There are worthwhile intra-Democratic debates to be had over tuition-free college. But Pete Buttigieg’s latest broadside against the policy isn't one of them, writes EricLevitz
Pete should learn to stop worrying and love paying billionaires to send their kids to public schools. Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images Young people who do not go to college tend to be more economically disadvantaged than those who do. This is not solely a function of rising tuition costs. For one thing, the peripheral costs of college attendance — from lost wages to books to housing — are often more formidable obstacles for working-class kids than tuition.
On the other hand, this same basic logic could have been deployed in opposition to tuition-free 12th grade a generation ago . If we believe that the value of public education isn’t limited to its function as a generator of human capital or labor-force readiness — and thus, that it does not merely benefit its direct recipients but also, society as a whole — then the distributional implications of tuition-free college don’t necessarily matter.
All of which is to say: There are worthwhile intra-Democratic debates to be had over tuition-free college, including ones that interrogate its distributional impacts.The serious distributional critique of free college is not that it would benefit the children of “billionaires,” but that it would deliver less benefit to the poor than it would to the upper-middle class. But the upper-middle class is Mayor Pete’s core constituency.
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