Economists are not amused with the college plans offered by Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
When NPR’s Planet Money asked 22 of them for analysis, they gave low marks to both candidates’ plans.
The bluntest statement on Bernie Sanders’s plan came from Yale University’s Larry Samuelson.
“There are many who can and should pay for college,” he said. If students benefit from a college degree, and they have the means to pay for it, the subsidy benefits the student rather than society.
On Hillary Clinton’s plan for free community college, if students work 10 hours a week, the response was more mixed. Planet Money rated it debatable.
“We know that one of the biggest problems is completion — so I worry a little about conditioning this benefit on working,” Hilary Hoynes, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, said.
Twenty of the 22 economists thought Sanders’s approach was “a bad idea,” according to Business Insider. Clinton didn’t fare so well either, with only five economists favoring her plan.
The Democratic plans could make higher education cheaper for students who would otherwise pay tuition, but it does so by shifting the cost of higher education to taxpayers. Furthermore, by making college cheaper for everyone, more students could enroll, driving down the marginal benefit of a college degree. The plans also assume that students will complete their degree. For four-year degrees, six-year completion rates are only 59 percent. Even if college becomes free for students, attending for two, three, or four years, but not finishing a degree isn’t always the best choice economically.
Were their college plans addressing completion rates and ideas on how to lower costs, economists wouldn’t be so skeptical of Sanders and Clinton.
