Here’s Exactly How Much the Government Would Have to Spend to Make Public College Tuition-Free
A mere $62.6 billion dollars!
According to new Department of Education data, that’s how much tuition public colleges collected from undergraduates in 2012 in the entire United States. And I’m not being facetious with the word mere, either. The New America Foundation says that the federal government spent a whole $69 billion in 2013 on its hodgepodge of financial aid programs, such as Pell Grants for low-income students, tax breaks, work study funding. And that doesn’t even include loans.
Read more. [Image: Reuters]
For perspective that’s about a twelfth of the military budget.
Sickening.
Well but…we can assume that if it were free, more students would take advantage of it and, thus, it would cost more money. That’s like saying “Americans spend $1 billion on yachts every year, so the government could buy everyone a yacht for only $1 B per year!”
The article goes on to say that we already spend MORE than $62 B on grants and work study and other stuff to make college cheaper for students but somehow turns that on it’s head and says “We could just spend that money on tuition instead and EVERYONE WOULD GET FREE COLLEGE!” But that’s deeply DEEPLY flawed. The $69 B the government is spending to subsidize higher education is in fact being used to subsidize higher education.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t spend more, of course we should, but you can’t just remove $69 B of money from the budget of the colleges in America, tuitions will go up and the government would have to dump a lot more than $62 B to provide free school.
If I were The Atlantic, I’d be pretty embarrassed about having published this. Can we stop with the bullshit headlines?
Again, I’m in favor of making education available to more people. But I’m also in favor of not lying about how hard or easy that goal will be to achieve.