The high price of college

Wait till you see what happens when Hillary makes it ‘free’

How to make college more affordable? Hillary Clinton’s answer tells a lot about how she might approach domestic and economic policy issues if she wins the presidency. It’s not a particularly encouraging picture.

Clinton’s plan shows signs of influence from two of the more radical elements in recent American politics: the “Occupy Wall Street” movement and the presidential campaign of the socialist senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.

The “occupy” movement, which took over a park in Lower Manhattan and also erupted in other American cities, was largely a protest against student debt. Clinton is promising an executive order that would give borrowers a threemonth “time-out” from student loan payments, forgive all student debt after 20 years, and forgive or defer loans for “aspiring entrepreneurs,” teachers and AmeriCorps members.

Sanders had promised to make public college free for everyone. Clinton is promising that “families with income up to $125,000 will pay no tuition at in-state public colleges and universities.”

She says she’ll pay for that by raising taxes on “high-income taxpayers.”

For someone running on a “stronger together” slogan and accusing her Republican rival, Donald Trump, of running a divisive campaign, the Clinton plan sure creates a lot of divisive wedges. It will accentuate the divide between public and private colleges.

It also splits Americans into a variety of groups.

There are those who do what Clinton wants them to do, and will get her help — teachers, “aspiring entrepreneurs,” families who earn less than $125,000 a year.

And then there’s everyone else — “high income taxpayers” — who get stuck with the bill.

Like so many government programs, Clinton’s college plan risks creating perverse incentives and unintended consequences. If a husband and wife each earning $124,000 a year get a divorce the year their twin children are applying to college, then remarry the year the children graduate, do they get the free college deal? Or does their $248,000 combined income render them “highincome taxpayers” who deserve presidential punishment?

Is the $125,000 income ceiling the same for a family that has one child in college and for another with three children? What about one family that has $80,000 a year in income but a lot of assets — say, $2 million in lottery winnings — versus another family that has $130,000 a year in income but no savings and a lot of debt?

Clinton pays lip service to asking colleges to help control costs, but the more the government takes over paying, the less incentive parents and students have to shop around for an efficient education provider.

Clinton herself has contributed to the expense of education by charging exorbitant fees to speak on campus. She reportedly earned $225,000 to speak at the UNLV in 2014 and $275,000 to speak at the State University of New York, Buffalo in 2013.

In the rest of the economy, managers are constantly trying to cut costs. Airplane seats are closer together to cram more passengers into a plane. ATMs replace bank tellers.

A New York Times article recently reported how Georgia Tech is offering an online master’s degree in computer science for $7,000, far less than the $40,000 or $50,000 that competing universities charge for the same degree. This innovation is, alas, more the exception than the rule. Why would a student get the $7,000 degree instead of the $40,000 one when the price for both is “free” because the government is paying, or when, even if you borrow the money, the debt gets forgiven or deferred if you do what Hillary Clinton wants?

Meanwhile, aggressive government regulation is running for-profit colleges out of business and forcing the non-profits to hire expensive lawyers and former government officials to figure out how to comply.

Want lower-cost colleges? Clinton’s approach is subsidies and redistribution. A better bet would be deregulation, competition and technological innovation.

Back in the days of the Cold War between the communist bloc of nations and the Western democracies, the communists maintained pervasive restrictions around Eastern Europe that were aptly called an “iron curtain,” isolating the people from the ideas of the West and physically obstructing their escape.

One of the few things that could penetrate the “iron curtain” were ideas conveyed on radio waves. The Voice of America network broadcast to the peoples of the Soviet bloc so that they were never hearing only what the communist dictatorships wanted them to hear.

Ironically, despite the victory of democracy over dictatorship that brought the Cold War to an end, within American society there has slowly but steadily developed in too many of our own colleges and universities a set of restrictions on what can be said on campus, either by students, professors or outside speakers.

There is no barbed wire around our campuses, nor armed guards keeping unwelcome ideas out. So there is no “iron curtain.” But there is a curtain, and it has its effect.

One effect is that many of the rising generation can go from elementary school through postgraduate education at our leading colleges and universities without ever hearing a coherent presentation of a vision of the world that is fundamentally different from that offered by the political left.

There are world-class scholars who are unlikely to become professors at either elite or non-elite academic institutions because they do not march in the lockstep of the left. Some have been shouted down or even physically assaulted when they tried to give speeches that challenged the prevailing political correctness.

Harvard is just one of the prestigious institutions where such things have happened — and where prre-emptive surrender to mob rule has been justified by a dean saying that it was too costly to provide security for many outside speakers who would set off campus turmoil.

Despite the fervor with which demographic “diversity” is proclaimed as a prime virtue — without a speck of evidence as to its supposed benefits — diversity of ideas gets no such respect.

Students taught economics by Keynesian economists are unlikely to hear about the 1921 recession, with double-digit unemployment, during which the government did nothing and the jobless rate fell by more than half as the economy recovered on its own.

Nor are they likely to learn how grossly misleading are many of the income statistics cited to justify the agenda of the left. As economist Alan Reynolds put it, many people “form very strong opinions about very weak statistics.”

Students are unlikely to go through college without being assigned to read “The Communist Manifesto” — often in more than one course — while a classic such as “The Federalist Papers” is seldom assigned reading.

In an electronic age, there are plenty of sources from which forbidden facts and suppressed views can be beamed into the many electronic devices used by college students.

There are many recorded speeches and interviews of outstanding thinkers, from the past and the present, with viewpoints different from the prevailing groupthink on campus, and these can be presented directly to students with electronic devices.

Someone from the real world beyond the ivy-covered enclaves would have to do it. And it is not yet clear who would do it or who would finance it. Perhaps some of those donors who have kept on writing checks to their alma maters, while the latter surrendered repeatedly to ideological intolerance, might consider such a project. Campus mobs could not shout down thousands of scattered iPads.