One of the current most controversial topics, especially last presidential election cycle, is how should America handle the large amount of college debt many students find themselves. The average student loan debt per borrower is $38,792, which is clearly a lot of money. But whose fault does this rest on: students, their parents, the government, the colleges? How could we even fix this problem: the government paying for portions of student debt, completely free college tuition, better interest programs? There are a lot of questions around this topic, and no easy answer. My goal is to outline the positives and negatives of the most radical approach being the government paying for student’s ‘free’ tuition.
The first topic is the debt students exist in. Obviously making college tuition free would greatly reduce this debt. It would allow thousands of students who cannot afford to go to college currently have the opportunity to receive higher education. The opposite side of this coin is that tuition free college does not simply make college completely free. Tuition costs only account for 39.5% of average total college costs. This means students would still more than likely have debt from college, even if it is significantly cheaper.
Of course the money to pay for free tuition does not come out of nowhere; it comes out of taxpayers pockets. Bernie Sander’s free college program(again not free college free tuition) would cost $47 billion per year, which would either mean an increase in taxes or money be diverted from other areas. Another argument is why should people who pursue non-college education jobs(anything from restaurant workers to the trades) pay for others to go to college, when college is really a place that allows someone to get higher paying jobs? In other words, the workers that make less initially would help pay for other people to get into higher paying jobs. It may seem unfair to many if that was the case. But then again, paying off college tuition has yielded financial benefits before. GI Bill participants ended up generated billions of extra dollars and the government got an eventual return of $6.90 for every dollar spent giving veterans college access.
One final point to mention is that there is the potential that many students would go to college for a year with the wrong intentions, waste tax payers’ dollars, and then drop out. And that is not a baseless claim either; “Under California’s community college fee waiver program, over 50% of the state’s community college students attended for free (before a 2017 program change), but only 6% of all California community college students completed a career technical program and fewer than 10% completed a two-year degree in six years.”
The goal of this was to list out the pros and cons and then allow ourselves to come to a decision for ourselves. Could the government paying off college tuition result in freeing students and giving more opportunities, or would it ultimately not even solve the issue and result in money being wasted?
Very interesting post! I was reminded of this topic when reading about how the federal student loans moratorium was extended again and the subsequent rationale behind the decision. Interesting to hear the statistic regarding the return on investment of the GI bill. I think a more targeted approach might work well, with government subsidies only for required jobs that the government needs to be filled, as it could potentially cut down on the waste of every college degree being covered by taxpayer dollars.