The "S" Word

How can we, as a society, make it possible for everyone to have enough? According to some, including Bill and Melinda Gates, as well as President Obama, the answer is college. I teach college, so I should be very excited about this. After all, it’s job security. But given how expensive college has become, is it really the right path for all students?

Many think that the only purpose of college is to help students get jobs. New York’s Governor Cuomo has proposed performance-based funding for colleges, in which the school only gets state money if students are able to find employment within a short time after graduation. Peter Thiel andCharles Murray have gone further and argued that students should be able to gettheir money back if they do go to college but don’t get jobs in their fields. (That sounds good, but frankly it might not be the college’s fault if the student is unemployable or if the economy is so bad that there are no jobs, etc. And I say this as someone who graduated with a ton of debt and not only did not get a job in my field but ended up working at a discount bookstore for $4.25 an hour. I’d love to blame it on my college and get my money back, but it’s not their fault I majored in the wrong subject.)

Are there other purposes to college than simply getting a job? Is it the right path for all? My English Comp. students and I have written about this many times in class, and I had three sections of Comp in the same semester, so I ended up thinking fairly deeply about the topic. Then I had an “aha” moment (which will probably seem pretty obvious to everyone else).

None of this would matter if college were free.

If college were free, or very, very cheap, it wouldn’t matter if graduates got a job in their field or not. College would be a low- or no-stakes way to try out different things, learn about the world and about yourself, and grow up a bit before striking out on your own. It would allow students to try the college path, and if it were not the right one, they could then do something else without having lost anything or gone into debt. It would allow poor students the same opportunities as rich ones. Our society might (gasp!) become more equal. (Or it might not. After all, high school is free, and rich parents still pay huge sums to send their kids to private schools where they make the contacts the will help them stay rich forever…)

So I decided that college should be free. There might be a clause that if you screw up badly you then have to pay or get kicked out, but the starting gate would be open to all. Why not? After all, the social costs of an uneducated population are huge, ranging from welfare to crime and incarceration to higher disease and death rates. It would be much cheaper to just pay for everyone to go to college. It’s pretty obvious what we should do. So why aren’t we doing it?

I racked my brain for a while before realizing what the problem is. Socialism. The “S” word. For some reason anything that smacks of everyone getting equal shares of anything is anathema to the general public, despite the fact that they themselves would benefit in any number of ways. We don’t want everyone to have free health care and we don’t want everyone to have free education. It seems like people would rather not get something good if they know someone else is going to get it also, which feels kind of twisted to me. (I think they should take a lesson from my 10-year-old daughter. When she gets a cool new toy, she actually wants all her friends to have the same thing so they can play together. But she’s just a kid. What does she know?)

Is it because, “I had to work hard for what I got, and walk 10 miles in the snow uphill both ways, and I never got any handouts, dammit, so no one else should get them either”? Or is it that people are afraid of what more people with a “liberal” education might do? Then again, maybe they’re just cheap.

For it is true that nothing is really free. Taxes would certainly go up if health care and college were paid for. But we would have a more prosperous, productive society, and we would be able to afford to pay more. If everyone were healthy and educated, there would be less crime and more money for all. Everyone would have enough.

I still cannot fathom why people don’t think this is a good thing, so I guess I should call up my old school and ask for my money back. Clearly they did not do a good job educating me, or I would be able to understand.