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OPINION

Tuition-Free College Isn't

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Jefferson Weaver By Monday, 12 August 2024 03:01 PM EDT Current | Bio | Archive

In an effort to bolster her credentials as a serious thinker about all sorts of things, Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive 2024 Democratic nominee, recently appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon in which they engaged in a sort of Technotronic rap during which she demanded that college be made free for all students.

As late-night talk shows are often the most fertile ground for innovative new ideas, it is worth considering how such an ambitious plan to send everyone to college free of charge could be implemented.

Of course, the simplest way would be to convince all the professors and staff alike to work for free and perhaps toss in a few extra dollars each to defray the costs of heating the classrooms and dormitories.

Unfortunately, even the most liberal of university employees do not embrace the idea of donating their labors for the common good so such an altruistic model is likely to fail.

The idea that college should be provided free of charge is appealing in the abstract but is it a realistic goal? Because the government does not really generate wealth in the traditional sense, it must rely on tax collections to fund its benevolent operations. As a result, anything that is free must somehow be paid for by the taxes it has extracted from the citizenry.

In short, it is more helpful to think of the government as a giant distribution facility in which the monies received from one taxpayer are transferred in part to another recipient.

So when Vice President Harris speaks about free college for all, she is presumably aware that there is no such thing as a free lunch when the government is involved: Every dollar spent by the government has to come from somewhere.

Of course, it is appealing to call for free education for all and then hope no one asks about the costs of such a program. But it is not very difficult to figure out how much money it would take to bring free education to everyone.

First, we have to figure out how much money was spent on post-secondary education in the United States as a whole — which, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, was $704 billion in 2023 alone.

This total presumably includes tuition costs as well as housing, food, and a litany of fees that fund those social clubs that will brainwash new students to convince them that they should embrace the radical political causes of the day.

The next step is to determine the number of taxpayers funding the bureaucratic ediface that looks out for all of us — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 52 weeks a year.

In 2023, 162,952,000 individual returns were filed with the Internal Revenue Service. No doubt many of these taxpayers—particularly those who never went to college or those who worked their way through college — would be thrilled to know that each of them would have the privilege to make this dream of free college for all come true for the bargain price of $4,302.00 per taxpayer in after-tax dollars.

If you assume that each taxpayer is in a 20% taxbracket, then they would each have to earn $5,162.00 each year to contribute the after-tax amount of $4,302.00 to this magnifcent enterprise.

Unfortunately, this amount would likely continue to increase every year because education expenses have far outstripped the costs of everything else (e.g., food, transportation, housing, Chia pets) over the past several decades.

If the free college for all became a government mandate, then you would see college presidents and chancellors dancing in the streets. After all, a mandate means that there is no free choice and that free college must be provided to everyone regardless of the cost to the taxpayers.

No doubt the colleges and universities who have been largely uninterested in reining in their operating expenses over the years would become even less motivated to do so because the mandate would essentially give them an open invitation to jack up their tuition costs and fees as much as possible.

The other problem with providing free college for everyone is that it would encourage a lot of people who probably should not be going to college in the first place to go hang out at their favorite school for a few years until they “find themselves.”

All in all, those people who have to work a job and borrow money and apply for grants and loans to pay for school are probably going to be more motivated to complete their studies than those who want to go to college because it will not cost them a dime and because they have heard that a particular school is a “party school” or that its fraternities offer awesome beer parties.

The moral of the story is that no government program is free; everything is paid for by the taxpayers — those long-suffering pillars of the American economy. There is no such thing as a free lunch with any government program; the recipients are merely the lucky ones who are on the favored side of the redistributive trough.

Jefferson Hane Weaver is a transactional lawyer residing in Florida. He received his undergraduate degree in Economics and Political Science from the University of North Carolina and his J.D. and Ph.D. in International Relations from Columbia University. Dr. Weaver is the author of numerous books on varied, compelling subjects. Read more of his reports — Here.

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JeffersonWeaver
The idea that college should be provided free of charge is appealing in the abstract but is it a realistic goal?
free tuition, kamala harris
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2024-01-12
Monday, 12 August 2024 03:01 PM
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