FREE COLLEGE FOR ALL!

Earlier today, I posted a lighthearted comment about the reappearance of the word “socialism” in mainstream discourse.  I alluded to several of the most popular proposals grouped under that heading – universal health care, etc. – but purposely omitted free college, so that I could say something more serious about that a bit later.  Herewith that more serious comment.

Free public education is a form of social investment [I am here once again drawing on the insights of James O’Connor’s 1976 work The Fiscal Crisis of the State.]   Literacy and math skills are required by the workers in all but the most elementary production processes.  In a capitalist economy, making them available to children and young adults at state expense is a way of socializing what would otherwise be capitalist expenses.  Since the schooling is paid for by taxes, it is in effect a socially invisible way of lowering wages.

In nineteenth century America, grade school literacy was adequate for all but a very small fraction of the labor force.  Many adults in the early years of the 20^th century did not have a high school education.  The father of my first wife, for example, never finished high school, and yet ended his work life as a Vice President of Sears Roebuck.  In the first half of the 20^th century a nationwide movement made free high school available, and in cities like New York it was actually mandatory that students remain in high school until age sixteen.

During this time, going to college was extremely rare in America.  As I have noted here before, when I applied to colleges in the fall of 1949, only about 5% of adults had college degrees – so unusual was it to go on to college from high school that in New York City students entered and exited the el-hi system twice a year, in January and June, depending on their birthday.  As a December baby, I was slated to graduate from high school in January, and had I not accelerated, I would have had to wait six months before going to college.

But the transformation of the American economy made college level skills more and more necessary for the productive operation of capitalist enterprises, and by the 1950’s, public colleges and state university campuses were expanding rapidly.  They were rarely free, of course, although when my father went to City College in New York all the way back in 1919, it was free.  But even Harvard in 1950 charged the equivalent of only $6000 tuition in 2019 dollars.  Many state universities were much cheaper than that.

The explosion in the cost of a college education occurred in the aftermath of the Viet Nam War, and though I have no evidence to support my belief, I am convinced that the latent function of the soaring college costs was to burden young college graduates with a more or less permanent debt that made it impossible for them to do rebellious, countercultural, politically unsettling things.  The debt not only effectively lowered their wages but also made them behave themselves.

The “socialist” demand for free college is neither pie in the sky nor truly radical.  It is one more effort to socialize the costs of capital.  Inevitably, the cost will come out of the wages of labor.  But because the proposal comes at a time when the college graduate cohort – roughly 35% of the adult population these days – has been given a life sentence in a no-walls debtor’s prison, it feels liberatory.

The explosion in the cost of college, by the way, is traceable to the unconscionable bloating of the non-educational departments of the college or university, but that is the subject for another post.