Yesterday when talking about the bad arguments for universal free fees, I left out two of the more common arguments.  One of them I left out because it’s genuinely a much trickier argument to negotiate (and hence not one of the “ten bad arguments”) and the other because I plain forgot.  Both of these arguments came up during discussions online—check out my Twitter feed if you’re curious. But let’s go over the arguments now.

Start with the latter, because we can deal with it quickly.  This is the argument that all the effort to target is expensive and it would be cheaper and more efficient just to hand out money for free (either as grants or free tuition or some combination thereof).  However, this argument overestimates the costs of aid administration.

For starters, check out the latest Canada Student Loans Program Annual Report (2014-15).  In Appendix B, it is revealed that the grand total operating cost for the national student aid program, which delivers roughly $3.5 billion in loans and grants every year is…$137.4 million.  Or roughly 4% of program costs.  And it’s pretty much the same at the provincial level.  Not all provinces publish their admin costs, but one which does is Saskatchewan, and if you look at their costs (see the Ministry of Advanced Education’s 2016-2017 Annual Report, page 24 , it is $2.8 million on a budget of $63 million, or roughly 4.4% of program costs (only in fact less than that because some of that $2.8 million is paid for by the feds and is therefore included in the $137.4M from Ottawa).

So, yes, you could spend billions of dollars to give money away without testing for need.  But the total amount you’d be saving, nationally, would probably be in the $250 million range.  This is a terrible deal.

The other argument is a bit trickier and it has to do with universality in the rest of the education system.  A free-fee supporter might say “well, presumably your arguments for need-testing fees/aid applies to all education, doesn’t it?  The rich would pay for education at the secondary level just as they would for post-secondary, so why not apply same logic?”

Fair question.  The simple answer is two-fold.  First, secondary education is mandatory (there are exceptions, I know, we’ll get to them in a sec).  Personally, I think if a government makes something mandatory it’s hard to charge a fee.  Second, partially because it is mandatory, the rate of return on secondary education is pretty low.  The argument for fees rests not just on ability to pay, but also on the fact that private returns exist (see here for more on this line of argument).  If there are no or low returns, then there is not much case for charging.

And third – this is the big one – homogeneity matters.  Everyone in K-12 is sharing a very similar experience.  A common curriculum and assessment.  This is not remotely true of PSE.  Some people want one-year degrees, some stay for 12 years and get three degrees.  Some enter into programs which cost $6,000/year to produce (this is cost, not price) – others (say in medicine) into programs costing $100,000/year or more.  Students consume vastly different amounts of PSE.  That means free tuition in PSE leads to huge variation in benefits which simply isn’t the case in K-12.

Now, back to the exception I was talking about, which is often cited.  K-12 isn’t always mandatory.  In Canada, education is compulsory to 18 in Manitoba, New Brunswick and Ontario, but elsewhere it’s only mandatory to 16.  So, they come back to the point: if you believe that there should be an income-test on free for PSE because it’s non-mandatory, then you must believe the same for grade 12!  (with the implication that this makes you some kind of barbarian).

Well, no, not quite.  Remember, non-mandatory isn’t the only test here.  Are there significant private returns to non-mandatory secondary education?  Not really, because it is so close to ubiquitous – and that’s an argument against charging, too.  Given the first couple of paragraphs of this blog I obviously can’t say it would be inefficient to charge for it, but the smaller likely charge involved (because K-12 costs less than PSE to deliver) and the fact that only half or less of high school students would be subject to it means that gains from charging would be a lot smaller than they are in PSE.  Between those two factors, it’s hard to imagine making a good argument for charging fees for a single year, and this is for reasons which are entirely consistent with why one should charge fees to wealthier students in PSE.

Note that this isn’t actually an argument *for* universal free fees – it’s more a “gotcha” for people who think universal free fees aren’t such a hot idea.  But it’s a good gotcha, so it’s at least vaguely interesting. But for all the progressives who want to nit pick to find a hole in this argument, I have but one question: why, when so many people agree for major subsidies, including free tuition for students from median-income families and below, are you spending so much time and effort fighting for people from the upper income tiers?  When there are so many other things to spend money on, what’s so progressive about championing people for whom financial barriers count so little?