In the US, as in many countries, local governments often provide fire protection. In general — there are exceptions, but they’re still rare enough to make news — this is a free service, available to everyone who lives in whatever jurisdiction provides it. No one has to sign up or pay for coverage. To most people, I suppose, this is a normal and reasonable thing to do.
One effect of fire protection is to stop peoples’ homes from burning down. As it happens, rich people are more likely to own homes than poor people. And when people with lower incomes do own houses, they are generally less expensive. So the distributional effect of preventing houses from burning is clearly regressive.
Why should everyone have to pay to keep millionaires’ mansions from burning? Modern apartment buildings probably aren’t even at that great risk of fire, what with sprinkler systems and so on. It’s the big houses up in the hills that are in the greatest danger.
So now comes a new mayor — let’s call him Mayor Pete — who proposes to abolish the municipal fire department and replace it with private fire services that people can contract with. Maybe he’ll take a page from ACA and have gold, silver and bronze levels of fire protection, sold on exchanges. It’s smart to build on what works, after all.
Naturally there will be means-tested vouchers for poor people to pay for fire protection. Or we can, say, cap the cost of fire protection at some percent of household income, with the difference made up by a subsidy. Just be sure you can fully document your income and assets each year, and don’t forget to fill out the forms. Of course not everyone needs fire protection — the homeless are free to opt out, and renters can decide for themselves if they prefer a building with fire coverage or cheaper rent.
Obviously, I am making an analogy with free college. And obviously, people who don’t support free college (and probably many who do) are going to reject this analogy. Here are some possible counterarguments:
– Everyone wants to not die in a fire. Not everyone wants to go to college.
– If someone falls through the cracks and doesn’t get fire coverage, the effects can be catastrophic — loss of home and possessions, serious injury, death. If some people end up unable to attend college, that is certainly unfortunate but not a disaster in the same way.
– It’s much more efficient to have a single fire service serving a whole area than to have lots of different contractors providing different levels of coverage in overlapping areas. There would be wasteful duplication of facilities, equipment, and personnel, and in an emergency confusion about who was responsible for what.
– If one house is allowed to burn that creates major risks for the houses nearby. Because fire spreads, fire protection isn’t something you can really opt into or out of on an individual level.
These are not unreasonable objections. On the other hand, we can debate how different fire service and college education really are on these dimensions.
Mike Konczal or I might say that they are not really so different – that many of the same practical considerations that favor a singe free, universal system of fire protection also apply to college. We might say that higher education is not a luxury in the contemporary US, and that if measures to keep the rich from getting a free education at a public college end up also excluding some non-rich people — as they inevitably well — that is a major cost. We might say that the machinery of assessing eligibility for various subsidies, vouchers, etc., collecting fees, and excluding or penalizing those who haven’t paid, is immensely wasteful. We might say that the benefits of higher education are social and public, and that these broader benefits are undermined when education is treated as a private good.
Noah Smith or the real Mayor Pete might say on the contrary that there are big differences – lots of people don’t go to college and that’s fine; means-testing is accurate and reasonably efficient, at least compared with running duplicate fire departments; and that claims about the importance of higher education to a fulfilling life or a robust democracy are mostly just the self-flattering fantasies of college professors.
Well, we disagree. But however you apply them in this particular case, these all seem like relevant arguments in thinking about how desirable it is to make a public service free and universal.
What they are not, is arguments about distributional impact. There’s no controversy over the distribution of student debt or tuition spending – they rise with income, but fall as a proportion of income. We can debate over whether that makes forgiving student debt progressive or regressive, but I don’t think that’s what’s motivating either side here. Disputes over whether something should be free and universal hinge rather on whether we see it as a fundamental right or a luxury; whether we see the risks of under- and overprovision as symmetrical; whether technical considerations favor provision through a single uniform system; and whether the service is a public good in the traditional sense, and whether it has significant externalities. If we were actually debating the elimination of universal fire protection, these would be the kinds of arguments people would make. Not ones about the direct distributional impact.
The distribution of college spending is quite a bit flatter than the distribution of home equity. So if you don’t oppose free universal fire protection on the grounds that it favors the rich, then I’m pretty sure you don’t actually oppose free public college on those grounds either. Mayor Pete certainly does not have any general objection to public spending from which the rich derive more direct benefit than the poor. Indeed, since public goods are mostly complementary to private goods — roads and cars; airports and airlines; meat inspectors and meat; police and private property — this is probably true of the great majority of public spending, at least if you look at it in the same narrow financial terms that people are looking at college debt forgiveness.
So I don’t think distributional concerns are the real reason that people oppose free universal public college. Presumably the real reasons are some mix of “I think it is very important that everyone is protected from fires, but I don’t think it’s that important that everyone can go to college,” and “Charging people individually for fire protection is impractical, but charging people to go to college seems to work ok.” Which might be reasonable positions! But let’s debate those.
I’d love to have that debate. But I must add that the fact that people who oppose free college keep bringing up the distributional impact, suggests that they may not be confident of winning on other grounds. It suggests that they, at least, don’t believe that most Americans see college education as simply a private good.
ETA: This postwould have been better if I knew anything about the concrete historical development of public fire proteection. Unfortunately, I don’t. Also, on twitter, Matt Bruenig argues that the distributional question isn’t as straightforward as I claim because of insurance. So just to clarify: The point here is that if you’re wodering why we have free, universal public services — and we have a lot of them — imagining them as cash transfers isn’t helpful. The reason the public takes over some service is precisely because it doesn’t fit the model of giving people cash – because the nature of the service makes it unsuitable to treat as a commodity. So the relevant question, if we are asking whether something should be a universal public service, is how well it fits the model of a private good. Not to start by assuming it is a private good and then asking how it is distributed.
I think you need to engage the substantive critique of higher education—that 1) even when tuition is “free” it’s still just a very costly means of filtering and certifying pre-existing inequalities of aptitude and family advantage; and 2) more important, that formal university education plays no useful role in educating people.
To make the last point concrete, here’s how students learn: they read books and work problem sets. That’s it. What college provides—professors talking in classrooms and the vast physical plant and administrative machinery that supports them—is superfluous.
But what about all the learning that takes place in classrooms staffed by talking professors? That’s a red herring. The actual learning happens when the students read books and work problem sets, not when they’re in class half-listening to the professor ramble on.
There’s a deep reason for that. The written word is an incomparably better communication channel for serious intellectual discourse than is spontaneous talking. No professor spontaneously talking can provide the kind of systematic, logically structured argumentation, comprehensive evidence, graphical explication etc. that an adequate textbook provides (and keeps providing after the semester ends at no additional cost).
That’s why learning exploded after the invention of the printing press. It wasn’t just the increased access to intellectual discourse that mattered. It was also the improved quality of intellectual discourse as people switched from muddled talking about things to polished, logically coherent, well-evidenced, diagramatically illustrated, referenceable writing and reading about things.
So if the university goes away and professors stop talking, people will learn just fine as long as they have books, problem sets and answer keys. It’s the publishing sector that educates people, not the university sector. And the publishing sector does that at roughly 5 percent of the cost of a college education with talking professors.
But what about when students are confused and ask questions—doesn’t that justify the professor’s role?
Nope. For one thing, professors are often very bad at answering questions and end up heightening confusion. More fundamentally, it’s precisely when students work through their confusion on their own—thinking harder, working forward from basic principles, searching for alternate sources and new evidence—that they really learn how to do intellectual labor.
Granted, a few fields—medicine and some engineering disciplines—require training on expensive equipment or rigid real-time performance protocols, so for those fields something like a university format is appropriate.
But for everything else—math, theoretical physics, law, English, philosophy, anthropology, economics, etc.—higher education should be abolished. People can learn all that on their own just by buying books and googling stuff. Where certification in a given body of knowledge is needed it can be done by SAT-style testing organizations with low administrative fees.
That’s how education should be: simple, cheap and democratic. The mystified hierarchy of the university—the last redoubt of feudal pomp, really just a higher rent-seeking—stands in the way of that. It should be dismantled, not made universal and “free.”
To the prior commentator: Aside from your inaccurate generalizations and wildly faulty arguments about how people learn and teach and how expertise is arrived at and best disseminated, your overly narrow utilitarian view of academia ignores everything that is gained by students, and professors, in a group learning environment, including a fuller sense of their own and others’ humanity, and the opportunity to work to advance human knowledge. Our society and world are in dire need of both these days.
Which is why millions of people want schools to be accessible to and supportive of more diverse groups. The only folks who might agree with you are the corporate interests seeking to replace teachers with computers and students with capitalist cogs.
Regardless, going it alone — on education or anything else — is not simple, democratic, or cheap.
Emily, you’re right that learning is a collaborative group process. The question I was getting at is what’s the right medium for that collaboration? It should be the written word, not F2F classroom talking as in university lectures and seminars.
Book-readers are physically isolated but intellectually connected to the author. Reading many books connects them to many authors, many voices to learn from—more than can fit in a classroom.
Book-reading is a one-way conversation, but written exchanges can be multidirectional. The internet makes group intellectual collaboration by writing simple, fast and universally accessible.
The written word hugely improves the quality and reach of intellectual collaboration. In a textbook, the author can get editors to help rewrite and polish everything for clarity and accuracy. She can comprehensively survey research in the field, add data from other sources and recruit artists and photographers to add graphs and illustrations. She can put in footnotes and bibliographies to steer readers right to other authors to widen the collaboration. Classroom talking can’t support that kind of multi-faceted collaboration.
Consider this blog thread as an indicator of the quality gains from written exchanges. In responding to your comment, I read it several times to make sure I understood it, something that’s not possible in a verbal conversation. (A lot of conversations get derailed because people mishear or misconstrue what other people said when there’s no record to refer to.)
Then I spent 20 minutes or so thinking carefully about how to respond to you. That’s not possible under the time pressure of a classroom conversation. After I wrote my response, I edited it to make it clearer; again, not possible when talking. And in a blog thread you can link to evidence and data that becomes instantly available to everyone, very helpful in an intellectual collaboration.
All of that adds up to a higher-quality intellectual exchange. If you think my comments here are bad, imagine how much worse they would be if I blurted them out half-formed in a classroom.
And yeah, talk ain’t cheap in college classrooms. That really restricts access. Even if tuition is free, the rigid scheduling constraints of classroom talking—everyone in the same place at the same time—make it inaccessible to people with family and work obligations.
Bottom line: the written word beats talking hands down. Once we understand this, the whole rationale for college—talking professors—collapses.
Hi Bill.
I don’t agree with you about the value of college, of course. But I do agree that this is the question we should be asking. The case for or against universal free higher education needs to be made based on how important/desirable we think it is for everyone to go to college, or have a chance to. The distributional question is a red herring — that was my only point.
Do you feel the same way about elementary and high school?
Yes!
Kids need help from teachers to crack the codes of reading, writing and arithmetic, but after that the world is an open book. First grade, last grade!
If that’s too radical for you, it’s still meaningful to cut back on schooling to lesser degrees, and college is a logical place to start.
For one thing, colleges don’t care about teaching. Elementary and high schools put a lot of thought and effort into trying to teach well, and teachers have to take years of education classes and supervised internships. But the graduate students and professors who teach in college get almost no teacher training, don’t take education classes, don’t have their teaching supervised, and are rarely held to account for outcomes.
That universities don’t take teaching seriously tells us that, tacitly, they expect adult students to educate themselves. It doesn’t matter whether the professor is good or bad; the student is the one responsible for learning. That makes sense—regardless of what the prof does, adult students can just study their books and learn the material. (A frequent comment on Rate My Professor is that the prof’s teaching is confused and eccentric, but if you read the textbook you’ll do OK.) The books do the teaching; the prof and the college are superfluous.
So elementary and high school, maybe. But college, no.
Josh, let me turn your question around: at what point should schooling stop? When do we finally let adults learn on their own without tutelage by professors?
Presumably professors don’t need professors anymore, right? They don’t keep endlessly taking classes to learn new stuff, do they? You’re starting to write about education, for example, but you don’t have a degree in education and I don’t think you ever took education classes.
My guess is that you’re not going to spend thousands of dollars on education classes in order to learn about education. You’re not worried that you’ll be so baffled by the field that you’ll need to spend three hours a week at the feet of an education professor listening to him interpret its mysteries for you.
My guess is that instead you’ll just browse the literature on your own and then start thinking and writing. That’s because you’re confident that you can learn things outside of your own field simply by reading up on them.
What you do any literate adult can do, even without a PhD. People learn by hitting the books—no profs required. 18 is old enough to cut the apron springs.
Hi, Will,
I won’t argue your 2nd point, since, of those folks who agree with you on dismantling all higher education, neither one of them has enough power and influence to accomplish it…
But when combined with your first point, I agree that the models for free tuition are flawed. How about this: give ALL 19-22 year olds an annual “lump of cash (LOC)”. Cap it as described below. Let them use it any which way–to buy books and problem sets and hope for the best; to go to community college (where in my 40 years of teaching, by God I loved me my feudal pomp); or to apply it to partially defray costlier colleges, including private ones. OR they can skip college and live off it while they travel the world, or just bank it while they work their gig jobs. Whatever.
No more issues of aptitude and advantage. Cap it at the average weighted per-student tuition of community colleges and state public colleges combined–perhaps with a bit of regional COLA. The former students get a bit of extra spending money, but it defrays a fair amount of the higher tuition at the latter. Poorer, more apt students will still get extra aid from the costlier private colleges. Non-students get the greatest gift of all–cold hard cash.
Some govt. cost regulation would be needed to keep comm. colleges and state schools from just inflating their prices, but these schools are already run by government bodies. Give out the money federally, MMT style, and the only cost is a bit higher inflation for the rest of us, which, if we find it too burdensome, progressive taxation of the rich kid’s parents (oh yeah!) will bring right back down again.
We will then see how much students really “need” professors–they can get paid to vote with their feet! And some may indeed just buy the economics multiple-choice problem sets, thus proving you right. JW may be out of a job, but he’ll just have to monetize his blog like the rest of the world…
Hell, I was too stingy above–I just checked a few rough numbers. Give it to 19 thru 23 year olds, and give them all $15 grand per year, which is average tuition at U of I Urbana. I get that coming to about 7% of the current annual Federal Budget. Easily affordable, even without MMT…
Since comm. college students are on average much poorer than 4-yr. college students, this is quite progressive, though many of the former will have to save the excess from the first two years to apply in years 3 thru 5. And again, the non-students can spend 5 years living in the real world with a modest cash cushion, the best education of all…
Right, cash grants are better than Pell grants, because they give people real freedom instead of making them indentured servants of the universities. But let’s just go straight to the logical endpoint: a Yangian UBI for everyone.
I’ve been criticizing the methodology of a college eduation, but then there’s the scandalous content of a college education.
There’s the scandal of distribution requirements, foreign-language requirements, PE requirements, Physics for Poets classes with no more intellectual depth than a PBS documentary; the scandal of social sciences that aren’t even coherent intellectual disciplines, let alone sciences; the scandal of critical theory; the scandal of academic prose….
The college-admissions bribery scandal is the least of it. Lori Loughlin isn’t a criminal, she’s a victim, like every parent, of professors peddling an education that’s less substantial than Olivia Jade’s makeup tutorials.
Je suis Lori!
The European social democracies have free college, but that doesn’t translate into “universal.” They have pretty much exactly the same percentage of people in higher education and getting degrees as the United States does. https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/education-at-a-glance-2019_f8d7880d-en#page51
So according to the OECD in 2018, among the over-25 population in the US, 54 percent had any kind of post-secondary education, with 37 percent having undergrad or higher degrees, bachelors (24 percent), masters (11) or doctorates (2). (Those percentages are the highest degree held.)
In Sweden, by comparison, the corresponding figures were 51 percent having any kind of post-secondary education, with 34 percent having undergrad or higher degrees, bachelors (18), masters (14) or doctorates (2).
It’s the same for Germany, France, Norway and Denmark: essentially no difference compared to the US in the proportion of the population that gets higher education and attains degrees; in fact the US is on the slightly higher end of the spectrum of higher education attainment.
So there’s no reason to believe that making college free will have any effect on the number of people going to college or getting degrees. Another indication of that is that, even though college costs have skyrocketed in the US, the percentage of people going to college has climbed right alongside.
These data suggest that the problem isn’t a lack of access to college because of cost. College just isn’t very useful to the roughly half the population who either don’t want to go or aren’t good enough students to succeed in college.
–There is likely to be a distributional effect, but not quite the one that’s expected. Free college could provide a big redistribution from richer taxpayers to middle-class families who stretch financially to send their kids to prestige universities. (Provided the tax structure works out right.)
But free college won’t distribute either financial or educational benefits to poor families, because poor kids who are college material already get a ton of financial aid, and because there won’t be any increase in college attendance rates among the poor.
There’s a limit to what education can do, and we may have reached it. I feel like the left is barking up the wrong tree here.
I grew up in a country where a college education was available to a student at a minimal cost. It could be free or perhaps a few hundred dollars ($2-$3K nowadays). My father, for example, went to a free college. He decided to get a liberal arts degree because a science degree, available at another branch of the school, would have cost more carfare. I had the option of going to a free/nominal cost college or a more expensive private school. I chose the latter.
In case you are wondering, that country was the USofA. My father went to CCNY. I considered it and SUNY, but went to a prestigious private school instead.
Back then, public colleges were heavily subsidized because having an educated workforce was seen as a valuable public good. Then as now, there are a lot of businesses that need well trained workers. They’re even willing to set up shop in ridiculously expensive places like San Francisco, New York City or Washington DC to get them. Having a good supply of college educated workers is an overall plus for a vibrant, growing economy, just as it is important to have a good supply of literate workers.
The problem with the current approach, requiring students to pay large sums for higher education is that they come out of school in debt. That limits their ability to work in more speculative areas and, more seriously, to take their place in our society as consumers. The US has a big problem with lagging aggregate demand. It shows up in our low rate of productivity growth.
Student debt isn’t helping things. If our better paid, more educated workers can’t turn the wheels of the economy, the less well paid, less well educated members of the cohort are unlikely to take up the slack. If it helps any, think of the post-World War II GI Bill funding college for veterans as an economic stimulus bill, and a very successful one.
Of course, this requires raising taxes on the wealthy, but our forty year experiment in cutting them hasn’t done all that much for the bottom 90% or so.
Free
Public option for
post secondary education
Main obstacle
Tuition tagged
Private option for
post secondary education
The private university
Higher ed LOBBY
Plus all the for profit training outfits
Right now uncle subsidizes
The private higher Ed not for profits
The Legions of liberal and sectarian private college ops
How ?
By the student loan program
Among other streams
Pumping subsidized funds
into an informal
Sanctimonious cartel
Of cap and gowners
Too BOOT often pumped in
Thru a profit grabbing
Private credit system
Your analogy breaks down because fire-fighting does not require an investment on the part of the beneficiary. The cost of college is 4 (more like 6!) years of of the student’s life, and its benefit is a function of the student’s ability and effort.
Speaking of 6 year degrees, while you may wish to contend some post-secondary education is necessary, college in its current incarnation is thoroughly luxurious. The conflation of education and universities is a large and casual deceipt.
“The distribution of college spending is quite a bit flatter than the distribution of home equity. So if you don’t oppose free universal fire protection on the grounds that it favors the rich, then I’m pretty sure you don’t actually oppose free public college on those grounds either.”
This assumes that the costs for fire protection would be proportional to home equity. Costs would be proportional to the cost to put out a fire, which would be only a tiny bit higher for more valuable houses.(Larger house=more water, all the fixed costs the same.)
“Indeed, since public goods are mostly complementary to private goods — roads and cars; airports and airlines; meat inspectors and meat; police and private property — this is probably true of the great majority of public spending, at least if you look at it in the same narrow financial terms that people are looking at college debt forgiveness.”
You can’t just look at the distributional effect of direct spending when there are also user-specific taxes associated with the services which also have distributional effects. Roads are paid for by fees on cars and gas taxes.(At least in theory, I’ve heard conflicting claims about whether this is really true.) People who drive less, pay less. I’ll give you airports, but there, if we’re subsidizing wealthy air travel users, we should stop doing that. Meat inspection is close to even, as wealthy people don’t consume more meat than poor people, and in any case the costs of meat inspection are paid for by the producer, costs which are passed onto the consumer. Effectively, those who eat more meat pay more for meat inspection, those who are vegetarians are not paying for meat inspection at all. Policing benefits the poor, as the poor are more likely to be victims of crime.
How do you feel about the mortgage interest deduction? Or what about the imputed rent tax exemption? I’ve been hearing about the mortgage interest deduction’s disproportionate benefit to the wealthy for years, so the notion that distributional effects are an ad-hoc argument created to argue against free college is clearly wrong.
Hi all. Really appreciate the comments, especially the critical ones. Hopefully will find time to reply to them soon.