Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce studied the effects of Hillary Clinton’s proposal to make public college free for families earning less than $125,000 dollars a year. Making college free for more than 80 percent of Americans, they’ve found, won’t make enrollment more equal.
This equalizing equation, plus a companion promise to reinstate year-round Pell grants for the poorest students, was central to her speech this afternoon at the University of Southern Florida—addressing that tricky college-age demographic, in that indispensable swing state.
Free stuff sounds delightful, and voters go gaga for it. Free college, lobbyists have learned, sells particularly well. “In the 2014 democratic drop off voters, it was the most motivating issue,” a representative from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee told reporters last week, explaining the origins of the politically expedient promise.
But the CEW study suggests, as others have before, that shifting the cost of public college tuition to taxpayers might hinder, not help, the progressive goal to diversify higher education: Public colleges’ enrollment will swell to a breaking point, at which admissions will have to become more selective. Poor and minority students on the wrong side of the achievement gap will crowd open-access community colleges, schools unprepared for the influx. While competitive public universities will become more and more meritocratic, highly selective private colleges will only continue to attract the sons and daughters of the wealthiest few families who can afford them. Society’s underserved, meanwhile, will be no better off with yet another false promise.
And the consequences for most private colleges are uncertain. Even Georgetown might have reason to worry:
Sound familiar? For one thing, these findings piggyback on prior studies of how plans like Bernie Sanders’s would work in practice. Clinton’s plan borrows heavily from his. Indeed, she announced it weeks after a one-on-one meeting with the grumpy socialist and days before he dropped out of the race for the nomination.
As ever, both plans stand to do the most good for the least needy. All told, it’s great news for Muffy and Chip at the country club: Ivy League colleges will, once again, be far less competitive for rich kids from fancy families.
