% black. Lee Atwater, a Republican who worked for Reagan, explicitly said that his party adopted stances that would hurt black people worse than white people so that they could appeal to southerners. You can believe whatever you want to believe about the Democratic Party wanting to keep people poor. That may or may not be true, but you haven't supplied any evidence. A government official openly said in an interview that things were being cut so that they could hurt black people. A couple of decades later, another Republican official in Florida explicitly said that voter ID laws were intended to lower voter turnout among black people.