I really wish Pete wouldn't use this bullshit argument that free college is bad because then someone who doesn't need it might take advantage of it. That's same talking point Republicans use to deny people social services like food assistance and healthcare.
— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) November 29, 2019
New Pete ad in Iowa taking aim at Warren and Bernie over college affordability/debt (but not by name), arguing they’d alienate half the country by insisting it be “free even for the kids of millionaires”. H/t @McCormickJohn
pic.twitter.com/SEAcOdHcAq— Alex Thompson (@AlxThomp) November 29, 2019
Mayo(r) Pete, having decided that ‘sensible moderate’ is the best lane for him right now, scores an own goal. (He’s the son of two college professors; he knows perfectly well how financial aid programs work — or don’t.) It was over a holiday weekend, so only the politically obsessed paid attention, but boy howdy did they pay attention:
Yes, for sure, the wealthy people illegally paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their kid into USC are going to jump at the chance to send their kids to public college for free
— laura olin (@lauraolin) November 29, 2019
Means-testing access to public education is not progressive.
I wouldn't expect @PeteButtigieg to understand this, but when a program is for the poor? We're treated like shit.
When the wealthy are in the pool with us? We're treated much, much better. https://t.co/iNWXXSUn5r
— Matthew Cortland, Esq. (@mattbc) November 30, 2019
Why are we letting rich people send their kids to public elementary schools?? Or letting them use public libraries? https://t.co/AF3TzcImim
— Soledad O'Brien (@soledadobrien) November 29, 2019
In order to solve this dramatic problem, we would have to financially screen *all college students*.
So, to prevent .1% of the pop from getting a free ride, we’d require the entirety of the United States population of college-aged families to complete financial applications.
4/
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) November 29, 2019
(But it would be a bonanza for the financial-aid prep/certification industry!)
That’s the difference between empty sloganeering and policy.
Policies actually have to work and make sense.
Pete is sloganeering.
He’s a smart guy. He knows the difference. He just doesn’t think you do.
7/7
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) November 29, 2019
It’s (comparatively) early days, yet; maybe Buttigieg will learn something from this.
My idea is plenty bold! Affordable firefighting is a big idea! But I believe we can gather support we need to drive big ideas like affordable firefighting through without alienating half the country.
I’m Pete Buttigieg, and I approve this message. https://t.co/GvQVEBw20O
— Greg Greene (@ggreeneva) November 30, 2019
Everyone is using public schools or libraries as the analog to attack Pete. More on point analogues are social security and medicare. Both have faced longstanding efforts to welfarize them. Dems have rightly resisted these efforts for decades.
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 29, 2019
Yes. Buttigieg campaign is intent on gaslighting the progressive movement – the base of the Democratic Party who will be knocking on doors next fall – with right wing Republican lies/talking points. https://t.co/tRb3250Xup
— Murshed Zaheed ?? (@murshedz) November 30, 2019
The smartest and best-credentialed politicians in the United States somehow cannot understand the meaning of the word "universal." All those degrees and all that money and they're still like "okay hold up just tell me who DOESN'T get this."
— David Roth (@david_j_roth) November 29, 2019
The absolute worst thing is that he wants this criticism because he doesn't give a shit about the merits, he wants to signal who he's against, and so the people who understand his messaging on this is bullshit are the very people he plans to perform disdain toward
— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) November 29, 2019
In his young credential-grabbing life, he has identified opposition to people who want a dramatically better world as the credential most useful to him right now
— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) November 29, 2019
This was only Hillary’s point 4 years ago. Man y’all really tell on yourselves that you totally ignored her policies. Hillary was a champion for universal prek https://t.co/uMYkSEIrsL
— Mia Brett (@QueenMab87) December 1, 2019
Ruckus
If we want a better and equal country then things have to be better and equal.
We spend a lot of money and effort means testing so what happens is that many can not, because of time or yes even money put in the effort to be means tested and therefore are excluded from whatever. We do this with every program to make sure that no one gets a dime they shouldn’t have. And it hasn’t worked worth a damn to make the country better. It’s like republican response to crapping on the economy, keep crapping until moral improves. How has that ever worked out?
mrmoshpotato
Universal (fill-in-the-blank) if we think you’re worthy of it!
Ummmmm……
Amir Khalid
If the only way to offer a public benefit to the deserving is to also offer it to the undeserving, then bite the bullet and do it. Better to let the rich few feed twice, I say, than let the poor multitudes go hungry.
MobiusKlein
In many non-US countries I have asked folks about ( Guatemala, Brazil ), the public non-college education is badly funded and mediocre, but the public colleges are good and well funded, and cheap/free.
So what happens is richer parents send their kids to private schools, so they can pass the entrance exams to get into the good public colleges, edging out many who went to public primary schools.
May be more anecdote that full story, I know.
mrmoshpotato
@Ruckus:
Oh, so it’s their fault you don’t benefit from the insider trading and market manipulation?
It’s your fault you’re not worthy of this information!
anarchoRex
Narrator: He would not.
TheMightyTrowel
Hi all. Taking advantage of an open thread to post something entirely unrelated. I’ve been offline for ages (actually just hanging mostly on twitter with the other malcontents) because i’ve been writing a big hard book. I just finished the first draft about 20 minutes ago. 90,000 words of complex social theory, archaeological case studies from 6 continents, and a healthy dose of irony. All carefully illustrated by yours truly. omg. OMG.
In other news… did I ever tell this blog community that i knew Mayor Pete at Oxford? Let’s just say that my scepticism about his sincerity and empathy are longstanding.
Anne Laurie
@TheMightyTrowel: Congratulations on the book / draft — please let us know when the finished product is available!
Amir Khalid
@TheMightyTrowel:
Do tell.
TheMightyTrowel
@Amir Khalid: i guess the best I can offer is that when I met him in 2005 he had the words ‘intends to be president’ tattooed on his forehead in invisible ink and everything he’s done since that day has convinced me he’s carrying out a very considered process to turn himself into the ideal Dem candidate for 2004.
Martin
My concern with ‘free college for all’ is that there aren’t enough college seats as it is. My mid-tier public this year hit a 4.17 median GPA for admission on 120,000 applications. Clearly we don’t have a demand-side problem.
So here’s the question – is ‘free college for all’ open-ended, or is it up against the subsidy caps that currently affect the public system – that is, the states will only fund x seats, with the exception of community college. Because out here in CA we have 800,000 students in public 4 year or grad programs and 2 million in community colleges, and we still have a supply problem. We’re probably half a million seats short of demand. Many of the UCs and CSUs could kick their doors open to more students if the money were there.
But if ‘free college for all’ is offsetting the student tuition but not the state subsidy, or it’s a matching program (which would be smart, TBH) then you wind up creating a bunch of new problems – that being who gets to benefit from free college for all. I’m not worried here about the wealthy kids, I’m worried about the ones in underperforming districts that can’t meet that 4.17 if we’re still constrained on size. Consider that Medicaid is intended to be a comparable program but the block grants and state matches has really undermined it for many people, and if this goes the same way, it’ll suffer the same problems. In some ways financial aid actually gives us better levers to pull to help low income students (I say, working at the #1 university for low income students), mostly because it’s all secreted out of political view.
OzarkHillbilly
@TheMightyTrowel: Congrats. You can breath again.
David ??Booooooo?? Koch
Meh. Warren has a student debt cancellation plan, but it’s means tested. Should she be attacked for not taking a “universal” approach.
Martin
@MobiusKlein: Not that different in the US, actually. If people really understood how college admissions work at most public universities, they’d be fairly outraged. Simple version – it’s better to be a 10 percentile student at a 50 percentile school than a 20 percentile student at a 1 percentile school.
Privates work entirely different. They won’t even look at the kid from the 50 percentile school.
JPL
@TheMightyTrowel: Congrats.
Dan B
@TheMightyTrowel: It’s seemed to me that Pete has blind spots about social justice issues, not that he’s a bad guy but the cluelessness and blind spots are consistent with being the brightest guy in the room. The emotional intelligence seems stunted.
JPL
OT Lisa Page has finally opened up about her ordeal to the Daily Beast. In a perfect world, it would be Rosenstein who is called the traitor, but that’s not the world we live in.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/
David Evans
My view is, if you’re offended that the rich get a free benefit, tax the rich.
Martin
I think the solution should be something that smells a little bit like an Income Share Agreement. I don’t like those plans as they are currently implemented, but like them better as a national program. Basically, you go to college, the govt pays for it, and you pay a percentage of your income for the next x years. It’s a win-win provided that college does lead to a higher paying job (it almost always does) and there’s no up-front cost. And if you run off and become a zillionaire you’re still held to the rate. In short, it’s an added tax for college-goers in exchange for being sent to college.
The benefit is that you can build positive feedback loops throughout the program. For profit schools that generally don’t help students find better careers don’t get funding. Schools have incentives to improve job placement. You can use the program to support apprenticeship programs. It does require the govt to float the tuition for a fairly long period of time – so it’s very much an entitlement program, but its one that should pay off in the long run. I would expect the govt to put a ceiling on tuition, which every public would find a way to hit – some by cutting costs, and some by increasing services. Yes the GOP will fuck with it. But they’ll fuck with whatever plan gets put forward.
These programs can’t easily work at the state level because it’s too easy for a worker to escape a state tax filing, but it’s rather hard to do that at the federal level.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Martin:
How dare you slap the sloganeering efforts of Sanders and Warren in something which hasn’t been thought out at all.
1. There is no such thing as “free” college. It may be a scaled universal benefit, but funding has to come from some mechanism and it is really dishonest to refer to it this way – which is why the Sandernistas do it.
2. Nobody who is proposing it has discussed anything about the differential in tuition & board rates between institutions and various states, the difference in state formulae for reimbursement, differing capital project funding requirements in each state, who picks up room and board expenses, how books are acquired, differing internal governing criteria in each state or the biggie – HOW TO ALLOCATE ADMISSION AT POPULAR DESTINATIONS. For instance, how does somebody get to go to Alabama vs going to UAB? UCLA vs UC Davis? Michigan vs Michigan State? Requiring payment from students/families tends to cause them to price-in their priorities as to where they go and what curriculum they choose.
3. Yes, Europe has a tendency toward massive state support for secondary education for low in order to achieve universal higher education. They also career track high school kids so that the resource isn’t wasted due to disinterest or lack of aptitude. Will we be spending huge amounts of money for Johnny to find himself for a few years as he bounces from Film Studies to Gnat Physiology to Literature? For Susie to find her muse in the theater program, dabble in psychology, explore a study abroad in weaving methods?
4. Much of the societal pressure about student loans dissipates if you make them dischargeable in bankruptcy again. Say 10 years from last loan, along with “immediately” on certain extraordinary circumstances (death being one). If they can be eventually shed if things don’t go well, that should be dischargeable – and of all the handwringing and legit concerns over cost, this is the most doable in the short term, with the least opposition.
5. As one poster suggested last night, we really need to go back to the notion of internship in certain things which really don’t justify a multi year degree.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Just checked on the timeline on the March Against Discharge – it is as I recalled.
First restrictions in 1976 weren’t unreasonable, but they were done in response to concerns about the the earning potential of young doctors and lawyers (HA!). Looks like some asshole journalists and pols were stirring that up.After years of tiny retrenchment regarding perceived abuses that “had to be addressed”, the soul crushing statutes were passed in 1998 and 2005, exempting loans from discharge.
sukabi
@TheMightyTrowel: that’s fantastic about your book / draft!
Steeplejack (phone)
@JPL:
Link to the actual article, which might get bumped off the top of the home page.
Shantanu Saha
We all know what the solution is to rich free riders on universal programs. Tax them more!
patrick II
I don’t mind letting a rich kid go to college free if his parents are paying enough taxes to pay for several more to go to college free also.
Gvg
First of all I would not waste time calling Buttigieg a liar about this. He actually is closer in opinion to most people I know. They always fixate on the Rich getting it free. There are normally liberals on this site who react that way. I think it’s instinctual to humans. Only my decades of life experience plus careful reading have convinced me means testing is almost always counter productive. I am not sure we can prevent any free tuition from being means tested.
i also think people don’t understand the real cost of college and assume if tuition is free or cheap, that all the debt problems and poor family access issues are gone. If only! College requires food and shelter and transportation and insurance plus more. All of those things cost more really than minimum wage part time jobs (or sometimes full time) can provide currently. Jobs also bring in scheduling issues with making it to class.
Others have already pointed out that colleges only have so many places. I lived in Florida from the time our population started growing fast due to air conditioning becoming common. It costs a lot of money to build more collleges and takes time. One of the biggest costs is salaries and a lot of people have trouble accepting that. College donors always want to pay for buildings but not commit to paying for people. We should be investing in ourselves, but people have to be trained to understand why and how it pays off. It seems to me like this whole aspect has been neglected for decades which also shows in infrastructure issues. Well, we need to start teaching this.
there will still need to be loans and other federal aid, just less of them if we do some version of free college.
Kay
I have a bigger problem with Pete’s plan. I don’t think he’s presenting it honestly. I think Pete’s plan is the “debt free college act” which is Schatz’s bill. It’s not free for “80% of people”- it’s not free at all – and if Medicaid expansion is any guide 20 or so states won’t participate at all:
This is Clinton’s plan from 2016. She didn’t call it free college because it isn’t.
kindness
The MSM just likes Democrats to lose. Then they can keep all their $$$ and still play pity parties on the MSM for more $$$. Which is why the MSM is so invested right now that Democrats nominate a slice of Wonderbread moderate no one but Republicans really like.
Tazj
@JPL: Yes, Rosenstein is a traitor for releasing only certain texts of hers without context and before the IG report. His actions weren’t honorable at all.
PenandKey
@Kay: Ah yes, the lovely “expected family contribution” line. That BS formula claimed that my family could afford to send me to college without aid entirely, and flat-out refused to factor in that my mother’s medical bills while I was college age cost twice what the EFC was and left no money for my brother or I to attend. End result? I spent ten years working warehouse jobs and didn’t end up going to college until I was married and no longer had to factor their income into the aid formula.
Sorry, but an aid formula that acts like lower middle class families can afford to pony up tens of thousands a year to send one kid to college, on top of their existing bills (including their own student loan payments), is hardly something to expand.
jonas
@patrick II: This. The reason wealthier people in, say, Sweden, put up with paying higher taxes for stuff like a (mostly) free college education and universal health care is because they can take advantage of it, too. As folks have been pointing out, the surest way to turn a public benefit into a political football is to make it a “poor people only” thing.
Mnemosyne
I tend to agree with the folks who say that universal pre-K and Head Start will give us a much bigger (and proven) bang for our buck overall and is a better starting point. I think that both Warren and Harris have plans for both that and college.
PhoenixRising
If we learn nothing else in a 200-level poli sci course in public policy, we learn that
A Program for The Poor is a Poor Program
Did Mayo Pete ever move to that level before heading to public office?
PenandKey
@PhoenixRising: All anyone who’s ever paid property taxes needs to know about this notion is to consider what their community would look like if the local schools taxed them but they weren’t allowed to send their kids there without paying a tuition fee.
My own slice of suburbia? It’s middle to upper middle class, and half our property taxes go to funding our local schools. As a result, they’re phenomenal, and the community has tripled in size in the last twenty years. I’d be shocked if even a fraction of that growth would have occured if we were told that not only would our taxes be high, but we’d have to pay an admission/tuition fee to send our kids to the schools. Either that, or the tax would have been killed asap.
When you make a program dependent on taxing people, and then tell those people they can’t use the program, the program dies. It’s really as simple as that.
Gretchen
Susan Wagle is running for Senate in Kansas. She says women want to vote for women, because we can relate – we all picked kids up at school. Barf. She also says she’s against free college because she worked 3 jobs to get through college and these kids can too. When she went to Wichita State in 1976, tuition and fees were $565/year and the minimum wage was $2.30/hour. Divide that out and you get a little over 6 week to earn that. Now tuition and fees are north of $8000, minimum wage is $7.25, so 28 weeks full time at minimum wage to earn that. A few more weeks when you figure in deductions before the kid sees the paycheck. The estimate is that 4 years at Wichita State, including the cheapest options for room and board, will set the kid back $85,000. That’s not Yale, that’s Wichita State!
PenandKey
@Gretchen: I got relatively lucky. My wife and I have a combined student debt load of $70k from the University of Wisconsin system as in-state students. That’s on top of grants and scholarships, and considering we were both older adult students who, as a result, didn’t have to live in the dorms like is mandatory for freshman at our college, that total would have easily been $100k+ if we’d live on campus
I don’t want to rub those numbers in the face of people who attended college 40 years ago, but when they try the “I worked through school, and so can you” line all they’re showing is they haven’t run the numbers. And, if they did, they’re ignoring what those numbers are telling them because it’s inconvenient.
bookdragon
I agree that free college has to be free for all for it to work, especially in maintaining public support for it. However, I am concerned that the result will be that degrees from public universities a decade down the road will be basically equivalent to community college degrees now because the rich will send their kids to pricey private universities which will become all the more exclusive and coveted because (with only rare exception) only the super rich can go there.
I’ll also call BS on the argument that “…to prevent .1% of the pop from getting a free ride, we’d require the entirety of the United States population of college-aged families to complete financial applications.” This is already the case if your child applies to college. When our oldest applied to college we knew our household combined income meant there would be no financial aid. Guess what? We were required to fill out and file the form anyway. And we were asked to do it again for the next year.
topclimber
@jonas: I don’t get why so many folks want to deny a tax-paid college benefit to the people who pay a lot of taxes. Children of billionaires, ok nobody wants to subsidize them but mostly because the super rich pay a miniscule rate on their earnings.
I WANT upper class (70th to 90th percentile earners) to get a benefit from their taxes NOT just because it makes the program less vulnerable to ghetto-izing It is also because many who earn via jobs (vs. capital gains or LLC scams) really do pay significant shares of their income to taxes.
Just because a household earns $500 K a year doesn’t mean they aren’t being screwed by our tax system. No snark intended here–remember how many well-off residents of New York got screwed by the end of exemptions for state income taxes? Sure they still have more disposable income than most wage earners, but they do have a point.
The reality is that most upper bound earners want their kids to go to expensive private schools, where half the cost goes to a room and board. So maybe, to coin a phrase, the argument is academic. But some few might want their kids to try out college before blank checking what may be a venture doomed by immaturity (hello FKA Dantes!). Or might have family reasons (even a kid’s own preference) to stay closer to home. Many have also wised up to the model of first two years at a community college, followed by a sanitized degree from Old Ivy U.
Give them the option of a benefit of free tuition at a public school and maybe they don’t gripe so much about their tax dollars supporting public education.
Gretchen
@PenandKey: I went to U Michigan in the 1970s. Tuition and fees were $900 a year, which was quite a bit higher than other state schools, but I could earn that in my summer job. My kids went to U Kansas 10 years ago. Tuition and fees were close to $10,000, which, guess what, they couldn’t earn and we couldn’t afford. So they ended up with loans by doing the same thing I did affordably. It doesn’t have to be free, but it’s been affordable in the past.
JaneE
I would rather pay for the schooling of a billionaire’s kids and let them have the same chance as everyone else. I really doubt that there will be any who take advantage of the free education.
smintheus
Buttigieg would have gotten free tuition at the university where his parents teach; there’s considerably likelihood also that he did get free tuition at Harvard because at many universities tuition-remission for faculty children is also granted if they attend a different university. In any case, Buttigieg is being hypocritical.
artem1s
the concept of college for anyone who wants to go isn’t what bugs me. It’s the funding mechanism that will inevitably mean tax payer’s money going to support something like Liberty University or the university version of charter schools. Sooner or later the fundies will be screeching that they should get vouchers for their very special white snowflake to attend the backward religious racist university of their choice for free. even worse, tax funding to support some online certificate-granting Trump University. If you think this won’t happen, you are fooling yourself.
We need to reinvigorate public K-12 and get for-profit companies out of education and end voucher systems if we really care about helping poor kids get good educations. Education funding reform needs to start with pre-school not college. Millionaire’s kids are going to use publicly funded systems and they should if they are paying their fair share of taxes. But we do need to guard against segregation by class and income within those systems.