1/ Higher education is in enormous financial trouble.

You might think "free college" is the solution.

In the 2020 @Monthly College Guide, I argue that's wrong -- and propose what to do instead. https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/september-october-2020/how-to-save-higher-education/

2/ To explain why, let's compare two institutions with similar (30,000+) numbers of students: East Los Angeles College, a large community college in California, and Auburn University in Alabama.

3/ "Free college" is essentially a plan to replace tuition revenue with federal funding. Here's how much tuition revenue our two examples received in 2018:

ELAC: $14.6 million
Auburn: $456.3 million

4/ Why the huge difference? In part because California spends more money per student to keep tuition low. CA increased higher education funding after the Great Recession while AL disinvested. This pattern has mostly followed political lines nationwide. Red states spent less.

5/ But the disparity is mostly because ELAC is a low-cost community college that serves predominantly lower-income Hispanic students whereas Auburn is an expensive research university that enrolls a lot of rich white people.

6/ To underscore the last point: The median family income of students who attend Auburn is $143,000 and 45% come from households in the top 10% of income, compared to only 2.6% from the bottom 20%. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/auburn-university

7/ In other words, the socialist dream for reforming higher ed is to give the rich people at Auburn close to half a billion dollars a year--and the non-rich people at ELAC about 3% of that.

Shouldn't it be, like, the opposite?

Yes it should. And that's what my plan does.

8/ The idea is pretty simple: Give a $10,000 per FTE student federal subsidy to any non-profit college, public or private, that agrees to adopt a uniform price schedule. Free for incomes < $75K and then a sliding scale up to $10K for people making over $250K/yr.

9/ There would be conditions. Consumer protection regulations, a standard financial aid award letter, and -- this is the big one -- credit transfer reciprocity among all participating institutions for courses outside of majors and core curricula.

10/ Individual colleges could choose whether to participate, preserving autonomy while also solving another huge "free college" flaw -- the Obamacare problem of whole states deciding to opt out for political reasons.

11/ Unlike "free college," the plan would save hundreds of private colleges with economically and racially diverse student bodies. They're on the brink of bankruptcy and will take whole communities down with them.

12/ Universities like Auburn would probably decline, which is fine. But colleges like ELAC would be transformed. Students and faculty would finally get the educational resources they've been unfairly denied for generations. Not just free college but *better* college, too.