So, to me, free college is a no brainer. I might not push it as hard as much more needed healthcare reform or UBI, but I strongly believe in the concept that college should be free, and by extension, student debt should be forgiven. I would argue my justification for this comes down to three major things.
1) Cost
Free college would be CHEAP. I mean my UBI plan costs just short of $4 trillion a year. Medicare for all would cost $1.75-2 trillion, with a cheaper medicare extra public option costing $280-500 billion or so. Free college for all? Much less, around $80 billion a year according to multiple sources. Even Bernie's plan would cost around that much, discounting his student debt forgiveness plan. With that the cost would be closer to $220 billion. But if we did all of that, no one would have to go to school and leave school with $20,000, $30,000, or even $50,000+ in debt. It's insane we do things this way in this country. We provide K-12 education as a right, what's 4 more years?
2) Equality of opportunity
So a lot of people would argue that paying for free college is stupid because we don't need everyone getting college degrees to get jobs. For many, college is simply about investing in a future work force, and nothing more. Well, here at outofplatoscave2012.blogspot.com, we tend to look at things from a less cynical point of view. Sure, we could argue a huge reason the value of college has gone down, with many people unable to find good jobs out of college, because too many people have a college degree, but so what? The fact is if we truly want to live in a fair and just society, everyone should have the same access to higher education, and be allowed to rise and fall based on their merits. The reason college arguably was such a good payoff in past generations was because college was only accessible to the rich. my boomer parents never went to college, nor did a lot of people in the boomer generation. They couldn't afford it. And many had to take lower paying or physically demanding trades jobs after school to make the bills. College was seen as a privilege afforded to the wealthy class, where rich people went to college, and then went on to get rich people jobs. So when boomers sent my generation to college, they saw it as the key to success. Except it isn't any more. We're churning out tons of people with college degrees, but those degrees are oversaturated and don't provide good jobs. And many of us who went are left saddled with student debt we can't afford to pay off. But let's face it, is the solution to allow college to be only a privilege for the wealthy and well to do again? Well, that's the alternative to having college free for all. If we want a society where everyone has an equal shot to get ahead, college can't be something gated off for only the wealthy. Everyone needs access, and we need a level playing field. Either college is free and everyone can fight over scarce jobs, or college isn't free and only the wealthy can afford it. or we can stick with our current system of pressuring people to go to college, saddling them with student debt, and then wagging our finger at them for daring to go to college and better themselves only to not find jobs that don't exist. Your choice. But I personally believe in equality of opportunity at least. While in my ideal system no one should be forced to work, those who want to should be given all tools needed to succeed.
3) Building a stronger, more educated society
So, there's been a lot of controversies in recent years regarding things like information. Since 2016, and the rise of Trump, it's become scarily apparent that a good half of our society is grossly uneducated. And that gap appears in our politics. Uneducated people tend to drift toward the GOP and are susceptible to misinformation, and educated people drift toward the democratic party. Our politics are based on a class war of sorts as Thomas Frank has pointed out. But, rather than it be the lower class vs the upper class, it's more the educated vs the uneducated, with the GOP essentially being the party of the ignorant masses with Dunning Kruger syndrome. Even Rammstein touched on this with their "Angst" music video, which showed a bunch of people listening to crazy nuts in straight jackets who shouldn't have a platform, but have a platform, and go crazy themselves as a result.
However, I find the debate on this issue post 2016 to be very unsatisfactory to me. Rather than try to deal with the issue in a way that is respectful to free speech and the free flow of information, we instead insist on talking about censorship. Everything is about reigning in fake news. In talking about how the Russians are propagandizing us. How the stupid masses should be censored for spreading misinformation. And given my own intellectual path, this just rubs me the wrong way. I am, in essence, a child of the internet. A millennial, raised shortly before the take off of the digital world, but who has spent most of my teenage and adult years in it. And for me, the internet has been a liberating force, not one that made me stupider, but one that made me smarter. In the early-mid 2010s, I'd always marvel at how the internet is like the new printing press, spreading information the authoritarian gatekeepers who control institutions like religion and traditional media don't want the masses to have. I mean, ever since I left the "cave" ten years ago, I've always stood on the side of educating people, freedom of thought, etc. And in my opinion, most of the problems with our current society on this issue can be solved with free college. One of the things I learned in college were things like authoritative sources, peer review, how to research things and how to sift through the BS. I learned things like statistics and research methods to understand how science works and why it's reliable, and much of my worldview is based on these things at its core. For me, the problem with America isn't that we have too much information, and that people can say what they want, it's that people are too stupid and uneducated to be able to distinguish between good information and bad information. And rather than educate people so they can figure this out themselves, we insist on censoring people spread bad information. In my opinion, critical thinking classes, including things like research methods and discussion of logical fallacies should be a mandatory part of schooling. We shouldn't tell people what to think mind you. Even though I am biased, i encourage people to reach their own conclusions intellectually. But we should give people the tools to be able to research things themselves. if we did this, we wouldn't have anti vaxxers who don't understand things like statistics. We wouldn't have people who believe the water turns the frogs gay, or that trump rigged the election, or that climate change isn't real, or the earth is 6000 years old. These people would be laughed at and relentlessly mocked for their horrific views. They wouldn't hold any power over it. What we have right now is bordering on an idiocracy, with half the country cheering on a political party of lunatics in order to own the libs and their educations.
Look, I'm an ex conservative. A huge reason I was able to make that jump was my education. If I had the same mentality I did in high school, I'd SO be a Trumper right now. And that is terrifying to me. But, when you're raised in an environment that doesn't give you access to a proper education, that's what happens. You have a stupid population that falls for authoritarians. And the scary thing about our society is the hordes of uneducated middle America threaten to take us back in time because of it. That's a good half of what's wrong with America at this point. I'm not saying America will be perfect if we only educated people, but it would solve the most egregious problems, and shift the right side of the overton window back to the center and away from fascism.
Seriously, our democracy is, in my opinion, at stake, because our population is literally too stupid for democracy. That's what electing Trump was about, that's what January 6th was about. We should do something about that. And that something is free college education.
Conclusion
Honestly, free college seems like a good investment to make. it's very cheap, and well within the grasp of our 22 trillion GDP to accomplish. Just think about it, free college for all at the cost of roughly 1/9th of our defense budget! And it would do so much good. It would even the playing field for getting decent jobs. While we wouldn't be able to guarantee good jobs for all, we would at least make the competition for the ones that exist fair, instead of having a de facto caste system in which the advantages of wealth simply reproduced themselves generation to generation. And we would be able to educate the populace to use democracy and free speech responsibly without restricting such things because our population is too dumb for them. People might wonder how the elites would control people if we had college education for all, and you know what? I agree. They shouldn't, and maybe if we had an educated populace our political discussions would involve the best ways to improve this country, instead of one party just savagely exploiting the fact that the other country is full of regressive uneducated people who threaten to undermine the entire thing in their stupidity. Really, free college would solve so many problems in my opinion. Our system is so regressive sometimes. It actually depresses me how much.
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