The City College of the City University of New York is the oldest of The City University’s 24 schools and was long considered the system’s flagship campus. Founded as the Free Academy of the City of New York in 1847, it was the first free public college in the United States, intended to provide access to free higher education based on academic merit to the children of New York’s poor immigrant and working-class families. And, for over a century, many 2nd and 3rd-generation immigrant and working-class families made good use of the great opportunity which City College (commonly called “CCNY” or “City”) provided them. Because of its high academic standards, City was sometimes even called “the proletarian Harvard.”
One of the many tragic results of New York's radically changed circumstances in the 1970s, at that time of urban social breakdown and dramatically diminished financial resources, was an end to the tradition of free tuition in 1976. In that era of increased transit fares and radically reduced public services, tuition at City was just one more example of the contemporary retreat from a politically responsible role for government at both the local and national levels.
I mention all this because I am a grateful graduate of City College (class of 1972), part of that last generation to benefit from New York's commitment to free education for its citizens. For me, at that particular moment in time, City College's free tuition was what made it possible for me to get a college education. Thus, I am a strong believer in the right of all citizens to an appropriate, low cost, good quality, post-secondary education. (That need not exclude some modest, manageable loans as a part of the overall package, as long as it remains the case that a college education is usually an economic benefit.)
So I am ambivalent and conflicted about President Biden's proposed program to relieve student debt - to cancel $10,000 in debt for those earning less than $125,000 per year and $20,000 for those who had received Pell grants for low-income families. I myself got through college (and also grad school) with fairly minimal student debt. I believe young people today should have a similar opportunity, and I am well aware how societal change has adversely impacted the cost of higher education. On the other hand, I am also aware that most people do not attend college. Approximately 38% of Americans over 25 have a four-year college degree, and some of them do have significant student debt. (Graduate and professional school graduates are another story.)
But this policy will be of no benefit to the majority of young adults who do not go to college at all, many of whom might reasonably resent this policy, which looks like a benefit targeted principally at an already advantaged (by virtue of expensive education) and largely predictably Democratic constituency. On which side does justice lie? It is hard to say. Certainly neither constituency has a monopoly on the fairness argument.
I believe that it is in the public interest to promote post-secondary education - not just four-year college but all the other forms of post-secondary education. Our contemporary failure to do so has been part of a wider societal retreat from promoting the common good and has had widespread negative effects on generations of students' opportunities and on our society's overall health and economic and cultural competitiveness. At the same time, it is obviously not necessarily in the public interest to subsidize universities' constantly increasing tuition, especially while they engage in administrative expansion at the cost of educational retrenchment. This means that this one-time solution, while it may please an important Democratic party constituency at present, offers no permanent prospect of solving the long-term problem of the escalating costs of higher education. As a public policy matter, this issue defies an easy either/or solution.
That said, looking at the issue in terms of electoral politics, the Biden plan may also seem increasingly problematic. As Tom Nichols has written in The Atlantic ("Biden’s Student-Loan Gamble: Why loan forgiveness is politically risky," August 24, 2022), this seems like "a niche policy that will hand the Republicans a free issue in America’s ongoing culture and class war." According to Nichols, "the whole business seems like class-based special pleading for a very specific and small group residing mostly within the Democratic Party." As he sees it, the Democrats "are trying to buy a constituency that ought to be firmly in their camp. The point of a “base” is that it will vote for its own party come hell or high water. A 'base' that needs to be enticed with a $10,000 bonus isn’t, by definition, a base."
Of course, even "base" constituencies require service and make demands. There is obviously nothing wrong with government giving benefits to its supporters. Republican administrations do that regularly with tax-cuts for the rich. Yet whether any particular benefit is good public policy - or even good politics - is always a relevant question. Politically, the problem isn't that the party of college-educated elites rewards its supporters. The problem is being primarily the party of college-educated elites.
As I said above, I remain conflicted about the merits of such a policy. There might be a case for some modest debt forgiveness, which is apparently what Biden is offering (unlike the $50,000 debt-forgiveness some Democrats have argued for). Still, in this very at-risk election, when things suddenly seem to be starting to go more the Democrats' way, why hand this issue to the Republicans?
In the end, in terms of how the politics will probably play out on this, therefore, I think I agree with Nichols, who sees this "as an unforced error" and hopes "that the Democrats do not make this a talking point in an election year. Republicans would be much happier debating college-debt forgiveness to households earning a quarter-million dollars a year instead of talking about how the GOP is a menace to American democracy."
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