College for all?

So there’s already a huge amount of wasted time and money and useless, undirected effort already being put into college. It’s already arguable that a lot of people who are there shouldn’t be there, or at least are largely wasting their time and money for a certificate of dubious provenance. So the people who already are going to college possibly don’t need it, and many aren’t really making use of it properly if they do need it. Some, of course, do. And some never finish. The college dropout rate is actually quite high. But even those who finish college often don’t know what to do with their degree. If this were a negligible fraction, then it wouldn’t be a matter of much concern. But compared to other educational institutions like trade schools and apprenticeships, college is a far more chancey investment.

The second problem is the cost. College is already ridiculously expensive and is getting more expensive every year, meanwhile the extra earning value of a college degree decreases every year. So every year a college degree (in the general sense, specific majors have exceptions) is worth less. And the college debt burden is already catastrophic, meaning that a huge amount of people paid tons of money for college degree that don’t actually have enough earning value to pay them back. So the people who already can afford college apparently don’t actually get enough benefit from it to pay back its cost. Meaning it was a failed investment they can’t pay off. So they’re asking for debt relief.

So, considering all that, our solution is to send everyone to college, for free. Which really means that everyone has to pay for it, even people who don’t go and who don’t send their kids. The government will make you pay so everyone can have the chance to do something that is already notorious for having too many people there who don’t need to be there and is such a bad investment that huge amounts of the former customers are complaining about it and demanding their money back.

Is it in any way possible that doing this, making college universal, might inadvertently exacerbate these problems? Among the stated benefits of college is the slightly (always decreasing) larger lifetime earning potential of a college graduate. But is that because college increases your earnings, or because the sort of people who go to college are, on average, already the sort of people who are more likely to earn more?

Considering that intelligence is one of the largest predictors of positive life outcomes (including income), and college attendees are not at all a random sample of the population but are virtually all in the upper half of that measure (as well as in the upper half of other social and demographic groups and classes), these are already the people we should expect to earn more. The sort of people who go to college on average may have greater lifetime earnings. But does that mean that making everyone go to college would distribute similar gains to everyone? Considering that college is already a problematic financial bargain for a growing number of the people? Considering you just saddled the entire country with the cost burden of college for everyone? And let’s not forget the time burden. College takes time that could be spent working and building specific job skills and experience.

Does distributing that cost of money and cost of time to everyone in the hope that it will confer the same universal benefits on everyone make sense? And since college is already so unaffordable and financially incapable of generating a return on investment, we also need to bail out all those failing degrees already being generated by subsidizing them and having the government (ie the citizens) pay off the debts that their degrees couldn’t.

The government’s money doesn’t come from nowhere. The money comes from the people. It gets invested in programs that you hope will serve an essential need or generate a return on investment in some way (in the way that the interstate road system generates returns through taxes on increased interstate commerce). In order for college for everyone to pay for itself, it has to be clear that the money invested in paying for so many extra people to get degrees will actually be returned in the form of greater possible earnings for those people, enough to repay, through taxes, the cost of paying for those degrees. But that’s not even a clear prospect on the private side. The private side is already asking for government bailouts. What makes anyone think that nationalizing the whole industry will make it run more efficiently?

Government programs tend to have catastrophic levels of waste and fraud. Every single family in California is going to need to pay $2500 just for the amount of unemployment fraud that occurred just in 2020. So, yeah, the ideas were good. They wanted to get the money to the people who needed it, and in the process the people of the state of California lost more money on just this one thing than the entire national budget of 173 of the world’s 250 coubtries.

Government tends to be very wasteful and inefficient, and government programs are typically extremely ponderous, slow to respond to change, difficult to adjust or modify, weak at responding to feedback, prone to corruption, and mired in beauracracy. They’re very inaccurate and fire across the whole country, hoping to hit the right targets. And if something is wrong with them, it takes them forever to respond and adapt or correct, if they can at all. They’re insulated from the usual feedback mechanisms that drive the private sector. They can’t just go out of business because they’re inefficient, insolvent, or fail to produce and any meaningful results. They have to be voted in and laws have to be passed to make even minor changes, because they’re the product of national fiat.

The postal service has been losing money hand over fist for years, but they don’t even have the power to adjust their pricing to try to make up for the cost of their service. If the treasury was a business, they would have stopped making pennies years ago. No sensible business would make a product worth negative value. But you can’t stop making pennies because there are too many institutional barriers and institutional incentives and political barriers that prevent the change. Those are just two of the most absolutely simple and uncomplicated examples. Once something is funded, it’s very hard to unfund it, for any reason.

That’s why it’s supposed to be hard to get things passed. Because government programs have this inherent weakness, and because if you spent money on everyone’s ideas and desires there would be enough total boondoggles among them to sink the whole ship, it needs to be fairly hard to get something invested in at a government level. It needs to be something that’s been so thorough tested, thoroughly argued over and contested by everyone, and has still made it through with such broad approval and proved bulletproof enough that the majority is convinced its a good investment and will vote for it.

Those are the sorts of things that you can create and invest in at a national governmental level and be fairly sure that it’s a good idea. Because if it isn’t, you might never be free of it. You might be throwing money at it thirty years from now, still waiting for it to produce the desired results, and be completely unable to amend or remove it without making a thousand different groups that have come to depend on it angry. The answer, no doubt, is that it just needs more funding.

Of course, once you face the fact that there’s a limited pool of funding, an unlimited amount needed to resolve the issues of all the various programs created, and there are a thousand different programs all competing for a slice of that finite pie (you can only increase absolute allotment to one by reducing the relative allotment of another), and you’ve got a real problem. So you don’t want any more things competing for a slice of that pie than those that have actually proved themselves to be worth it, net producers. Because if you have enough competing programs vying for that money, but a large enough amount of them are net losers, you’re going to slowly strangle and upend the whole mechanism.

As with most businesses, there are probably only a few departments that are really pulling their weight and generating a net positive. But those few can only carry the weight of so many other programs. And that’s why it’s important to hard to add new programs. It isn’t the case that you can’t add new programs. You just need a testing process (as well as a strong evaluative and auditing proccess for old legacy programs) that is really robust, so you minimize the amount of loss leaders you allow to accrue in the system.

That’s also why government should be hardest at the national level and easiest at the local level. The local level is more tailored, more informed, more specified, more subject to feedback mechanisms and oversight. It’s less vast and distant and cumbersome.

If the federal government is like a bomb you drop on whole nations, local government is like a surgical strike force. And if it does go wrong, the negative effects are more contained. A local experiment may sink the local economy, but at least it’s only the local economy, and the scale of it is likely to be far smaller and more manageable than that of a federal disaster. And by having higher systems around that weren’t exposed to those risks, there’s the chance of outside intervention by anaffected state or federal government to help the locality recover, after the problem has been clearly identified and dealt with (which is at least more likely, since other cities in the state will get to have a say in giving out those funds, and other states will.