By Ryan Mazrim, staff writer
While the idea of “free education” at community colleges is an honorable endeavor, the fact of the matter is we live in a world of scarcity
and limited resources and people scrambling to reach the next rung on the ladder.
As many of us have discovered, nothing in life is free, and more than likely if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is — especially if its going to cost $70 billion in tax-payer money.
Free college degrees are exactly that: too good to be true.
The laws of supply and demand apply here and best describe the potential downside to the proposal. Offering free education would reduce the value of the college degree as whole while simultaneously holding taxpayers financially responsible for it.
Not more than a decade or two ago, having an associates degree separated you from the pack of potential hires and certainly from those with high school diplomas or less. This often was reason enough to motivate those who wanted those better paying jobs to work the extra hours to invest in themselves.
With the influx of recent Associate degree graduates to the job market, employers will consider it a prerequisite more than an accomplishment, much like a high school diploma is now.
With the current state of the job market, in order to remain a desirable candidate for a job, a four-year degree is preferred to typically even get a call back for that second interview that could put you into the middle class or better.
There is a certain level of pride and feeling of accomplishment for graduates who look back on their long path of academia to get to where they are at now.
That raises the question: How much more charitable do we have to be before we just become a society that enables and further promotes an “everybody gets a trophy” mentality?
It doesn’t make us a cold, callous society that doesn’t believe in helping those less fortunate.
The concern that we should have is that students drop out of community colleges at a fairly high rate already, it would not be unreasonable to assume those numbers would rise, thus making the cost outweigh the benefit.
Some may contend that education is a right, not a privilege. By the same logic — health care, food, transportation, etc. — should be free, as well.
Ryan Mazrim can be reached at [email protected] or (217) 786-2311.
dankeeling1 • Mar 21, 2015 at 5:13 pm
If there is a limited number of university places, doesn’t it make sense that the cleverest people should get the places as opposed to the richest? I believe free university education would promote this, and therefore allow society to benefit more from the investment. Too many privileged people with no real-life skills walk into positions of power already IMO…