Why College Education Can't Be 'Free'

College students who are too dim to make it in college are demanding that college educations should be ‘free.’ What they really mean is that THEY don’t want to pay for it. They just want the benefits if they actually manage to get themselves educated, or get a degree in spite of their cluelessness.

Colleges and universities have a staff— professors and others— and buildings in which to hold classes. Both these things cost money that someone will have to pay for. Yes, we COULD enslave all college professors and make them teach for free, but we’d still have to feed them, because their deaths by starvation would inhibit their teaching ability. Feeding our nation’s college professor slaves would cost us money. We’d also need to house them in some manner nice enough they won’t all run away from the educational plantation and leave the college students untaught. 

Because of the costs, what ‘free education’ usually means is that those few students who pass the entrance exams with flying colors will get the educations. The students who today can enter classrooms based on student loans (which have to be paid back) would have no shot at higher education. This would actually be good for the dim bulbs who could never have graduated anyway, since they would have no loans to pay back.  But the others— the ones who are not epic test-takers but who could have managed to learn and graduate anyway— would have no opportunities.

Another approach to ‘free education’ is what happens in our public high schools, especially in poor neighborhoods. The standards are lowered, classes dumbed down, and before long you see high school diplomas handed out even to kids who can’t even read the words on the diploma. That’s a major reason that college is so important for people who want a job— high school diplomas now mean nothing. College diplomas are going the same way. 

I’ve heard someone express admiration for some foreign country in which ‘anyone’ can get government funding to live on while they go to university. But they never ask how many applicants can get into the colleges, how many places there are available compared to the number of high school leavers who don’t have jobs yet and might look at government funded studying as an alternative to getting a job. I doubt any country with ‘free education’ can afford to give it out to all comers. Someone has to get jobs to pay the bills.

As college degrees become worth less and less, it’s interesting that some are pointing out the shortage of young persons willing to train to become plumbers, carpenters, electricians, and other skilled non-college jobs. I guess the work is just too hard, compared with going to a college for years, majoring in binge drinking, and hope Bernie Sanders will magically pay off everyone’s student loans without collapsing the economy too badly.