How to make US colleges free
Bernie Sanders made a lot of waves by advocating for free college for all. He was quickly shouted down as a radical and socialist (both of which are true). But it got me thinking, why not?
It’s probably easiest to think of our universities as two distinct systems. The first are the elite highly selective universities. The second are the ones that should help you get a job. There is a third set, but let’s not talk about them and maybe they will disappear quietly.
So how do you make this free? The elite universities have enormous endowments and could move to free undergraduate education in the next decade with some good planning. I know that the illustrious and successful alums of these colleges would be overjoyed to embark on a financial campaign to make that happen.
In the second tier of universities, I think there is a simple fix called an Income Share Agreement. I am an investor in Lambda School, an online computer science program which was a pioneer in ISAs. The way it works is that school is free until you get a job, and then you pay a percentage of your salary once employed. This has a miraculous effect because it aligns the school and student. Lambda doesn’t get paid until their student gets a job and keeps it. So they work hard to make that happen, even building soft skills training to their students on how to apply, interview, work well with teams, and a bunch of other things that i wish other CS majors had.
Could the second tier universities do this? Absolutely. It would take a very big financial and cultural restructuring, but the sooner the better. Every year they don’t do that, another batch of competitors will pick off the most lucrative niches and make school free. My bet is that the private institutions will be able to move faster to compete on this new playing field and show the path for the government-run systems.
It will be a far better day for students when the university’s future and theirs are inextricably linked. Bernie Sanders might be a radical, but he is not wrong.
