Free College: The Impossibility

Free college for everyone! Sounds great, right? Except for one little detail: it doesn’t really exist. Sure, you don’t have to pay for your education, but somebody does.

Now, imagine with me for a second, that your education was truly free. Nobody had to pay anything to those colleges for keeping you, feeding you, and filling your head with all the stuff it takes to keep a job. If the colleges aren’t receiving money, then they can’t pay for the salaries of the teachers filling your head, the food they provide, or even the electricity to keep the campus alive. So unless universities can start printing their own money, they aren’t going to last very long.

The government promises to pay for your college, but they’re not providing that money. They aren’t giving generous portions of their paychecks to put you through school. That money has to come from somewhere. That somewhere is America’s wallet. The only way to produce that much money is to raise taxes for America’s population. You might think that’s great now, because it isn’t costing you anything, but wait fifteen or twenty years. How will you feel about part of your paycheck going to pay for the tuition of some kid you’ve never even met?

Free college sounds great until you really look at the impact it will have on the rest of America. It would basically allow people who have the ability to pay for college to get it for free at the expense of taxpayers, and encourage those who don’t want to go to attend, simply because it’s free. College shouldn’t be free, but people should still have the freedom to choose to work hard, graduate, and earn a degree on their own merits.