The Truth About Biden's College Plan

Last week, President-Elect Joe Biden declared that he had a solution to the issue of college costing so much. That’s right, he was going to make it “free.”

In particular, community college would be free for all and public colleges and universities would be free for anyone whose parents make less than $125,000 per year.

So, for most folks.

To be sure, Biden supporters absolutely loved it. After all, what’s not to love about free stuff, right? Especially when education is such a massive expense. What’s not to love?

Well, plenty, actually.

First, let’s talk about the idea of this being “free.” As Robert Heinlein once noted, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Someone is always paying for it and it’s on you to figure out who and why.

In this case, the “free” education is actually going to be paid for by the American taxpayer, and the price tag is going to be pretty hefty.

Currently, there are around 20 million college students in the United States. The average cost for in-state public colleges is $20,770. That means the cost of this education plan is around $415.4 billion. That’s per year.

And that’s being a tad conservative. While some of those 20 million college students are likely to be ineligible due to their parents’ income, others of those 20 million will opt for more expensive educations since someone else is picking up the tab. The student who wants to go to an out-of-state school won’t be worried about the added cost any longer.

In other words, the actual cost may end up being much, much greater.

If this were all about cost, we’d have plenty of reasons to oppose the move right there. It’s not, though.

While I agree that education is important, what Biden’s plan does is two things in particular. The first is that it’s a payout for future votes.

In four years, either he or Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will be running again. That’s four years’ worth of new, young voters who will be getting a free ride to college. Don’t think they won’t point that out to these young voters, to be sure.

Additionally, part of the plan likely hinges on the knowledge that most colleges and universities are little more than progressive indoctrination centers. Students get fed into a machine and are inundated with progressive attitude and bias for four or more years—and if you think someone getting a free ride is going to worry that much about how long it takes them to graduate, you’ve got another thing coming—and it’s a miracle that any student graduates with conservative or libertarian values.

The idea is to feed as many people into that machine as possible, all in hopes of churning out legions of progressive voters that destroy any conservative or libertarian values left in the United States.

Yeah, I know, it sounds a little melodramatic, but not any more than some of what we’ve seen on college campuses. Take what recently happened at Bryn Mawr, outlined in an essay at Quillette.

Bryn Mawr’s experiences aren’t overly unique.

And that’s what Biden wants to pay for.

Don’t get me wrong. The cost of education is ridiculous. There’s no real denying of that in any way, shape, or form. $20,000+ per year is an insane amount of money for a single student to pay.

Yet there are solutions that don’t boil down to “let’s tax everyone and let Uncle Sam pay for it.” For example, we could use some tried and true examples from the past. In particular, we could push to allow apprenticeships for professional careers rather than forcing everyone to go through college first.

After all, once upon a time, many lawyers came into the profession through apprenticeships. The same is true for accountants and architects. Hell, Frank Lloyd Wright, arguably the greatest architect of the modern age, was apprenticed. He never graduated from college, but learn at the feet of someone who knew what they were doing.

Opening these pathways back up will offer options to people that create zero burdens on the taxpayer.

Further, school counselors could stop with the whole “everyone needs to go to college” schtick, especially when they’re telling them that it doesn’t matter what they study, just that they go.

Sure, some kind of post-secondary training is important, but these kids are being set up for failure by telling them that it doesn’t matter what they study. I’m sorry, but getting a degree in creative writing doesn’t qualify you for much of anything. Neither does a degree in philosophy or gender studies.

Yet what Biden is proposing will put all of us on the hook for such degrees. We’ll be paying for them and then have to deal with the fallout when these people graduate and suddenly find out that they’re qualified to do jack squat.

The idea of free education is going to sound very attractive to a large number of people, but they don’t know what they’re asking for. Not really.