Paying College Forward: The Reality of Free College

            With the recent rising of the Democratic Presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, discussions on the topic of free education have reached a new high. With the national student debt hitting the trillions and only increasing along with the cost of college, it should come as no surprise that the idea of free college is quite an attractive prospect. Unfortunately for us all, the idea of free college revolves around several fallacies.

            First, the idea that college could actually be free. Nothing is free in this world. Regardless of whether you are paying for it or not, every product made, lesson taught, and floor mopped, must be paid for. Every hour of work done by a worker incurs an hour of debt owed to the worker. That debt can be paid off in one of two ways: by the volunteerism of the worker (i.e. the worker does the work for free), or by a payment in cold hard cash. Since most people will not, or cannot, work for free, this creates a bit of a problem with regards to “free college.” People work at every college, professors teach at every college, every college has a campus or online program, and all these people and things must be paid for. So, “free college” is really nothing more than “paid forward college”. Essentially, someone else went through college, reaped the benefits of the education they received, and in turn paid for you to be able to do the same. Instead of paying for your own college, you will go to college riding on the funds of some other citizen, and then you will be forced later on to “pay it forward” and provide some other student with the funds to do the same.

            At face value, “paying college forward” may not seem to be a bad thing. After all, who doesn’t want to defer the cost of college to a time when they have a steady income and can pay it off? The problem with this mentality is that it focuses to narrowly on easily seen effects of “paying college forward”. For instance, let us take two random students from the population: student A and student B. Now, student A is a good student, he studies hard, is frugal with his money, and understands that, even though his college has already been paid for him by someone else, there is still a cost at play. So, student A hurries through college, making good grades, and getting out as quickly as possible like any student who was paying for their own college would. Student B on the other hand, is not a very good student. He doesn’t study very hard, isn’t frugal with his money, and is oblivious to the fact that his college is being paid for by someone else. So, Student B labors through college making moderately good grades, but spending extra years in college because he is not paying for it himself. Student A is now burdened with the task of paying for the extra time that Student B spent in college.

            Of course, one could say that simply limiting “pay it forward” college funds to four years would solve the problem that Student B poses. However, because of government loans, Student B can simply get a loan from the government. After all, he didn’t have to pay for the first four years, so what is a little bit of debt? This introduces additional problems.

            First, Student A must still pay for Student B’s extra college. Only now, it is veiled under the guise of a loan. The money loaned to Student B must come from somewhere, and that somewhere is from the pockets of Student A. If the loan were to come directly from Student A, he could be assured that he would get his money back. However, that is not how the government works. Once Student A’s money has been taken for Student B’s loan, he will never get that money back. Yes, the government will get that money back and will either allocate it to some other student, or some other function of the government, but this is still a tax on Student A. Second, Student B is now just adding to the national student debt, and we are right back to where we started with people going into debt because of college.  

            Either way, the amount Student A is actually paying for college (student B’s college instead of his own) will go up. This problem will escalate as more students realize that they can get away with behavior similar to Student B. Suddenly the cost of college is sky rocketing, but no one notices because “the government is paying for it.” However, the problems don’t end here.

            Every institution wants to make money. Competition forces companies to keep their prices reasonable lest they risk losing money to a competitor. Introduce the government into this situation, and suddenly there is no competition. Apply this to “pay college forward” and now we have another problem.

            Let’s say that College C is a mediocre but upstanding college. It charges students a reasonable amount, just enough to make a profit, pay all of it’s professors, pay for the campus land, buildings, and facilities, and perhaps a little bit of extra unneeded, but nice, things. Let’s say that the government decides to institute “pay college forward.” Well, now, College C is guaranteed money for every student that it accepts because the government is “paying” for it. College C now has no incentive to keep costs down because it is guaranteed that money from the government. So it can now go pay to put in that expensive golf course, build that random monument in the middle of the college campus for seemingly no reason, and do things that raise the cost of tuition at College C. This lack of frugality on the part of College C results in an increase in the cost of attendance there. Unfortunately, because the students are unaware of the cost (after all, the government is “paying” for it, so why should they look into the cost) and only see the nice new things, they will all flock to College C. Now the government is tasked with allocating the funds to pay for them to go and College C will continue to raise its costs. In turn, the government will continue to allocate funds, and once again, Student A is hurt because Student B didn’t look into the cost of the college he was attending, and now Student A is taxed to make up for the extra cost.

One might argue that government could rectify this problem by only given a set amount to each student to go to college. However, this produces two problems. First, every college is priced differently for a multitude of reasons, and so some colleges would be forced to downsize in order to accommodate for the students who are going to college for free but were not given enough money to actually pay the cost required for those colleges to actually make money. Second, if the college has a problem - say a dorm burns down - the college cannot pay rectify the problem - to rebuild the dorm. Normally, the college would just temporarily raise the cost of attendance in order allocate the funds needed, but the government imposed set cost of attendance prevents the college from doing so. However, the cost is also only one aspect of the competition problem.

             Everyone goes (or at least should go) to college to learn. Students will strive to go to a college that has professors that will teach them well, so that they can get good jobs. When colleges are competing against one another to get students to come to the college, they will attempt to hire the best professors they can to draw more students to the college. However, if the government introduces “pay college forward,” this incentive is gone. College C, which normally wouldn’t allow students with bad grades or bad records in high school into it, no longer cares because it gets the money regardless of how the student does. Additionally, College C no longer has any incentive to hire good professors. The students that College C loses because it no longer has good professors will easily be made up by the numerous new students who normally wouldn’t have been accepted because of their records, but can now go to college on the “pay college forward” government plan. This results in a new group of “college grads” inadequately prepared to enter into the workforce and is an overall burden to society.

            Now, the last thing to address is the idea that, by cutting certain areas from the government, this “pay college forward” program would be easily feasible. For the purpose of discussion, assume that cutting spending in certain areas from the government – say, defense –  would cover the cost of the “pay college forward” program. Most people would look at this and say that we now have a really good program. Taxes were not raised, spending was not increased, and now everyone has free college. The problem with this idea is that, if spending can be cut in a certain area of government without it have detrimental side effects, then that part of the government was being flooded with too much cash. By simply re-allocating the cash, the government is actually raising taxes. They are admitting that they were spending too much in one area, and trying to hide that by re-allocating money into a different area. Effectively speaking, each citizen should have only been paying a portion of what they were in taxes. Instead of that area of government being cut, reducing the burden on the people, the taxes are kept and re-allocated. Each taxpayer was already paying too much, but now they are paying “just enough.” Even though the end result is the taxpayers are paying the same amount, they never should have been paying that much in the first place, and thus the government effectively raised the taxes.

            This doesn’t even begin to address the topic of what tax reduction does. As was assumed before, defense spending could be cut (I am not in favor of this, I’m just using it as an example) and defense would still function properly. This indicates that the people were being overtaxed. If the people were simply given this portion of money in the form of tax cuts, they could actually pay for their own education. In other words, instead of the government cutting spending in defense and using that money to pay for each individual citizens college, it could cut spending in defense, period. Since the amount of money that was cut would enable the government to be able to pay for the citizens college, it should be enough of a tax cut to allow the people to pay for their own without government intervention.

            This is, of course, only a few of the glaring, yet somewhat “invisible”, results of “pay college forward” government intervention. It would take a degree in economics, and many hours of research, studying, and sweat, to actually unveil all of the detrimental side effects of such an endeavor by the government. However, it should be clear that such policies are a detriment to society.