Why Hillary's Free Community College Plan Would Be Terrible For Students, Staff . . . Everyone

by Herman Cain: How to destroy the value of absolutely anything.

Hillary was at it again last week, promising to make community college free, and adding the very weird promise of “debt-free tuition” for four-year universities.

I’m not really sure what the latter is supposed to mean. Debt-free means you don’t owe anyone any money. Does that mean she would ban student loans to pay for tuition? Or does it mean every student loan would be automatically forgiven as soon as it’s time to pay it off? Because if that’s the case, there’s only one party that’s going to be willing to make the loans – which will be gifts and not loans at all.

But let’s go back to free community college. As is usually the case, Hillary never explains how she would pay for this. Neither she nor Bernie Sanders ever do. They just bluster about how much we need to “tax the 1 percent,” even though you could tax 100 percent of the 1 percent’s wealth and you wouldn’t have nearly enough money to cover even one of Hillary’s or Bernie’s give-stuff-away-free schemes.

But let’s leave that aside for a second. Let’s pretend for a moment that you could somehow find the money to make community college free for everyone. Would that make it a good idea to do it? No, it wouldn’t. In fact, the people who would suffer the most from such a scheme would actually be those who go and get a free community college education.

This has to do with a basic economic principle about what happens to the value of something when you make it free. It’s the same thing liberals have found out with health care as they’ve tried in various ways around the world to either give it away for free or sharply discount it. When you make something free, you devalue it. If liberals believe that everyone should be able to get a community college education regardless of ability to pay, then let’s imagine what would happen if everyone showed up at the community college for just that.

For one thing, enrollment would explode, and that would mean that the community college would not have enough faculty, or enough classrooms, or enough of the other necessary resources to serve all comers. They would have to hire more faculty and more staff. Great, you liberals say! You just created more jobs! Except that none of the people coming to get this service are paying for it, so making community college free didn’t just saddle the taxpayers with the existing costs of community college. It saddled them with much higher costs.

Another problem with making something free is that those who receive the thing don’t value it the same as those who paid for it. When you’ve paid tuition – even a nominal amount – you don’t want to blow off the opportunity and waste your investment. Even if your parents paid (perhaps especially then) you don’t want to explain to them that you wasted their money by not taking school seriously. But if you only showed up because it was free, then what do you have to lose by slacking off?

Entire community colleges filled with people who didn’t have to pay will not yield a positive learning environment.

Finally, if everyone’s got a community college degree, then what is the value of a community college degree? Exactly. It’s nothing. It’s no better than a high school diploma in terms of setting you apart from anyone else, because everyone’s got one.

Democrats don’t like to hear this, but something that has inherent value should cost you something. If it doesn’t, then either you’ll trash it, or everyone will get it and it will thus become worthless. And oh, by the way, it will also become unaffordable for the providers of the service to continue providing it.

This is a terrible idea, from a terrible candidate trying to keep up with another terrible candidate.
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Herman Cain is a conservative radio host of CainTV, a 2012 GOP presidential primary candidate with over 40 years of experience in the private sector as an analyst for Coca-Cola, an executive at Pillsbury, a regional Vice President for Burger King, and CEO of Godfather's Pizza. Cain served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and a supervisory mathematician for the Dept. of the Navy.

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