6 (or more) non-evil arguments against free higher education

I often enter in discussion with fellow European students on the question of free higher education. In most European countries, it is a standard that higher education is free for all citizens (at times up to the level of Ph.D. studies), and every questioning of this paradigm is met with fierce reaction. Last week, having found myself being attacked (not for the first time) for my position opposing free higher-education, I decided to put on paper a more developed review of my views and arguments. This is the result.

(***Please note that in this entry I talk only about free higher education, meaning, academic education. For primary and secondary education, the discussion is a bit more complex and has other arguments and factors to be considered).

Free higher education is great. The ideological justification behind it is completely understandable: it is meant to promote equality, providing all (especially those who do not have the possibility to pay) with equal access to decent education, better employment, and self-fulfilment. It generates better, more educated and more open-minded human beings. Utopia.

Opposing the justification behind free higher education is almost cruel. How can one be against such beautiful values? Indeed, such discussions begin with this exclamation, portraying me as having no heart and no empathy for the others. The goal is not to convince people that I have a heart – because, in fact, I am quite in favor of equality. Real equality. My argument is that free higher education in the end does not stand up to its promises: neither equality nor education.

The argument consists of six main points. The first five points debate the first part of the justification: does free education promote equality and provides all with equal opportunities?

1. There is no such thing as free for all

First of all, I try to explain to my fellows, that free higher education for all is a myth, it doesn’t exist in reality. Like unicorns.

Why? Simple:

There is a limited amount of places in public universities. When higher education is free, of course, everybody wants to study (who wouldn’t? It’s free!). So public universities get packed up and need to start selecting students.

Let us imagine we have two candidates to a free, public university: John, from a nice high-income family; and Mike, from a low-income (though equally nice) family. From childhood, John has received the best education from his parents (they can afford it, and nobody can blame them for wanting the best for their child) – beginning from expensive mind-developing toys and Mozart CD’s for children, through enriching extra-curricular activities after school, and ending up in marathon sessions with private teachers prior to the high-school finals and the SAT exam. Math wasn’t his strongest link, but hey, nothing that a couple of exercises cant solve.

Mike wasn’t that lucky. He is very smart but also struggled with math all along junior-high, and together with the need to help here and there at home, his grades weren’t so shiny upon graduation.

Now they are both trying to get into public university (because it’s free, remember?). Guess who gets accepted?

You guessed right!

But don’t worry – Mike has a solution! Since so many students want to sign up for public university but so few get accepted, there are plenty of private colleges around, so he applied and got accepted. Hurray, higher education is available for Mike!

Uh, one problem. It’s paid. And it’s actually very expensive. No free higher education for Mike. Tough.

2. If everybody is “equal”, then nobody is equal

The problem with inequality continues during studies at the university. Even if studies are free for all (although we already saw that they are not free for all), inequality hides beyond tuition fees.

During studies, students from low-income families have to work (often more than one job) to sustain themselves, as they cannot count on their parents’ support. The fact that they have to work means that they have less time to read books, write papers and prepare for exams, not to speak of taking any extra-curricular activities, like unpaid internships.

Students that can count on economic support from their families can devote themselves to their studies, focus on reading and writing instead of working, and occasionally take some internships to complement the theoretical knowledge with practical experience.

The result: students from high-income families receive significantly higher grades, and have more practical experience in the field. They all studied for free, so theoretically they should all have the same chances, but think of John and Mike. At the end of the studies, when going to an interview for their first professional job, who has higher chances of getting the position?

Conclusion: the structural gap is too big and too deep to be covered-up with free higher education. If it’s free for everybody, it’s not free for anyone, and students from low-income families end up paying, just in other, more subtle ways.

3. Free higher education for all actually increases inequality in the long term

In fact, what free higher education does is to increase inequality in the long term. Remember John, the high-income student from points 1 and 2? You won’t be surprised to hear that he did get that first professional job after the studies! Not only he continued to have the support of his parents, he also went swiftly on to an M.A. degree, and his professional career got significantly boosted. He is now a successful manager with a 5 digit monthly paycheck. Mike? He had eventually to compromise over his first job, picking a position that was not really related to his field of studies. His career didn’t fly as smoothly, and the M.A. at the private school was already unaffordable. Well, he is happy with his family life, but cannot say exactly the same about his financial situation.

John’s and Mike’s children are bound to repeat the same scenario, only in an amplified version. As my mom always says, money grows more money, and so the equation is simple: John’s parents’ money + John’s self-acquired money = more opportunities than Mike can offer to his children.

4. Paid education promotes more equality than free education

This is the argument that is the hardest for my fellows to understand, although the mathematics of it are pretty simple. How can something that is paid promote equality? It goes against the logic!

Let’s make a simulation of a state’s higher education system. We’ll take an imaginary sample of 100 students, according to a division that would reflect an average states economic gap: 10% of the students are from high-income families (John and his fellows); 20% are from low-income families (Mike and his buddies); and 70% from medium-income families (“others”).

Let’s say the annual cost of a student in a public university is 1000$. So the state has to invest 100,000$ from tax-payers’ money to support all the students.

Now, let’s say, that instead of giving education for free to everybody, the state actually requires students to pay the tuition fee of 1000$. Families from high and medium income pay the tuition and cover 80,000$. Add to it the original 100,000 that the state wanted to invest in education, and the state now has 180,000$. Oh my, that’s a lot of money, what should the state do with all that money?

Hmmm, how about (just throwing a crazy idea to the air here), the state continues to cover Mike’s and his buddies’ tuition fees (20,000$) altogether? Free academic education, what a great idea!

But wait, that still doesn’t solve Mike’s structural problems, because without his parents’ support, he still needs to work for his living, so he still cannot focus on studies. What if we take the state’s remaining 160,000$ and distribute it as grants for gifted students from low-income families, so they can study instead of worrying about work?

I don’t sounding populist, but this sounds to me like a problem being solved! Mike studies for free, gets to really focus on his studies, and has a real chance to compete in the labor market and to improve his socio-economic situation!

Doesn’t it sound more equal than the original “free for all” scenario?

5. In the macro: free for all is not good for the labor market and for society

Since I don’t like populist problem-solving scenarios, and structural social problems are always deeper than what they seem, I will leave John and Mike for a while and talk on a slightly deeper level about the impact of free higher education.

It creates inflation in particular professions and deflation in others, distorting the labor market and the economy. Supply and demand is the fundamental rule of market economy. I don’t want to talk about education in terms of market, but society has not yet found an alternative model to govern its exchange of goods (and I feel comfortable talking about education as a good).

Once, professional and academic education followed the rule of supply and demand – people chose their professional path according to a combination of what they are good at with what is needed in their surrounding community. Not on the level of “what would help them make money”, but rather on the level of the role they would have in their societies. In post-industrialist societies, there is a change in this trend. When choosing a career path, people think more in terms of self-fulfillment, more about their individual will and less about their social role. This is completely fine and natural – I went down the same road too.

But when education is free, it overboosts this trend, distorting the labor market. Since everybody can choose what they want to do, it is easy to understand how some professions, with a low social status, get massively abandoned. In a post-industrialist, well educated, society, there is much emphasis on academic education at the expense of appreciation of technical, industrial and creational work. The job of production has been massively moved to the so-called developing markets, and “developed” economies have become service economies. Such economies produce very little, and there are serious doubts on how sustainable a service-only economic model can be in the long term. Some economic crises have already hinted at this direction.

A joke from the beginning of the economic crisis in Greece said that the crisis was rooted in the over-employment of philosophers in the public sector. This joke obviously uses stereotypes related to Greek history and contemporary politics, but in its heart, it tells a small truth about our societies: in the free and accessible academia, the disproportional growth of humanities and social sciences at the expense of other, perhaps more practical-oriented subjects, is inflating the post-industrialist bubble: we have so many sociologists and philosophers, but struggle to find a decent plumber, electrician or carpenter.

(***A short comment here: at this point of the argument, I often get criticized for undermining the role of humanities and social sciences. I should clarify that I do not undermine this role, and this is why I chose the particular example of sociologists, since I am myself a student of sociology. An educated society is extremely important, and humanist intellectuals are of great importance to the cultural development of a given community, but the key is the proportion.)

Another problematic outcome of free academic education for the labor market: Students leave the academic world to the labor market in a late stage, without work experience, and struggle to fit in.

When studies are free, everybody wants to study, and they will do so as long that they are allowed to. Students graduate on average at the age of 23, quite an advanced age to be making your first steps in the labor market, and usually have very little working experience. This results in several scenarios:

One is the phenomenon of people doing unpaid internships until the age of 25-27 just to gather the necessary professional experience. When studies are free and the academic market is inflated, there is higher competition for each vacancy. It is not enough to have finished studies in a certain field (many others did as well), and the value of work experience rises. Since professional experience is on high demand, many compromise for unpaid work, in the form of internships and volunteering. In the end, an average person’s professional career might start even after the age of 30, an extremely late age if you take into consideration that a person’s productive work age range is more or less 18-65.

It means more or less 12 years of wasted work potential, in which the student does not earn properly, cannot start his/her economically independent life, and does not pay taxes (which, in turn, hurts society in general – we need tax payers to support, for example, retirement payments for an increasingly aging society).

The second scenario is that graduates who struggle to fit in the labor market end up in lower-income jobs or in jobs that do not fit their intellectual and educational background. Imagine Mike as a young graduate who, after 5 years of studies is forced (by the circumstances) to work in a low-income physical work (which he has been trying from the first place to avoid by going to university). It creates immense frustration, and justifiably! Multiply this frustration by tens of thousands of graduates in a similar position, and what you get is a potentially dangerous social movement with no trust in the economic and political system (again, justifiably) and with a tendency to radicalism.

A variety of social movements that lately protested against the existing economic system (e.g. Occupy, Indignados, or the Syriza party) gave us a taste of what l can look like to have a whole generation of frustrated citizens, and the history of the 20th century gives extreme examples of where vast social frustration can lead.

6. The slightly anarchist but non-the-less important argument

This entry has been exhausting, perhaps at times chaotic. There is one last argument that I make – many people disagree with it, but in my opinion it is nevertheless fundamental to remember. It regards the second part of the justification of free education: does free higher education create more educated human beings?

As previously stated, nothing is for free. Someone always pays for it. In the case of free education, it is the state who pays. That the state pays means that the state controls. Studies that are fully sponsored by the state hurt the concept of academic freedom, and subject universities to political pressure from the side of the government. In authoritarian regimes it is a common practice, but it happens also in democratic countries. Supporters of free academic education make the argument that the academy should not be commercialized, and that a profit-oriented academia will be subject to commercial pressure. But what is better: a commercialized academia or a nationalized one? I opt for the first one, even if only for the reason that the market is a bit more diversified than the government, and has more checks and balances.

Free higher education does not necessarily create better educated or informed human beings. It risks losing the possibility to think critically, and may result in creating merely better, more obedient citizens. Humanity has seen enough state-sponsored brainwashing through the last centuries to give itself so easily in the hands of state education.

Conclusion

In his canonic essay “Mythologies”, Roland Barthes claims that myths are transparent, camouflaged. They are there, where you don’t see them. Free academic education for all is a myth. It is hard to reveal and to debate since it hides behind its legitimate and noble call for equality. But the truth must be said – it does not deliver on its own goals.

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