Department of Education data show that from 1985-1986 to 2015-2016, the average one-year tab for college tuition, fees, and room and board charges spiraled sharply higher, from $9,228 to $39,529 at private four-year schools, and from $3,859 to $19,189 at their public counterparts. At these prices, the cost of four years to complete studies for a bachelor’s degree heavily taxes student and family finances and saddles many with vast sums of debt that hobble their financial lives for decades.
Making college “free,” as some have demanded, would not solve these problems. A government program that pays for every student’s college education would not lower costs; it would merely shift the costs to taxpayers. A free college education program, indeed, would likely further increase costs, because more would choose to attend college on the government’s dime and the increased demand would push schools to raise their prices even higher.
The right way to tame the intertwined problems of ever-increasing college education costs and heavy student loan debt instead is to make the bachelor’s degree a two-year program. Cutting in half the number of years of attendance required to earn a bachelor’s degree would not change annual prices charged by schools, but it would cut in half the number of payments, and thereby slash the total cost of college education and related student loan debt in half.
A two-year bachelor’s degree program may seem like a radical change, but the length of post-secondary education programs is arbitrary. While the norm is four years for a bachelor’s degree, two more years for an MBA, three more years for a law degree, and four more years for a medical degree, many institutions already offer shorter paths. The University of Massachusetts has a three-year bachelor’s degree program. Cornell University has a five-year bachelor’s-plus-MBA program. The University of Pennsylvania has a six-year bachelor’s-plus-law program. Northwestern University has a seven-year bachelor’s-and-medical-degree program.
And in other countries, these courses of study are often even shorter. In England, the bachelor’s-and-medical program takes just five years.
Colleges and universities would undoubtedly oppose the switch to a two-year bachelor’s degree program. As large bureaucratic institutions, they inherently oppose any substantial internal change. They also would oppose the switch because it would cut their revenues in half. The federal government, however, could overcome this opposition and achieve at least near universal adoption of the two-year bachelor’s degree program by only lending to students enrolled in two-year programs. Schools would comply rather than lose the vast revenue stream provided by the federal student loan program.
It would be particularly appropriate for the federal student loan program to use its powerful influence in this way, because this federal program has had a major role in making ever-increasing college education costs and heavy student loan debt the problems that they are today. The easy credit that the program has provided, both through its direct loans and in the past through its loan guarantees, by enabling vastly more students to pay for college education, has increased demand for it, accelerated its upward price spiral, and helped saddle students with high levels of debt.
These problems will only continue to grow without structural change. The right structural change is to adopt a two-year bachelor’s program that would slash college education costs and student loan debt in half, without costing taxpayers a penny.
David M. Simon is a Chicago lawyer. The views expressed in this article are his own and not those of the law firm with which he is affiliated. For more, please see www.dmswritings.com
