“Efficiency”

“But when tuition-free college is made available for everyone, it is harder to pay for and less efficient, because when tuition-free college is universal, it gives money to families who could have afforded college anyway.” -- Elizabeth Bell

I respectfully disagree.

Bell published a piece in The Conversation looking at free college proposals. It’s a good piece on a crucial topic, summarizing a larger study. She notes that public support for free college goes up when there’s a GPA requirement but goes down when there’s an income cap. She explains those shifts by claiming that when people evaluate programs with those criteria, they’re actually evaluating the target populations. Biases rooted in race and class get expressed through respect for “neutral” criteria and disrespect for “handouts.” She goes on to claim that programs without income caps are inefficient, because they funnel money to students (or students’ families) who didn’t need it.

Yes and no.

The income cap Bell used for her study -- $50,000 -- is markedly low for something like free college. In the first year of the Community College Opportunity Grant in New Jersey, the income threshold was set at $45,000, and most of the grant went unspent; the space between where Pell ran out and the income cap was so small that very few people fit in it. If tuition at a public four-year college is, say, $15,000 per year, a family making $60,000 should hardly be considered too rich to help. If that were my situation, I wouldn’t look kindly on a program with a cap of $50,000 either. (In an effort to bring in more people, the state raised the AGI to $65,000. For a state with a cost of living as high as this one, even that is pretty low.)

As a parent who has guffawed at what the FAFSA and CSS Profile think is a reasonable amount to pay, I can attest that skepticism about means-tested benefits may be based in bitter experience about means testing getting it wrong. I’ve learned through direct experience, and through experience with students, that what institutions think is reasonable is often manifestly ridiculous in real life. I’m not alone in this.

Anything means tested brings with it significant verification and documentation requirements. (Anyone who has filled out a FAFSA knows this in their bones.) By contrast, something universally free is simple, clear and quick. You know right away, and you don’t have to go to battle with financial aid offices or old tax returns.

The point about “efficiency” reflects a category mistake. If history were entirely static, Bell would have a point. But it isn’t. She applies a synchronic analysis to a diachronic issue. Over time, programs for the poor become poor programs. This is where her point about evaluating the target populations leads. As a taxpayer, I don’t mind that wealthy homeowners get fire protection like everyone else. That’s part of what makes fire departments politically sustainable. A program that doesn’t last doesn’t do any population any good. If he wants to, Bill Gates can borrow a book from a public library. That’s a much less “inefficient” use of resources than, say, screening every library patron to see if they make too much money.

As someone who went to high school in New York State, I’m well aware of the damage that concerns about “efficiency” can do to the funding levels of various programs. When New York started regents’ scholarships, they were $250 per year, which was nearly enough to cover a year’s tuition at a SUNY school. When I got one in the 1980s, it was still $250 per year; at that point, it just elicited bitter laughter. That’s what happens to programs without strong constituencies. Opening up a benefit to a broader constituency can protect that benefit politically.

Finally, of course, there’s the well-documented American veneration of “work.” A GPA requirement, in American culture, turns a benefit from “given” to “earned.” We’re much more willing to respect anything earned. Bell could correctly counter that narratives of given intersect with race and class in dispiriting ways; no argument there. But to leave out the narrative of earning is to leave out a lot.

I’ve written before of my fascination with completion scholarships, by which students who build up a certain number of credits get the rest of the degree free. That strikes me as both more egalitarian than most “merit” scholarships, and more politically sustainable than most “free” programs. It comports with fundamental beliefs of the larger culture. As Marion Tech CC has shown, it can lead to improved results. With a completion scholarship, “skin in the game” takes the form of achieved credits, rather than loans. I’m a fan.

To the extent that the choice boils down to maximum efficiency in a given moment or sustainability over time, I’ll take the latter. A program that folds, or that becomes a hollowed-out shell of its former self, doesn’t do anyone much good. Let Bill Gates borrow a book if it means that we get to keep the library. That’s an efficient use of resources.