........ in which I comment on the perils of free college.

First off, my apologies to readers.  I've been out for a few weeks, and I've no doubt you've been at a loss for what to do with those 15-20 minutes you otherwise would have wasted reading the Tuesday Blog.  I can only plead the demands of a paper deadline.  I'll try not to let it happen again.

Second off, despite the title and its obvious reference to a key plank in Bernie Sanders' political platform.  This is not really a political post.  Nor is it an indictment of Bernie, per se.  I actually like Bernie.  I think his rabid socialism probably comes from a good place, and given the utter chaos of the Republican primaries right now, I may well vote for Bernie in the Virginia primary, since the one thing I can be politically sure of at this moment in time is that I don't want Hillary Clinton to be president.  I'm getting to feel that way about the Donald and Ted Cruz too.  Oddly enough, some political quiz I linked to through Facebook tells me I should like Ted and the Donald, and maybe I do agree with them on political positions, but the Donald seems to me just a little too ignorant and a little too volatile, and Ted feels awfully oily.  I mean seriously, I would not purchase an automobile from that man at any price.  Do I want him for my president?  Thanks, Ted, I'll walk.  But enough politics.  Let's talk about college.

My worry about free college has little to do with the economics of paying for it as a society -- well, that's not entirely true; I worry much about that, but I'll let the economists hash out that issue -- what I'm worried about is the destruction of what is left of the academic integrity of the American public college and university system.  See, we already tremendously undervalue a college education here in the good old U.S. of A., and I can't help but think that reducing the material economic value (i.e. the price tag) of that education to $0 will lead us as a culture to undervalue it even further.  Let me be clear:  I am speaking of the undervaluing of college education (the actual intellectual content and practices learned in college) as distinct from a college degree or the college "experience."  Those latter two are actually overvalued in weird sort of zero-sum relation to the actual education.  I speak from the experience of a person who has been teaching English classes to college students for getting close to 20 years, and my experience tells me this:  free college will damage higher education by exacerbating what is already a problem in our culture's attitudes towards college as a whole.  That attitude is largely already a prevailing assumption that college is a time free of responsibility and authority figures; a time for finding oneself, not in Socrates or Charles Dickens, but in Natty Light and Trojan condoms; and a time at the end of which -- all of the "living" notwithstanding -- one is entitled to a degree that will lead to unreasonably gainful employment.  I don't see how free college won't make all of this worse.*

The truth of the matter is that our current generation of college students was raised by parents whose impressions of what college should be like were disproportionately influenced by the movie Animal House.  That fact that these parents' understanding of the college experience is centered in ideas of Bacchanalian revelry is testified to by the fantasy portrayed in the 2003 hit, Old School about going back to college to escape the responsibilities of adulthood (yes, hard as it is to believe, Beanie's baby, the very one who so often needed "earmuffs" is coming up on college age about now).  And this is the parents of our current university generation.  To say nothing of the students.  Parents, moreover, often try to recreate the good experiences they had in life for their kids. This seems particularly true for college.  Numerous conversations held between Phil, Claire and Haley Dunphy (TV's Modern Family) during the episodes surrounding Haley's short-lived college career illustrate this fact:  modern parents expect some level of debauchery and rampant irresponsibility to be at the center of their kids' college experience.  Learning anything, not so much.  A degree, most definitely, but it need not necessarily tie to their cherubs having taken anything away from those four years in their proverbial noggins.  

At this point, I realize I'm probably sounding like an old Puritan curmudgeon.  That is unintentional.  I don't mean here to rail against college immorality.  Lord knows that I enjoyed a good Dionysian rant during my graduate school years, as far as (and sometimes a little beyond) what my moral compass would allow.  I don't begrudge any measure of fun to college students now, but what I do mean to say is that there's a certain zero sum measure of time and energy in college, and we have already overbalanced that ledger on the side of partying down.  One of the few things that probably restrains the revelry is a lack of cash.  It stands to reason that not having to pay any tuition leaves more money in students' pockets to spend on beer, movies, shopping, etc.  One thing about the activities of going to class and doing your homework:  they're free.  Yes, I'm implying that being broke is an effective goad for spending one's time wisely in university.  Incidentally, this video gives an idea of how those in college now view the experience.  You'll notice that there is very little that is considered inherent to college that has to do with learning anything.

There's another thing about free college that is troubling, and that is the dilution of the academic gene pool that would undoubtedly accompany it.  I realize this is a classist argument, but it's true, for all that.  College isn't for everybody.  It's higher education; academic conversations in specialized fields are carried on at an advanced level, a level to which not everyone is intellectually equipped to contribute and in which, quite frankly, not everyone is interested.  I do realize that the issue here is economic, so the assumption might be that the gatekeeping function exercised by tuition is going to keep out the poor and not the ignorant or the stupid not intellectually prepared, but I don't think it's that simple.  We have scholarship programs for those who are intellectually but not economically equipped -- scholarships that should perhaps be expanded so that those truly qualified and interested aren't left out.  Opening the floodgates is quite simply going to dilute the pool and make it harder to get something truly academic out of college.  Think about it.  We have gifted programs at the K-12 level precisely because those at an advanced level of intellectual achievement cannot learn optimally in a classroom geared towards remediation.**  Do we really want that in college?x  Are we going to have university gifted programs?  

Lastly, I think that making college free would exacerbate the sense of degree entitlement that is already being felt by a number of American college students.  Now this might seem counterintuitive, since the entitlement a lot of students currently feel is articulated something like this:  "Hey, I paid good money for this degree" [implied: the professors better pass me and with the grade I want, because I paid for it, right?].  One might think that removing the price tag would remove the argument, but I don't think that would actually happen.  The rationale that Bernie argues for when pimping free college is that a college education is an American right.  We agree to educate all citizens K-12 because we at some point agreed that it was necessary preparation, and our people have a right to it.  He now argues that since a college education is necessary for a good job, it is our responsibility to provide it, and receiving it is a student's right.  Sorry, I said that wrong.  A college degree is necessary, and therefore a right and our responsibility.  If you don't think the latter (degree) is the way students (and their parents) are going to hear that promise, then I've numerous bridges and a high quality Mexican wall to sell you.  And that's why I think removing the price tag will make the sense of entitlement to a degree worse than it already is.  Because the degree will become, quite literally, a government entitlement.  This could do very bad things to the average college classroom.

Again, I don't mean to disparage Bernie Sanders, exactly, in writing this.  I do think the old guy genuinely wants to help people, and I think his free college offer is in that vein.  But I think there's a massive chance of unintended consequences here.  Consider:  the analogy he's making is that public college will be like public school, K-12.  Isn't it widely agreed upon that the majority of the nations' public schools are a disaster?  Wouldn't that logically follow in college?  I do buy the argument that the old public school logic says that we should be responsible for educating a populace with whatever they need pursuant to getting a decent job, but rather than putting everyone through college, how's about we stop requiring a college degree for things that don't need it and, for Pete's sake, stop stigmatizing people that don't have a degree.  It doesn't mean they're stupid or incapable.  It means that they didn't find Socrates and Dickens and Freud all that compelling of a thing to spend their time and money on for 4+ years.  That strikes me as a better idea.

Well, there's more I could say on this, and probably more that I should've said in the interest of avoiding overstatement and making nuanced qualifications, but it's after 9pm on the East Coast.  Many of my readers will be enjoying this, not with coffee, but with a shot of nightcap.  Speaking of which, it's high time for me to knock off and put my own higher education to good use by watching a little TV.

*In full disclosure, most everything that I'm saying about college here is radically not true of the college at which I am currently teaching, but finding an experience where the education was paramount, for me, required taking a job at a microscopically small Christian liberal arts college that primarily admits the best and brightest of America's home-schooled kids.  The atmosphere is something of a cross between America in the '50s and Oxford circa 1450.  It's not typical.

**We actually already have a lot of remediation in college.  Particularly at public colleges, especially community colleges, an alarming number of freshman have to start their college writing courses at the Basic Writing level, which, at many schools, does not actually even merit college credit.  They have to pass out of that and into the introductory freshman writing class.