A review of the evidence on higher education policy shakes the foundation of some liberal policy proposals for millennials.
As the Brookings Institution noted, student loans don’t hurt home ownership rates and “free college” helps the rich more than the poor.
“The main division between the home ownership ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ is their education level—not their debt,” Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, a senior fellow for Brookings, wrote.
The average student loan debt keeps getting higher, but college graduates are still better off than their peers. The more educated a millennial is, the higher likelihood that they own a house.
“By 27, those with a college degree overtake those without degrees in homeownership. By 35, the gap in homeownership between those with and without a college education is about 14 percent,” Whitehurst wrote.
It’s expensive, but a college degree sets a graduate apart from the rest of the workforce. About 34 percent of Americans between 25- and 34-years-old earned a bachelor’s degree, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Graduates earn higher salaries, paying down that debt, while saving enough for a mortgage. For college dropouts, roughly 40 percent of first-time students, the debt they accrued might hold them back. For graduates, however, that isn’t the case.
Politicians have praised the necessity of a college degree and its economic benefits, yet focused on the plight of debt-burdened millennials. That’s overlooked the success of graduates and led to other proposals based on cherry picking the evidence.
Hence, the popular idea to make college free. If liberals want to make college access more equitable, they’ll have to scrap that plan.
“Free college proposals like Bernie Sanders’ would help the rich more than the poor,” Whitehurst noted.
When Brookings analyzed who would benefit from Sanders’ plan, they found a drastic imbalance.
“Families from the top half of the income distribution would receive 24 percent more in dollar value than students from the lower half of the income distribution, largely because the wealthy tend to attend more expensive institutions,” Whitehurst wrote.
It would effectively reward high-cost institutions that failed to restrain spending as well. Even Hillary Clinton found flaws in the plan, opposing it because “I am not going to give free college education to wealthy kids,” she said.
That puts liberal plans for higher education reform in an awkward position. If making more aspects of higher education free, or supplying more resources for struggling graduates, is ineffective or benefits the wealthy more than anyone else, the Democratic approach to higher education makes society more unequal.
Free college benefits the wealthiest most, and more debt relief takes away policy focus from millennials without a degree, who are worse off than their college-educated peers. Treating “millennial” as synonymous with “college graduate” has put those politicians in a bind.
