ATLANTA, GEORGIA – NOVEMBER 20: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) (C) … [+]
At last Wednesday’s Democratic debate, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar set herself apart from her more left-wing rivals with the radical notion that the federal government shouldn’t spend scarce taxpayer dollars on college tuition for rich kids. “I think that we have an obligation to be fiscally responsible, think big, but make sure we have people’s backs and are honest with them about what we can pay for,” said Klobuchar. “And that is everything from sending rich kids to college for free, which I don’t support, to kicking 149 million off their current health insurance.”
Another relative moderate, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, recently tweeted: “Instead of providing free college tuition for the children of millionaires and billionaires, I will open doors of opportunity for Americans who choose not to go to college with massive investments in apprenticeships, workforce training, and lifelong learning programs.”
Klobuchar and Buttigieg are correct that eliminating tuition for everyone attending public colleges and universities represents a massive handout to America’s upper middle class. Why? Because students from richer families, on average, pay much higher tuition than their lower-income peers.
Fifty-five percent of poor students (those from families earning below $35,000) at public institutions already pay zero tuition, thanks to a combination of government grants and need-based financial aid from their schools. But among America’s richest families, those earning more than $110,000, 72% pay more than $5,000 in tuition annually.
Source: NPSAS
Making college free helps those with the biggest tuition bills the most, and most of those students come from rich families. Additionally, low-income students who do pay tuition tend to pay much less than their higher-income classmates, and would thus receive comparatively smaller benefits.
Some progressives wonder why we should care if students from rich families get free tuition, so long as poor students benefit from free college as well. The reason is that government revenues are limited.
No matter how much money you think the government should spend on education, that number is always going to be finite. It is therefore an inescapable reality that a dollar the government spends on free college for rich students is a dollar it’s not spending somewhere else, such as more aid for low-income students, vocational training, apprenticeships, research, or some other educational initiative.
And that’s not even considering the non-educational areas where that marginal dollar might be better spent. The government could allocate it to national defense or healthcare instead, or (gasp) leave it in the private sector to spur economic growth.
Perhaps you think free college for the wealthy is an acceptable byproduct of a universal free-college policy, but the appropriate test is not whether we can accept this use of taxpayer dollars, it’s whether this is a better use of money than all other competing priorities. Conceptualized that way, it’s hard to argue that free college for the rich passes muster.
