Most arguments against free education that I've read focus on the cost and tax burdened or how it would effect our national debt. In my opinion these arguments are near sighted and shallow, but more importantly will have no effect upon a liberal's opinion other than to make them think you don't care about poor people. Democrats believe that a more educated country is going to have higher wages and thus the income and taxes would increase together, offsetting any costs. And statistically that is true. Better education brings better wages. A Democrat also believes an educated public is worth any financial burden it imposes on the country and would happily take money from defense spending or a number of other government programs to help pay for it. So the cost is not an issue to them.
So what will a fee education do? It will encourage every Tom, Dick and Harry who are otherwise not qualified for College to go, schools will lower their teaching standards, weakening the significance of their degrees, businesses will no longer be able to rely on universities to provide their students with the basic tools necessary for the workplace environment, and those who actually cared to put forth the effort will be short changed and get a watered down degree because their fellow classmates were not up to the task.
My argument therefore is not focused on the financial cost, but rather on the education costs and personal costs to the students themselves. We already see a sharp contrast in our youth between those who are educated in private schools and those who are educated by the public school system. Private schools are consistently producing more educated and better quality citizens. Do we really want all of our colleges to be an extension of the public education systems or four more years of high school? High School is failing our youth. Why on earth would we pattern our higher education systems after it?
Even if colleges remain private the lure of money is too great for many of them to resist making educational concessions in order to increase their cash flow. For instance; I don't know all the details, but a college in the city where I live recently got into a lot of trouble after it was found out they had been enrolling homeless people or other ill qualified candidates into their college simply to get federal financial aid for them. They were enrolling several people who they knew would not finish a semester much less graduate simply because the college benefited financial from each name on their roster. This was not a low quality community college either.
Many colleges and universities already focus too much on enrollment numbers rather than the quality of students they bring in because those students represent financial income for their programs. This will always be a fact, but the Federal Government incentivizing this is a recipe for disaster. Law schools across the country right now are lowering their standards in order to get enrollment numbers up. As a result I predict many of their new students will find themselves unable to endure the curriculum and will eventually drop out, but with a significant debt that otherwise might have been avoided had they initially been told they are not lawyer material. Some might even graduate, but be unable to pass a bar exam and will find themselves as out of work lawyers.
In my own University I saw several problems that I feel free education will only exacerbate. Many of my college professors felt that they needed to water down their materials, or in other words teach to the quality of students in their class. Otherwise their class grade averages would suffer as well as their year end reviews. Several of the top teachers resisted this temptation and still taught what they thought was best. But even they have admitted that they were forced by the school to make at least some minor adjustments to their grading, teaching, or testing styles that they otherwise would not have made. I spoke with many of the students who expressed the feeling, that as a result of these concessions, the significance of their degrees had been weakened. Not only because the work loads were made easier to suit the class and therefore they were robbed of a better education in general, but also because of the quality of their fellow graduating peers. They felt that their degree's worth was damaged by virtue of who else carried one. And it's true. I saw many political science students who knew very little about politics, or more importantly didn't understand statistical analysis or were otherwise incapable of analytical thinking and writing who graduated along side of me. How? because they were able to choose "the easy" professors and get the same degree that I was able to get, with less effort. In the business world however, where quality work actually counts, their quality of work will be significantly weaker than mine and my other good classmates and employers will take notice regarding the consistency and quality of students the college is turning out.
The solution is to fix the public education system so that children getting into college are prepared for college and to make degrees once again worth the cost of tuition. 50k in debt is not a problem if you can get a decent job coming out of college to pay for it. Making college free is not the answer. If free education prepared people properly for their futures high school graduates would be prepared for college; sadly most are not. The solution is to create an interim education system that is free. Something that can transition a high school graduate into college appropriately, but without weakening the significance of a college degree. If the quality of students coming into college improved the professors could teach at a higher level and the degrees being received by their students would actually translate into employment.
