Well Occupiers are now less popular than the Tea Party, but that hasn’t stopped NPR from covering their latest antics every time I’ve been in the car for the past two days. This morning I was treated to students chanting that education should be as free as water and air, and while I hate giving these folks more attention and picking on the low-hanging fruit of the Tree of Progressivism, this statement is full of so much ignorance that I just had to respond.
Look, I understand students’ frustrations with expensive education. A lot of them are racking up debt loads without good job prospects in sight. My personal bias is that it’s the government’s involvement in making student loans more accessible that contributes to college’s soaring costs, and that more government would make things worse, not better. But I understand the frustration. But chanting about a perceived right that education should be as free as water is so ironic on so many levels that it borders on hilarious hysteria.
1. The phraseology about making education “free as water and air” comes from Peter Cooper, the founder of a privately funded college. I think it’s fantastic that this guy believed people deserved free education and set up his own institution where every student has their tuition fully covered from voluntary donations. Of course, the college can only accept about 10% of the students that apply, and it seems to be in financial troubles these days, too. Free college is expensive. But forgive me for assuming that these chanting students aren’t pushing for voluntary philanthropy to fund their college experience, and it’s ironic that they’re stealing the catch phrase of someone who tried to provide free college in the private sector and using it to suggest that the government should mandate this for everyone.
2. Water is not actually free. OK, no one owns the H2O molecules that float around the planet, but there are costs involved in transporting and filtering that water to faucets and shower heads, and I pay a water bill for that privilege every month. Now these college students probably think water is free because they’ve never seen a water bill in their life, since it’s always been paid for by their parents, or their tuition, or the restaurant manager that gives them free water because it has a very marginal cost that’s far less than the business they expect you to give them, but water is not free. It’s “free.”
3. These students already got “free” education in public grade school. The only reason they’re begging for more is because the free education they already got wasn’t good enough to teach them that institutionalized education isn’t really free. I mean, what do you want, government to subsidize college education entirely instead of just giving you cheap loans so colleges can just directly bill the government whatever they want instead of the roundabout way where they currently go through you? Or do you want the government actually running college education and funding it for “free” from the general budget that’s looking so nice these days?
4. Education actually is free. No, not institutionalized education. I’m talking about good old-fashioned learning. For a very long time we’ve had public libraries full of educational books on every topic imaginable (I know, public libraries are “free,” not free, but your local taxes are already baked into this discussion regardless of what kind of institutionalized education we add on top of it). But now we have the Internet. You used to have to spend a couple hundred books for a good encyclopedia set. Now there’s a free encyclopedia online that’s far more comprehensive and far more up-to-date and with far more references than any printed encyclopedia ever had. There are free dictionaries, free thesauruses, free calculators. You can watch videos. You can read How-To articles. You can learn just about anything you want. And if you get stuck, you can browse forums and Q&A sites of people who have already gotten stuck the same way, or ask a new question entirely. There are all sort of incredible educational opportunities out there on the Internet.
Now I know that a lot of college degrees still have some value. I know that, regardless of the causes, a lot of college costs are so high these days that students can’t reasonably save up or work their way through it. There are even reasonable libertarian arguments for government subsidizing education because investing in people learning various knowledges and skills should lead to an overall more prosperous society.
But yelling that education should be as free as other things that aren’t really free when you’ve already gotten a bunch of free education and have a bunch of other free education available to you but the kind of free education you feel entitled to happens to be very expsensive… well, that’s just silly.
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If you look at education as a factor for economic growth, then it’s the most worth while investment the government can ever make. Factor in what the other major industrial powers are spending on education and you’ll be pretty stunned. Most developed nations (EU, Japan, US) spend 4-6% of public expenditures on education. In all of these countries college tuition revolve around $400-$2200… including China! The average cost for an undergraduate student to attend a four-year public university in the United States is approximately $6,500 per year. Grad school around the world is cheap too, but closer to 20-30k here. End result= Everybody else is getting something closer to a free lunch, while not spending more out of the govt pie; And an engineer or doctor in Japan, the US or the EU is just as capable as the next.
Thank you for your comment. I mentioned above that there are arguments that subsidizing education is a worthwhile investment. But I wonder whether or not that subsidizing makes education even more expensive. If your numbers are correct, that begs the question of why college education in other nations has not risen as much as in the US.
If you look at education as a factor for economic growth, then it’s the most worth while investment the government can ever make. Factor in what the other major industrial powers are spending on education and you’ll be pretty stunned. Most developed nations (EU, Japan, US) spend 4-6% of public expenditures on education. In all of these countries college tuition revolve around $400-$2200… including China! The average cost for an undergraduate student to attend a four-year public university in the United States is approximately $6,500 per year. Grad school around the world is cheap too, but closer to 20-30k here. End result= Everybody else is getting something closer to a free lunch, while not spending more out of the govt pie; And an engineer or doctor in Japan, the US or the EU is just as capable as the next.
Thank you for your comment. I mentioned above that there are arguments that subsidizing education is a worthwhile investment. But I wonder whether or not that subsidizing makes education even more expensive. If your numbers are correct, that begs the question of why college education in other nations has not risen as much as in the US.