The rest of the world varies. China, India, and Canada university systems have rather different characteristics from each other and from the US.
Canada’s mostly catchment-area/commuter, taught by actual professors. You can do something more American-style, but it’ll run ya.
About ten years ago we got ACA. A good chunk of the political class representing most of half the country has been having apoplectic fits about it ever since, but if you tried to remove it now, you’d have mass revolt. Actually that’s what happens if you try to remove it now. All the same arguments were advanced then. I actually think they could’ve gone much farther and we’d have been fine, and it would’ve been better-accepted than ACA. That doesn’t affect 8% or 14% of the country – it affects 100% of the country.
It wouldn’t cost trillions of dollars. It’d cost about $100B a year taking into account the number of people, many of whom aren’t kids, going to university now, which is a small fraction of GDP and 2-3x what NIH gets, and is not unsustainable. That’d cover State U and U of in all 50 states. The Biden admin, which has a good team assembled on this, has made a down payment with just over $40B in the recent covid act. There would be no reason for higher ed’s ridiculous inflation if we put public funding back under nominally public universities; in fact the SLACs and those would have to come back down unless they find some real marks among the parents on boards like this who’re just prestige hounds. Because otherwise it becomes difficult to find people who’ll pay $70K, even rich people, when the local U’s quite good and costs $16K including living expenses.
I don’t think there’s reason or time to poke around with state-by-state, exacerbating inequalities as we go. Trust me, if the feds offer $2B a year to the University of Alabama and say “but here’s what you have to do with it, more or less,” they’ll take it, and the kids and families will very happily accept the free tuition and courses taught by actual professors in buildings that work well.
You are right. I have never done the math on the actual amount needed to fund full tuition for every public college and university student before seeing your number, but your math is much much closer than what I stated. Most congressional budget totals are run over a 10 year period and the costs to provide loan forgiveness/cancelling up to the 27K in debt and to pay tuition for every public school in-state student to go to college would be at least 2 trillion dollars over a 10 year budget cycle or 200 billion dollars a year. You have mentioned the ACA several times, but the country and the congress are much more divided than they were when the ACA was passed in 2010.
I also do not see the educational inflation being controlled by anything mentioned so far which is the most dangerous part of all of this. A child born in 2021 can expect the COA of a college education with continuous 5% inflation increases to cost 260K for a 4 year education (65K per year average) at a public school if we continue on the current path. I don’t see how most families could truly afford that number in 18 years even if the tuition portion of these costs are paid by the government.
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If you think college is expensive now, wait until its “free.”
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Far fewer adults have children now than before, and while they may be willing to continue to fund K12 as a public necessity, relatively few feel the same for college. Perhaps commuter community college, but certainly not residential colleges for others’ offspring. Of course, employees at public universities have a vested self interest in encouraging free college for all, but it is unlikely the rest of us will pay for that.
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I’d support any of these. I know in PA there was talk about changing our subsidies for horse racing into funds for higher ed. I don’t know if it went anywhere or not because, of course, the wealthy own the racehorses and really don’t want to lose their subsidies or how else could they pay their grooms, etc??? But me? I saw that segment on the news and was wondering, “Why is this even a question - yes - help more common people with the money!” coupled with, “We’ll get money back from helping folks get educated.” The segment said the state gets nothing in return for helping the horse racing industry - it’s a drain. Those working as grooms can likely make as much money in other “basic” jobs. It’s not a high pay occupation.
Any state could always do it like NY does and require those getting the aid as grants to stay in state as taxpayers for X years afterward or pay back the “loans.” To me, that’s a worthy system.
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States have all different ways to fund higher education. Which method are you going to pick?
Colorado has fairly low property taxes and state taxes, but U of Colorado costs a lot for even instate and even more for OOS. It’s a ‘pay me now or pay me later’ situation. It also has/had one of the best 529 programs. Works for residents. Wyoming has no income taxes at all but finds a way to provide almost a free education to most of its residents (tuition is low and there are a lot of scholarships). NJ? Very high property taxes, income taxes, and yet still has a high tuition at state schools?
$100B? That’s $2B for each state and even if you shift $1B of that from small states like Wyoming to Big states like Florida, is that really going to get every student a free education at the schools they want to go to? As it is, Florida doesn’t have room at the public schools for everyone so gives a resident grant to keep students in state and going to private schools. California doesn’t have enough space in its UCs or CSUs for everyone. U of Colorado has a ton of students from California, so if CU has to take more instate students, what’s going to happen to those California students who now have to stay home?
And I like sports. Those aren’t going away, and students are still going to want sports, rec centers with climbing walls, all you can eat cafeterias, and Greeks life. It is going to make elite schools even more elite as students go searching for those things if you strip them from public schools.
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Population distribution, similar to some US states like Arizona and Hawaii, makes it possible to locate a relatively small number of public universities with commute-accessibility to most of the population. However, people living in areas away from the major metros need to attend university residentially.
Also, the most desired universities in Canada are huge relative to the population (bigger than most US universities, even though the population of Canada is much smaller than that of the US).
But then rest of the world also includes China and India, right?
Which aspects of “rest of the world” would you prefer to be brought into US universities?
Wyoming’s state government gets its biggest share of revenue from federal transfers; charges/fees, property taxes, and sales taxes are also significant shares of revenue, according to https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/projects/state-fiscal-briefs/wyoming
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I did the math and it may be more than 100 billion a year, but it is nowhere near what I initially postulated. 19.7 million people are currently in college and about 14 million are in public schools. About 3.5 million of all students are part-timers and if you give 10K per year (average tuition nationally in-state) for all students in public schools full time and approximately 5K for part-timers it would come out to ~120-140 billion dollars in year 1. The big issue is that costs would grow pretty quickly and double every 14 years with current inflationary rates for higher education.
Maybe it is where I live, but no one that I have talked to in my area cares about this issue because college expenses are more affordable here than in some other parts of the country. I prefer my own state’s solution to higher education costs and have always consider issues around education to be “local issues”.
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For a state-by-state comparison of student loan debt, you can look at Interactive Map - The Institute for College Access & Success . If you click on a state, you can look at the student loan debt level for each college in the state.
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I get the concerns. In fact before I got pregnant I did the math for college saving and was shocked to see that by 2021, we’d be looking at about $75K for 4-year in-state – and of course the reality is more like $100K.
The thing is that the wild inflation’s been driven by the fact that public funding’s been sucked out from under the publics, which has meant that sensible kids and parents looking nervously at a choice between increasingly expensive, decreasingly good local in-state and wildly expensive private have made the self-protecting decision: go private. And as that happened in an avalanche in the late aughts, early 2010s, those kids’ not showing up at the publics pushed your average public U further into remedial territory (yes, I know, there are exceptions like UMich, UIUC, Cal, etc.), which has made it a worse and worse option even as it’s gotten more expensive. It’s a vicious circle. The state Us try to fix that with honors programs, but end of day if your local state U’s become essentially high-school-plus, an honors program can’t fix that. It’s still part of the same university.
As the state Us started sinking, they flailed harder and harder to compete nationally for OOS students, because that’s where the money is. So they built like crazy and started spinning up new programs in this and that – things they didn’t have cash for. So they borrowed, and the bond rating companies – I’m not kidding about this – would analyze their pictures and say “you can raise tuition and fees, you have room to do that, do it and you’ll be more attractive to investors.” And the whole pack would move together. The justification at the bottom was always that someone else was more expensive further up. I’ve heard admin at my U claiming our tuition’s shamefully low, that we should by rights charge more. We have homeless students and a food bank on campus.
Put public money back under the public universities, and you jam that cycle and put it in reverse. State Us wring their hands these days about selectivity, but you don’t have to play those games if the middle income bright kids are coming back because honestly it’s too good a deal to pass up. They’re going to make it a better university. The research groups will suddenly be revitalized. Their sibs and friends will see it as an option. And slowly the reputations start to come back. It also makes it easier to recruit good administration and faculty.
The other thing is that with federal money comes great regulatory power. The universities are already subject to this. They’re all fixated on time to graduation and graduation rates because if they screw that up, they can lose eligibility to receive federal student loan money. So yes, you can tell a state U that if they’re receiving federal wotsit funds, they must justify any COA increase above x% annually and have it approved.
Incidentally, despite all the handwringing about ACA, I just checked yesterday to see what would happen if I suddenly had to use it because I’ve been mouthy at work recently. Answer: I’d have essentially the same insurance, covering me and my kid, for $0/mo, $600 deductible on a BCBS silver plan. I’d have to be making hella dough before my insurance became expensive. I get the “we don’t have providers” problem in some places, but what I see in my area is this: what upper-income people are complaining about when it comes to premiums is the fact that healthcare is expensive if you want a nice menu, so unless we’re going, again, to take care of it with single payer, as an upper-income person you’re going to see policy costs like what your employer would pay if you got insurance as a benefit.
In that sense, the state U deal would be superior: tuition would be low or free for everyone.
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I laid out the math in another thread somewhere, will see if I can find it. The math doesn’t come from totting up tuition, but by starting from the point of your average giant state university’s budget and where those revenue streams come from, and what happens if you both replace a large chunk of student tuition $ with federal money and tend to a couple decades’ worth of deferred maintenance at the state Us.
Incidentally, I don’t think tuition needs to be free, but the halcyon days of “I mowed lawns and paid my tuition with the summer money” can come back. You immediately get outcry about “but internships and resume builders”, and the answer to that is to tell industry that not only do the Obama-era rules about paying interns apply, but finish fixing the problem: nonprofits also have to pay, and if housing costs are above median, either provide housing or pay a housing stipend. No more of this business where kids are paying tuition to have internships they have to borrow money for because they’re in expensive cities and they’re working for free. Only rich kids can afford internships that way.
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Normally what happens when kids go off to unis far from home in Canada is that they rent an apartment, often with high school friends. No great mystery there. You don’t find a lot of dormitories, much less an American-style campus with all the trimmings and the weird sports apparatus grafted onto it, and a lot of the people there are international students. As for “most desired universities”, like McGill and UofT, you don’t get the sort of national hyperventilating about getting into “top unis” the way you do here, possibly because people aren’t so terrified about plunging into some kind of void if they don’t go to Toronto for law. What with social programs and all.
I can’t speak to Chinese and Indian universities beyond what graduate students have told me in explaining why they’ve come to mine, which doesn’t strike me as much of a basis for comparison.
If we’re serious about improving US public universities while reducing costs? Again, Europe, Australia, and Canada provide a perfectly good model that I expect is also reflected in Latin America. Very heavily subsidized nationally, so that students walk out with little or no debt; taught by professors or professor-equivalents; a student quarter but not a sprawling campus like a resort hotel; largely student-run student clubs for those looking for friends and a lark or a specialty project; easy-to-get-in, hard-to-stay-in; shabby state-owned buildings; limited marketing; national grants supporting faculty in scientific, scholarly, and artistic work that requires them to take on and mentor promising/advanced students, also funneling them towards next steps in their training and employment. Anyone who’s completed secondary school can take a crack at it at low cost, meaning they aren’t penalized for life for having behaved like they were 14 when they were 14; those who really belong in college can stay; it’s about education and friends and cheap wine.
In other words, uni isn’t a cotillion, a ski club, a fraternity, a therapist’s office, a resort hotel, or a football field. It’s a school.
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If your income dropped to $0, you don’t get a silver plan. You don’t get any plan except medicaid in the states that have extended medicaid to adults. If you don’t make above poverty level, ~$20k for single, higher for 1 child, you get to pay full price for a plan NOT on the ACA. No bronze, no silver, no gold.
Ask me how I know.
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Yes, I’m aware. If I were to lose my job tomorrow, though, my income for 2021 would not be $0. In my state, if my income were actually $0 for the year, I’d be on a state plan and would be paying little or nothing for it.
The gaps in extended Medicaid also strike me as a fine argument for not doing low/no-tuition state U nationally rather than state-by-state. It’s not the fault of the residents of states that refused expanded Medicaid that they’re out of luck; they just happened to be poor in a state that’s fine with cutting off its nose to spite its face. The same happens in education when you leave it to the states: you get these victims of geography.
But it is not based on your income for the year, but on your income at the time you apply. You’d likely be getting some severance or unemployment, but not everyone gets that.
No one I know thinks their ACA policies are that great. One friend, who was used to (literally) Cadillac insurance (ex husband worked for GM) can’t even find doctors to take her plan and was shocked to learn about deductibles and 80/20 payments until the $8000 stop loss.
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From healthcare.gov:
https://www.healthcare.gov/income-and-household-information/how-to-report/
It’s your expected income for the year. They’re reasonably detailed about what to include and how to account for unemployment.
If your friend’s husband was well-paid at GM and she was able to expect a fairly high AGI after divorce, then yes, she was going to pay like a rich lady. Like I said, higher-income people are going to carry the same sort of insurance premium that their employers would otherwise pay – it’s no longer a work benefit. I’m pleased for her that she was able to stay innocent of deductibles and copays for so long, but yeah, this has been a normal feature of American health insurance for decades now.
If she doesn’t want those things, and doesn’t want to be poor, and she wants her insurance accepted everywhere, then single-payer’s what she’s after. As a high-income person she’ll still pay more healthcare tax than poor people will, though. If she’s A-OK for income and free from ordinary worries about it, though, she’s still in a very nice position.
Again, though, if we’re talking about education (digression!), she might like state-U benefits even better under a federal support system. Her kids would pay nearly the same tuition as kids from poor families. Of course, her taxes would also be higher. All part of that business of reconstituting a functional middle class, that engine of democracy and prosperity.
Many public university administrators have done a remarkably poor job of handling the funds they have now, so one might be reluctant to bestow more funds. If they built $50 million dollar buildings hoping to attract OOS students paying an extra $20k year in tuition, that is a not a positive return on investments, ever. Those that were able to maintain reasonably high admissions standards (UT, UNC, UC, UVA,UM, etc,) maintained their allure for the middle class, which has grown as privates approach $80k/year.
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