Free College Would Be a Disaster for the U.S.: A Gen Z Perspective

Tuition-free college has become a popular idea in America, likely stimulated by the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, 34% of Americans strongly support tuition-free college, with 63% of people being generally favorable toward the idea. However, just because an idea is popular doesn’t mean it’s a good one. Free college would almost certainly be an economic disaster for America. 

First, and perhaps most obviously, despite being marketed as “free college,” it is, in no way, free. The costs would simply be transitioned from the individual attending university to the American citizenry at large through taxation. A tax hike would be seen by those who paid their way through college already, and those who chose not to attend college. These tax increases would be a hit to the economy, as research done by former chair of the United States Council of Economic Advisors Christina Romer shows that tax increases can have a direct negative impact on the country’s GDP.

Surprisingly, a college degree does not really determine a person’s career path following graduation. According to the U.S. census, only 27% of college graduates work in a field related to their major. Additionally, only 62% of college graduates are employed somewhere that requires a college degree. Most college graduates do not even go into their field of study, and more than a third did not even need that degree for their current employment. College does not fundamentally determine your future employment path, nor is it necessary for stable employment. More than a third of college graduates essentially wasted their money attending college, as it did not bring them to a level of employment they couldn’t have achieved without the effort and expense of attending university. When these college grads see the true lack of value, student loans can become a ‘nice-to-pay’ debt, rather than a ‘need-to-pay.’

Making college free would not increase the supply of jobs available to college graduates; it would simply increase the demand for college degrees for jobs that don’t exist. It would, in essence, devalue the degree, in the same way that a high school diploma is no longer seen as a positive, but as an expectation. The result would not be a more productive, higher-skilled society, but rather a society of more indebted people with bachelor’s degrees slinging lattes at Starbucks.