Noah Smith, Columnist

Cheaper College Makes More Sense Than Free College

The answer is to give more help to the poor while shifting more of the burden to the well-off.

February 26, 2019 at 1:30 PM UTC

Noah Smith is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.

Pretty and costly.
Photographer: Craig Warga/Bloomberg

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One of Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ tentpole ideas is the promise of a free college education for all Americans. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is also running in 2020, also supports the idea. To a millennial generation drowning in student debt, whose job prospects were severely curtailed by the Great Recession, free college is a tempting prospect. Supporters believe it could also help rectify the immense opportunity gap between the children of the rich and the children of the poor:

But “free college” could mean any number of things, not all of them beneficial.