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Free college is not a new idea, but, with higher education costs (and student

loan debt) dominating public perception, it’s one that appeals to more and

more people—including me. The national debate about free, public higher

education is long overdue. But let’s get a few things out of the way.

College is the domain of the relatively privileged, and will likely stay that

way for the foreseeable future, even if tuition is eliminated. As of 2012, over

half of the U.S. population has “some college” or postsecondary education.

That category includes everything from an auto-mechanics class at a forprofit

college to a business degree from Harvard. Even with such a broadly

conceived category, we are still talking about just half of all Americans.

Why aren’t more people going to college? One obvious answer would

be cost, especially the cost of tuition. But the problem isn’t just that college

is expensive. It is also that going to college is complicated. It takes cultural

and social, not just economic, capital. It means navigating advanced

courses, standardized tests, forms. It means figuring out implicit rules—

rules that can change.

Eliminating tuition would probably do very little to untangle the sailor’s

knot of inequalities that make it hard for most Americans to go to college.

It would not address the cultural and social barriers imposed by unequal

K–12 schooling, which puts a select few students on the college pathway

at the expense of millions of others. Neither would it address the changing

social milieu of higher education, in which the majority are now nontraditional

students. (“Non-traditional” students are classified in different

ways depending on who is doing the defining, but the best way to understand

the category is in contrast to our assumptions of a traditional college

student—young, unfettered, and continuing to college straight from high

school.) How and why they go to college can depend as much on things like

whether a college is within driving distance or provides one-on-one admissions

counseling as it does on the price.

 

Given all of these factors, free college would likely benefit only an outlying

group of students who are currently shut out of higher education

because of cost—students with the ability and/or some cultural capital but

without wealth. In other words, any conversation about college is a pretty

elite one even if the word “free” is right there in the descriptor.

The discussion about free college, outside of the Democratic primary

race, has also largely been limited to community colleges, with some exceptions

by state. Because I am primarily interested in education as an affirmative

justice mechanism, I would like all minority-serving and historically

black colleges (HBCUs)—almost all of which qualify as four-year degree

institutions—to be included. HBCUs disproportionately serve students facing

the intersecting effects of wealth inequality, systematic K–12 disparities,

and discrimination. For those reasons, any effort to use higher education

as a vehicle for greater equality must include support for HBCUs, allowing

them to offer accessible degrees with less (or no) debt.

The Obama administration’s free community college plan, expanded

in July to include grants that would reduce tuition at HBCUs, is a step in

the right direction. Yet this is only the beginning of an educational justice

agenda. An educational justice policy must include institutions of higher

education but cannot only include institutions of higher education. Educational

justice says that schools can and do reproduce inequalities as much

as they ameliorate them. Educational justice says one hundred new Universities

of Phoenix is not the same as access to high-quality instruction for

the maximum number of willing students. And educational justice says that

jobs programs that hire for ability over “fit” must be linked to millions of

new credentials, no matter what form they take or how much they cost to

obtain. Without that, some free college plans could reinforce prestige divisions

between different types of schools, leaving the most vulnerable students

no better off in the economy than they were before.

Free college plans are also limited by the reality that not everyone wants

to go to college. Some people want to work and do not want to go to college

forever and ever—for good reason. While the “opportunity costs” of

spending four to six years earning a degree instead of working used to be

balanced out by the promise of a “good job” after college, that rationale no

longer holds, especially for poor students. Free-ninety-nine will not change

that.

I am clear about all of that . . . and yet I don’t care. I do not care if free

college won’t solve inequality. As an isolated policy, I know that it won’t. I

don’t care that it will likely only benefit the high achievers among the statistically

unprivileged—those with above-average test scores, know-how, or

financial means compared to their cohort. Despite these problems, today’s

debate about free college tuition does something extremely valuable. It

reintroduces the concept of public good to higher education discourse—a

concept that fifty years of individuation, efficiency fetishes, and a rightward

117 AMERICAN MOVEMEN TS Free C ollege

drift in politics have nearly pummeled out of higher education altogether.

We no longer have a way to talk about public education as a collective good

because even we defenders have adopted the language of competition.

President Obama justified his free community college plan on the grounds

that “Every American . . . should be able to earn the skills and education

necessary to compete and win in the twenty-first century economy.” Meanwhile,

for-profit boosters claim that their institutions allow “greater access”

to college for the public. But access to what kind of education? Those of

us who believe in viable, affordable higher ed need a different kind of language.

You cannot organize for what you cannot name.

Already, the debate about if college should be free has forced us all to

consider what higher education is for. We’re dusting off old words like class

and race and labor. We are even casting about for new words like “precariat”

and “generation debt.” The Debt Collective is a prime example of this.

The group of hundreds of students and graduates of (mostly) for-profit colleges

are doing the hard work of forming a class-based identity around debt

as opposed to work or income. The broader cultural conversation about student

debt, to which free college plans are a response, sets the stage for that

kind of work. The good of those conversations outweighs for me the limited

democratization potential of free college.

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth

University and a contributing editor at Dissent. Her book Lower Ed: How ForProfit

Colleges Deepen Inequality is forthcoming from the New Press.

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