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Record: 1Title:For Colleges, 'Free' Is About Much More Than
Money. Authors:CAREY, KEVIN1Source:Chronicle of Higher
Education. 7/18/2014, Vol. 60 Issue 41, pA23-A24. 2p.
Document Type:OpinionSubject Terms:*TUITION --
Universities & colleges
*FINANCE
*HIGHER education -- Costs
*EXPERIMENTAL methods in education
*EXPERIMENTAL colleges
COOPER Union for the Advancement of Science &
ArtAbstract:The article presents the author's reflections on free
college education in the United States. The author begins by
discussing the controversial decision of the New York City-
based Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art to
raise its tuition. The meaning of "free" in the context of college
is discussed. Conclusions are then offered noting that while free
college educations can have disadvantages, the alternative
model of heavy student debt is worse.Author
Affiliations:1Director of education-policy program, New
America FoundationFull Text Word Count:1182ISSN:0009-
5982Accession Number:97104203Persistent link to this record
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Colleges, 'Free' Is About Much More Than Money
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THINK TANK
ON ASTOR PLACE in Lower Manhattan, you can stand on a
street corner and see, for higher education, the power and
fragility of the word "free."
To the right stands the Cooper Union Foundation Building, a
steel-reinforced Italianate brownstone that has, since 1859, been
home to Peter Cooper's vision of a college, "open and free to
all," providing a world-class education in architecture,
engineering, and the arts. For over a century, Cooper Union for
the Advancement of Science and Art has inspired fierce loyalty
in graduates who excelled because of, not in spite of, the
university's egalitarian spirit and lean, focused approach to
learning.
To the left is 41 Cooper Square, a curving new modernist
structure reportedly built with the help of a $175-million loan
that the university took out while hoping to land a naming-
rights gift that never arrived.
To cover the loan payments and advance the Cooper board's
vague ambitions to--honestly, I can't even type these words
without getting bored--build what the college's president is
quoted as calling a "global brand," the university will increase
tuition this fall from $0 to as much as $20,000 per year for
some students. Cooper Union is free no more.
Students and alumni have protested and offered a
comprehensive alternative plan, to no avail. Their argument that
"free" is not just a financial-aid policy but an essential
characteristic of the college has fallen on deaf ears. Which
raises the question of how to think about free, and higher
learning, in a time when all forces seem aligned to make college
as far from free as it can be.
American universities have been not-free long enough that the
concept has become alien, like something from an old science-
fiction Utopia. Higher education is still virtually free in parts of
Europe, of course, as a Finnish graduate student reminded me
while observing that, if you include government stipends for
rent and living expenses, tuition there is effectively a negative

number.
This has consequences, not all benign. The Finn had friends
who, she believed, were ambling through their 20s without
urgency or ambition, content to be paid to learn. I was reminded
of an Italian sommelier met on vacation who mentioned in
passing her free law-school education. The law bored her by the
end of it, so she skipped the bar and moved to Tuscany instead.
But the flip side of insufficient urgency is far too much, in the
form of payments on backbreaking loans. Americans pay more
for higher education than citizens of comparable nations, with
no discernible extra benefits in return.
"Free" in the United States has been historically linked with
"open access," not in the Cooper Union sense of "not
discriminating against women and ethnic and racial minorities"
but by establishing few if any academic standards for
admission. Making college attendance a no-stakes affair--pay
nothing, come as you are--may discourage the kind of sustained
focus and engagement with academic institutions that tend to
characterize successful students.
The best balance is probably a nontrivial but broadly affordable
tuition charge that a median-income family can pay out of
pocket, or a student can afford by working half-time or less
during school. Many community colleges still offer this deal,
but it is rapidly disappearing from four-year institutions. The
present generation of undergraduates has become dangerously
accustomed to the idea that all universities are expensive,
public institutions only somewhat less so than private.
The problem is that "modest and affordable" is a fundamentally
unstable state for a university's prices to occupy. If everyone
understands that students pay nothing, the institution behaves in
a certain way. Ambitions and expenses are held in check by
annual revenues, whether from endowment earnings or public
appropriations, that are unlikely to grow drastically over time.
The college understands itself as an institution with civic
purposes and obligations. It doesn't dream of global branding,
because it has more important things to do.

If, on the other hand, tuition is more than nothing, the college
understands itself differently. It is selling a service in a market.
And once you start down that road, the questions of "How much
more could we charge in this market?" and "How fast can we
get from here to there?" are unavoidable. Barriers of regulatory
policy and public shaming can be erected to slow the
acceleration toward full market pricing, but they are delaying
actions that will not change the underlying trajectory of the
institution.
Inevitably, the broader culture adjusts to accommodate this way
of understanding society's obligations to its students. College
becomes, as many others have observed, a private good offered
by private institutions. Lawmakers who cut higher-education
appropriations suffer no electoral consequences, and are
emboldened to cut again.
It is almost impossible to stuff the animal spirits of market
ambition back in the bottle, once released. This is why those
who believe in Cooper Union's historic identity have fought so
hard to keep the founder's original vision from being shattered
beyond repair.
As Kevin Slavin, an alumnus and a trustee, wrote online, "I
didn't go because it was free for me. I chose Cooper Union
because it was free for everyone. And anyone who actually
experienced that knows that the only way to jeopardize the
quality of the education there is to charge for it.… 'Free' affects
far more than a fiscal bottom line. It affects the intentions,
behavior, ambition, and performance of everyone in the
system."
And once the college economic model depends on someone
paying tuition upfront, it's difficult to create mechanisms that
retroactively bring prices back down toward free. This is why
higher-education finance is becoming what has been called a
"kludgeocracy" of tax credits, interest-rate subsidies, and loan-
forgiveness schemes.
It's also why programs that purport to offer a "free" college
education, like the recently announced partnership between

Starbucks and Arizona State University, are inevitably far from
the Cooper tuition-free ideal. (Participants will have to pay
substantial tuition upfront and will be fully reimbursed only if
they are juniors or seniors, accumulate 21 credits at ASU
Online, and are still employed at Starbucks 20 hours per week.)
There is little chance of replacing all the college revenues now
flowing from tuition with new public funds. Rearranging
existing public subsidies to make some colleges free at the
expense of others is a zero-sum game.
So the best chance to reinvigorate the fading ideal of free
college education is to find a new generation of Peter Coopers,
people willing to invest their fortunes in colleges that combine
a sharp, bounded educational focus with a commitment to the
public good. Advancements in information technology mean
that such colleges won't need huge campuses full of $165-
million-plus buildings to be excellent. A single structure, built
in the right place by the right people, will once again be enough
to create an educational institution in which the founder's spirit
can be sustained for generations beyond his passing.
~~~~~~~~
By KEVIN CAREY
Kevin Carey is director of the education-policy program at the
New America Foundation.
The Chronicle of Higher Education:
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