Friday Interview: ‘Free’ College Makes No Sense | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The authors of this post are the CJ Staff of the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

    Pope Center's Leef critiques proposal for federal government takeover

    RALEIGH     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 Donna Martinez for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)

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.

Martinez: You have written that essentially if we did this, made it "free" to the end user, that we would simply create another K-12 education system.

Leef: The K-12 system, basically, is just what Professor Samuels advocates. There's no charge to the student. The parents don't have to pay anything to go to K-12 public schools. They are run by the government. And yet we see very poor results in most of the public education system, and we don't see anything like the reining in of unnecessary cost that Professor Samuels thinks would happen if we just turned it over to federal officials, who'd be really dedicated.

    Well, we know the way the game of politics is played. Interest groups will get their money. And interest groups that have a lot of clout in the government will get most of that money. So to think that ... his proposal would rein in the excessive cost and waste of resources is wishful thinking.

Martinez: Wouldn't we also be stepping into problems with human nature, in that if something is "free," then we all want to try to take advantage of it, and we would tend to value it less?

Leef: That's a very good point. People value things when they're paying for them themselves 100 percent. They value them less when other people are paying in whole or in part. Several years ago I came across an interesting paper written by an economist in one of the Federal Reserve banks, and she pointed out, and with good data, that there's a correlation between whether people are paying for college and whether they get much out of it. The people who pay the most tend to be the most diligent, whereas students who are getting a free ride, well, they tend to do what most people do when they're getting a free ride  -  they enjoy themselves.

Martinez: George, you made a comment that I predict will rub some people the wrong way. You said there are people who are going to college who shouldn't be going to college and that the value of a college degree has declined. Now that runs up against what is a common view by some in this country, that the more people we send to college the better, that there is an inherent value in everyone going to college. So what do you say to those folks who say, "George, you're wrong; you're kind of mean when you say that."

Leef: I say look at what students actually study and actually learn. You'll find that a large percentage of them coast through college without learning much at all. They come into college with very weak academics. They need remedial work in English and math. They can't write very well. Unfortunately, college doesn't accomplish much, even in remediation for a lot of these students. They get their degrees, but they've learned little or nothing that actually adds to their productive capabilities in later life.

    So they have a huge pile of debt. They've squandered years of their lives that could have been spent learning something useful, which they would do if they were out in the business world keeping down a job. Instead they have college degrees, and now they are trying to find work that, you know, almost any high school student could do. It's a myth that college makes you more productive and guarantees you a better income. It doesn't do that at all.

Martinez: Recently I was reading an article  -  I can't remember the publication  -  but it was a well-respected one. It was talking about how business executives are now starting to say what you've been talking about. They're seeing younger people coming into the work world, and while there's all sorts of positives to them  -  they are very adept at digital technology, and they can be inquisitive and curious  -  that they're not critical thinkers, and that some, even when they have a very prestigious credential, say, you know, a degree from Duke or UNC Chapel Hill, that there's something lacking there.

Leef: Yes. You hear that criticism a lot, and it's for that reason that people in the business world are starting to look for other indications of a young person's capabilities. One alternative that's popping up is called the College Learning Assessment, which is now offered to anybody, whether you've completed college or not. But it's a way of showing that you have good thinking skills, good language skills. And if someone can score well on the CLA, that probably is going to be a much better indication of his capabilities than simply having earned a degree someplace.