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The Daily Signal
Europe Has Free College. Here’s How It’s Working Out.
Mary Clare Amselem
January 17, 2020
Free college sounds great! Who doesn’t like free stuff?
To make the idea sound even more appealing, advocates continuously cite
Europe as an example of success. Many European countries offer their
citizens tuition-free higher education, so why can’t America?
The truth is that free college in Europe is no success story. Rather,
it should serve as a cautionary tale for the United States.
European-style tuition-free higher education has proved one thing
beyond the shadow of a doubt: “Free” college is actually wildly
expensive.
Americans already pay a steep price for our higher education system.
Taxpayers—including those who never went to college and never intend
to—spend more than $150 billion a year on federal student loans,
grants, and other government programs.
The increasingly hefty price tag attached to college tuition reflects
the fact that colleges have no incentive to keep their prices low
because students can so easily take out massive loans from Washington.
One of the few factors putting any downward pressure on higher
education costs is the growing criticism that universities receive for
leaving so many students burdened with massive amounts of student loan
debt.
Under a fully financed government system, however, universities would
receive no such scrutiny. They’d simply pass the bill to Washington and
let lawmakers take the heat from unhappy taxpayers.
That cumulative bill would quickly skyrocket. Many European countries
that have experimented with “free college” are finding that approach to
be simply unaffordable. Germany, for example, saw a 37% increase in the
college subsidy cost to taxpayers once public universities removed
tuition.
Similarly, England had a free-college policy between the 1960s and the
1990s. Enrollment soared, straining government revenues. Ultimately,
England had to lower resources by 39% per student.
Ultimately, England’s free college policy wound up hurting low-income
students the most, as schools were forced to cap the number of students
admitted.
In fact, according to researchers at the National Bureau of Economic
Research, “the gap in degree attainment between high- and low-income
families more than doubled.”
European countries that offer tuition-free higher education also
struggle with the issue of completion. Finland, for example, ranks
first among all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
countries in terms of subsidies for higher education, with 96% of all
higher education funding coming from public sources. However, Finland
ranks 25th among OECD countries for degree attainment.
France famously touts its tuition-free university system. Seldom,
however, do its boasts note that almost 50% of French students drop out
or fail out after just their first year.
It is clear that transferring the entire cost of higher education from
students to taxpayers is fraught with unintended consequences.
Countries such as England and Poland actually saw significant increases
in higher education quality and access after reinstating private
tuition payments in their countries. It appears that there is some
value in requiring students to invest in their own education.
Given the increased tax burdens placed on taxpayers (including those
who don’t hold degrees), the significant overcrowding, and high dropout
rates, European-style free college should largely be considered a
public policy failure.
The $1.5 trillion in outstanding student loan debt that Americans owe
is certainly a crisis. However, the solution to this problem is not to
encourage more students to attend who may later drop out and ask
Americans who did not go to college to pay for those who do.
This would fuel inefficient higher education spending and weaken the integrity of our colleges and universities.
The solution, in America as in Europe, is to put individuals rather than governments in charge of higher education financing.
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