… is the unfortunate title of a new book by Robert Samuels, a professor at the University of California, and president of the University Council – American Federation of Teachers.  The title is unfortunate because the book’s not really about free tuition; the subject doesn’t really get a look-in until about three-quarters of the way through.  Rather, Samuels’ book is mostly about (as he puts it in the title of his first chapter) why tuition goes up and quality goes down.  When Samuels focuses on this issue, it’s an excellent book.  When he strays, it’s not.

Let’s start with the good stuff.  Chapter 2, “Where the Money Goes in Research Universities,” is genius.  Not because it’s saying much that people don’t already know – pack in the undergrads, teach them using underpaid sessionals, reserve “real” profs for graduate students and research – but because it’s very rare anyone on the inside of universities exposes this strategy in stark naked terms (ok, yes, Ian Clark and co. have also done it, but Skolnik aside they aren’t academic lifers). I mean, sure, people like me talk about it all the time, but within institutions themselves there’s an omertà about it all.  Samuels is a rare bird in stating that while reductions in government support haven’t been helpful, a lot of higher education’s wounds on the undergraduate front are self-inflicted.

Where he’s less good, frankly, is on actual issues of money.  The chapter on university endowments – which focuses entirely on bad risk management practices leading up to 2008, without bothering to consider university long-term investment practices, or the recovery of endowment positions since 2008 – is either inept or mendacious, I can’t tell which.  And Samuels makes no serious attempt to prove his claim that, with just a few revisions of mission, tuition could be made free.  It’s not that he doesn’t have good ideas for making institutions less costly, it’s that the extent of possible savings is not quantified, and he can’t seem to decide if such savings should go to improving the plight of sessionals by making them full-time, or passing the savings on to students.  It’s a a lot of hand-waving, frankly.

As for the touted benefits of free tuition?  Basically, it’s that poorer students would be better off if it were so.  This is true, but could just as easily be achieved with grants.  Why governments and institutions should provide windfall gains to millions of students from better-off families in order to make it free for poorer ones isn’t addressed.

So, briefly: 9 out 10 for the first three chapters because it’s an unusually clear and concise statement of the problems and of the current political economy of universities.  After that, it’s about a 5 out of 10.