The Public Option for Higher Education

[marmar]

from Dissent magazine:



The Public Option for Higher Education
By Andrew Ross, Michael Cheque, and Luke Herrine - November 7, 2013


Top-level lawmakers are finally turning their attention to the student debt crisis. On August 22, President Obama announced a plan to “fundamentally rethink how higher education is paid for in this country.” A few weeks before, Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon declared that he would introduce a bill that would spread Oregon’s “Pay It Forward” loan repayment proposal across the nation. No doubt, there is a widespread hunger for a new way forward in education funding, and it has only sharpened in the wake of the sorry spectacle, earlier in the year, of legislators squabbling over how much to raise interest rates on federal loans. But the well-intentioned proposals floated by Obama and Merkley fall far short of a sustainable, effective solution to the problem.

Before dealing with these plans, let’s be clear: making college affordable would hardly put a dent in the federal budget. If we subtracted all of the tax exemptions, outlays, and programs that currently subsidize public education, only $12.4 billion in additional annual funding would be needed to cover the current tuition at all two and four-year public colleges and universities. In other words, the cost of a genuinely “public option” that would turn education into a binding democratic right turns out to be not much more than a rounding error in the federal budget—less than one percent of yearly spending. That’s all it would take for the federal government to join the long list of other countries that fully fund higher education. By way of comparison, U.S. taxpayers are currently subsidizing too-big-to-fail banks to the tune of $83 billion a year. If we just turned off that faucet we could provide public education completely tuition-free with $70 billion to spare.

A fully-funded system of colleges and universities is the first step towards claiming education as a vital social good. Eliminating tuition at public colleges would allow educators and policy makers to focus on what really matters: creating an educational system that benefits all of us, not just those best equipped to pay. Obama’s recent proposal further entrenches the market-driven belief that higher education is a consumer commodity or a private financial investment, to be judged on its returns to individuals. He aims to rank colleges by factors such as price, graduation rate, and earnings of graduates, and to tie federal funding to those outcomes. Leaving aside how colleges will scramble to game this measure, such a myopic approach to defining ‘value’ would almost certainly further skew university funding in favor of encouraging degrees such as business and finance that generate the maximum return on investment. And it does nothing to address the labor crisis in higher education, where almost three quarters of all teachers are off the tenure-track.

Obama also proposes to universalize income-based repayment. This would at best be a palliative. Monthly payments would be lower, but they could endure for much longer, accruing more interest and leaving the poorest students on the hook for the largest amounts of debt service. All in all, the presidents’ version of higher ed reform is as needlessly complex as Obamacare and moves us further away from the goal of a democratic education commons. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/the-public-option-for-higher-education

[xchrom]

1. du rec.