An Inside Higher Ed piece by Paul Fain (“Free Community College: It Works,” Feb. 5, 2015) argues that providing free education at community colleges works because, get this it leads to “increased degree production.”  Well there is a brilliant study, stating the obvious, but not really getting the point that when something is “free” the demand for it will naturally increase—people want more of it.  More people go to college and more get degrees.  This is unfortunately what we have come to expect from the cheerleaders of “college for everyone.”  They seem surprised that the laws of economics actually work.  But they ignore the question of whether what people want more of is actually a good thing.  And they also ignore the obvious fact (at least I thought so) that someone has to pay for this “free” education—“there is no such thing as a free lunch,” an old but tried and true maxim.

So we have over the past eight years at Tulsa Community College more degrees being “produced.”  But what are these degrees?  Did anyone bother to try to measure the quality of the education itself or whether these degrees resulted in jobs, and jobs that were reasonably in line with what a graduate might expect?  Apparently not.  I guess some people are just happy to have more degree-holders out there.

I am afraid there is a growing crisis in American higher education, private and public.  The crisis is encouraged by government.  And unfortunately it is fueled also by parents and their children who have bought the lie that a degree is the ticket to the “good life.”  Even our courts have bought it to an extent, for example, the case of Griggs v. Duke Power (1980), in which the Supreme Court effectively ruled out various tests for prospective employees as discriminatory, leaving basically one “court-proof” text of the possession of a college degree.  From then to now, it is the mere possession of the degree that has become the primary “union card” for graduates, not actual competency.  Besides that, universities themselves and professions have also contributed by pushing up the minimum requirements for a field.  For example, while at one time, a BS in Nursing was sufficient (before that, just training), it is now being bumped up to an Masters degree (this is not a complete process yet).  One cannot get by now with just a Bachelors degree in Education.  States require a Masters.  Pharmacy likewise has inflated its requirements.  The list continues and is creeping into many more programs.  We are even producing a lot more PhDs.  One might ask what they are all doing—possibly promoting more free higher education?  All this credentialing requires of course more education, more degrees.  And the state is right there, along with education “experts,” to cheer along moves like free community college as a path to those goals.

But does anyone ask about the necessity of degrees in themselves?  Does anyone ask about quality of education?  Does anyone ask what all this costs?  And is it fair to require taxpayers to foot the bill for this?  In other words, what are we as a society and as taxpayers getting in return for this move to grant free education?  It is not clear that we are gaining much at all, except for more degree-holders.