Universal coverage, even "free healthcare" doesn't automatically mean single payer. Take Switzerland, for example.

Bernie (and you) getting stuck on the purity of your jargon causes you to miss real-world constraints.

Similarly with "free college". Martin works for one of the California public college systems:

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🌷 Martin says:
February 10, 2016 at 5:16 pm
Free college doesn’t give any relief to those who already have large education debts in a repayment status.


That’s a trivial problem. The non-trivial problem is that you have an economics reality that needs to be dealt with which is that the only real mechanism we as a society have for balancing supply and demand is cost. Once you eliminate that mechanism, you need to invent a new mechanism. The Germans have a national university entrance qualification. So do the Chinese. Let’s just substitute the SAT in for that test, since it’s the likely substitute for such a test.

Guess what – the SAT is far more biased against low-income people than the financial aid system is in this country. All you’ve done is taken issues of inequity out of the college loan system and substituted every issue of inequity in the K-12 system, from how tax dollars are distributed to issues like school lunch programs and crime. Right now cost serves as something of an imperfect moderating function for the higher education system, but it’s a better system than structural problems inherent in how we allocate tax dollars for social programs. Free college will take those structural problems and magnify them even more. You’ll take a system where it’s challenging for a kid from inner city Detroit to get admitted to a top university and make it a near impossibility.

You could probably triple the size of the higher education system, but you’ll still need filtering mechanisms. Can every kid getting free tuition study engineering at MIT? Of course not. Can every kid study engineering? Still no. That SAT will also govern what you can study, which the current system only affects at the edges. But China’s system does precisely this – you got this score, you get to study X at universities Y or Z. Guess what – as soon as Chinese households get some money, one of the first things they do is export their kid to the US where students have far more say in where and what they study. Free college would destroy that system in the US, and substitute something a lot more like China’s system, and well-off US families will export their kids to the UK or some other country.

And there is ZERO reason for free tuition. Education is an appreciating asset. It is one of a very few things that are worth borrowing money for – a house and health care being the other two. And that’s pretty much the whole list. Without a college degree you are worth, say $30K per year to the labor market. With a college degree you are worth say $45K. For $15K per year in higher earnings, you can easily afford to borrow $100K. It’s a fantastic return on investment – better than almost anyone would get from any other investment.

One big problem behind the exploding college costs argument is that consumers aren’t being responsible. Borrowing $100K without picking up any marketable skills is sending a lot of students back to minimum wage jobs. I get that you really want to study classics, and don’t want to learn programming, but programming pays off the loan. Fuck, my first programming job 25 years ago was on a project in classics because it was far easier for them to find a programmer that bothered to study classics than to find a classicist that bothered to study programming. Much of it ties back to college loans not discriminating based on what students study – so you have student studying subjects far in excess of what society’s needs are with loans not helping to be a regulating function, and that also drives university decisions to expand programs that are cheap to offer over those that are expensive, but better serve students. If student loans could be higher for students studying in-demand subjects, that would shift everyone toward better outcomes.

Free tuition takes everything that is broken in our educational attainment system and makes it worse. Better would be to start with a few sensible things – how about child care and protections for workers who start families so that women get far better opportunities to work off their college loans? That would help everyone. If you want to let students study whatever, then a national program that takes some percentage of your gross income over 20 years and returns that money to the institutions where you studied (prorated, etc.) That gives universities big incentives to expand programs that lead to better paying jobs, improve skills, and improve placement. It’s not free, but it’s deferred like a loan, guaranteed, and provides positive rather than negative incentives.


I don't agree with everything he says (my dad, too, spent very little for his college education, and got his masters through his company going to school at night). But he's right that there are huge implications in taking financial aid out of the picture by making college "free".

Back in the 1970s (and before), states paid a huge portion of the education spending for things like college. Now, they hardly pay anything in many cases - take Virginia for example.

Clinton's plan ("debt-free college") made sense.

She lead the race the whole time, until Comey stuck his big fat head in it.

FWIW.

Cheers,
Scott.