That doesn't make it free. It does mean the poor, the hardworking, non-college educated working class pay for the more wealthy, more educated kids to go to college for free, while their own kids get to sit another generation out.
Everyone pays a little more so that everyone's children can go to college for free. Saying it's poor people paying for rich people is complete nonsense. And as it is, wealthy people's children will go to college regardless of how it's funded; everyone paying through taxation is essentially the only mechanism that enables poor people's children get access to higher education. That means it's better than all the alternatives.
There is no country where everyone's children actually do go to college. The US already has one of the highest rates of college attainment at 50%. Which 50% do you think sends more of its kids to college, the top 50, or the bottom 50? The problem with the bottom 50 isn't that they can't afford college, it is that they've already been failed by the educational system, legal system, their parents, etc. The problem there is vastly deeper than "Free college".
You are basically advocating the most regressive tax in history. That money would be vastly better served by sending it to inner city elementary schools than dangling in front of a huge group of people who will never be able to use it.
Sucks for the hairdresser that has to subsidize my kids (And my mortgage).
The fallacy you're falling for is that you think that a person's tax bill is going to change depending on what the government spends money on. If the government doesn't spend on education then a hairdresser doesn't get to pay less tax; that money is saved to used to cut taxes for the wealthy, or to give giant corporations a break, or to buy even fancier bombs from billion dollar arms companies. Ordinary people aren't affected.
Given the choice between giving corporations an amnesty on reshoring the billions in cash they have in offshore accounts or paying for kids to go to college for free, I think the better option is education.
No, I never said that, I said there are better ways to spend the money. In 2015 in East Palo Alto, they had to close an elementary school for two weeks because they had no heat. How much do you think those kids benefit from a promise of free college versus a safe, clean, heated, well staffed elementary school?
Given the choice between giving corporations an amnesty on reshoring the billions in cash they have in offshore accounts or paying for kids to go to college for free, I think the better option is education.
Talk about fallacies, there is a false dilemma wrapped in a straw man for you, but let's go with it. No one is offering that choice, but if they were, you should probably be for it because the reshored money could be used for education, though hopefully spent wisely, not on free college. With an amnesty, at least the govt. gets some money to spend. It doesn't help pay for free college to do nothing.
In theory the poor (should) pay less taxes. In practice, I'm telling you, in Europe taxes pay for free education and social equality is higher than in the US and access to education (and healthcare) much better.
Like the US, in Europe most of the poor don't go to college. While they pay less taxes, they do pay taxes, and that money pays for the upper class to get their education (not free, paid for by everyone else).
The root of the social equality issues in the US are vastly far removed from "free college". It's the exact opposite - we need fewer marginal colleges, fewer for profit colleges, fewer marginal graduates, fewer drop outs, and more job training.
If the US could take one lesson from European education, it would be a good system of tracking students into job training in high school.
Depends on how you define poor but in Europe lower class families with no studies sending their children to become doctors or engineers is commonplace (without grants, students that are not super high achievers). In USA as far as I can see this is not true those families can't afford the cost and debt and even if the student could ends up with a huge debt for a large part of his life with no assistance and a worse social net. This is absolutely not the case in Europe. We are talking about people who want to get into college and can't afford it. Happens a lot more in the US.
