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1. COMPOSE an argumentative essay that incorporates at least two of the assigned sources below. Target word count should be 1250-1500 words.

2. Argue whether college should be free in the United States. 3. Support your position in using articles from The Washington Examiner, The New York

Times. The Nation and/or Dissent. 4. Provide details, examples, and evidence to substantiate your points. 5. Write in academic language and adopt a tone appropriate for scholarly discourse. 6. Use transitions within paragraphs, between main points, and at beginning and end

of essay. (All of the articles have been copied and pasted into the document).

We should discourage students from attending college, not make it free by

Tim Worstall December 27, 2019 03:05 PM Washington Examiner

Washington Examiner - We Should Discourage Students From Attending College,

Not Make It Free

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It’s a staple of the Democratic Party in 2019 that we need more college for everyone. Part of the

liberal argument for “free” or subsidized college is that education makes us richer.

Many Democrats now even extend this argument to say we as a society would be richer if we

taxed ourselves to send everyone to college for free. This position depends upon the idea that

college really does make people richer, a phenomenon that has, historically, largely proven true.

But it appears that this is changing.

The value of education is inherently subjective. Some might say four years swooning over

French sonnets makes the individual richer in some intellectual sense, or that courses in puppetry

or gender studies are somehow helping students grow as humans. This academic wishfulness,

though, isn't sufficient justification for making taxpayers finance higher education. If Democrats

intend to ask taxpayers to foot the bill, they need to prove that we are indeed made richer in real

financial terms, demonstrable on paper, by expanding education.

The usual proof is that we can see in real-world financial results the value added to an

individual’s lifetime wealth due to a college degree. Essentially, we can observe that those with a

college degree make more than nongraduates and acquire more wealth over their lifetime. In this,

the degree is adding value and wealth to us all. Therefore, the argument goes, we can cough up

more taxpayer cash for "free" tuition and still come out ahead.

This logic completely fails if there is no such college premium. If the higher incomes don't

appear, then the value isn't being added. This means the whole process isn't worth it.

Unfortunately for Democrats, this seems to be the case. According to new research from the St.

Louis Federal Reserve, the college degree income premium has substantially declined, and for all

non-white students, the college degree’s wealth premium is “statistically indistinguishable from

zero.” The gains from a college degree haven’t totally evaporated, but they’re certainly shrinking

and quite fast at that. Soon, the college premium might not even exist at all.

Why is this all happening? Well, the St. Louis Fed is a little reticent to dive into this because it's

the result they're reporting, not the cause. We get to have the fun of trying to work out why this is

happening.

One answer could be that the modern college experience doesn't teach students much of anything

that’s actually useful. Perhaps the combination of excessive grievance studies such as critical

race theory or revolutionary sexual politics and a lack of useful skills such as plumbing or car

repair does, in fact, diminish the real-world value of degrees.

The most likely answer, though, is that college is still of great use to some folks and does indeed

add lifetime value for a certain portion of the student population. But it clearly produces a

negative return for another portion of society, leading our average premium to spiral downwards

so rapidly. The simple solution is that we need fewer students to attend university, not more.

We ought to divide young people into groups, those who will likely benefit from a college degree

and those who won't. We should encourage the first to attend but strongly deter the second group

from enrolling in university.

How? Well, start by making those going pay the full cost of their education. Classes such as

accounting, engineering, medicine, and so, which do produce those higher incomes, will gain

students. Classes that don't will lose enrollment, and hopefully, will ultimately be extinguished

from campus.

Still, if people want to waste their money on a degree in gender studies, go ahead. As a

philosophical liberal, I do believe that people should get to spend their dime their way. But

government resources should only encourage the first subgroup of prospective students to attend

university and that will largely require focus on productive areas of study.

The last thing we should do is embrace the Democratic proposal and make college “free,” aka

taxpayer-funded, for all students and all majors. Rather, we want students to carry more of the

cost of their studies precisely to get both fewer students and students in more productive fields,

thus educating only those who will actually financially benefit from earning a degree.

The current system is an utter waste of economic resources. Making it free for everyone to go to

university will just spend more societal wealth spiraling down the waste pipe.

Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential

blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The

Continental Telegraph.

The New York Times - New Mexico Announces Plan for Free College for State Residents

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New Mexico Announces Plan for Free College for State Residents

By Simon Romero and Dana Goldstein Sept. 18, 2019 The New York Times

ALBUQUERQUE — In one of the boldest state-led efforts to expand access to higher education,

New Mexico is unveiling a plan on Wednesday to make tuition at its public colleges and

universities free for all state residents, regardless of family income.

The move comes as many American families grapple with the rising cost of higher education and

as discussions about free public college gain momentum in state legislatures and on the

presidential debate stage. Nearly half of the states, including New York, Oregon and Tennessee,

have guaranteed free two- or four-year public college to some students. But the New Mexico

proposal goes further, promising four years of tuition even to students whose families can afford

to pay the sticker price.

The program, which is expected to be formally announced by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on

Wednesday and still requires legislative approval, would apply to all 29 of the state’s two- and

four-year public institutions. Long one of the poorest states in the country, New Mexico plans to

use climbing revenues from oil production to pay for much of the costs.

Some education experts, presidential candidates and policymakers consider universal free college

to be a squandering of scarce public dollars, which might be better spent offering more support

to the neediest students.

But others say college costs have become too overwhelming and hail the many drives toward

free tuition.

“I think we’re at a watershed moment,” said Caitlin Zaloom, a cultural anthropologist at New

York University who has researched the impact of college costs on families. “It used to be that a

high school degree could allow a young adult to enter into the middle class. We are no longer in

that situation. We don’t ask people to pay for fifth grade and we also should not ask people to

pay for sophomore year.”

By some measures, the tuition initiative will be the most ambitious in a growing national

movement. College costs and student debt have emerged as major issues in the Democratic

presidential primary, with two of the leading contenders for the nomination — Senators Bernie

Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — promising to make all public colleges and universities free.

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has a more limited proposal to eliminate community

college tuition.

So far, states, not the federal government, have led the way — sometimes out of a hope that a

more educated work force would attract businesses and improve local economies. As of 2018, 17

states had programs promising free college to at least some students, according to an analysis by

the National Conference of State Legislatures. Most of those programs cover tuition only at

twoyear institutions.

New York’s Excelsior Scholarship, championed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and enacted in

2017, illustrates some of the challenges New Mexico will face. Excelsior promises free tuition at

public two- and four-year colleges to families making up to $125,000, but requires that students

have no gaps in their education — meaning no time away from the lecture hall to work or to care

for children or aging relatives. And the scholarship money cannot be used on books, housing

costs, child care or any of the other living expenses that can quickly pile up, and eventually cause

many to drop out of school.

“If you call it free and don’t provide the supports for students once they get there, then you still

don’t set them up for success,” said Wesley Whistle, a senior adviser on higher education at New

America, a Washington think tank.

He said he favored plans such as the 21st Century Scholarship Program in Indiana, which covers

the cost of public college tuition for students from low-income families, allowing them to spend

their federal Pell grant funds on nontuition expenses.

Like the New York program, the New Mexico plan would cover only tuition, not living expenses,

and the funds would be available only after a student drew from existing state aid programs and

from federal grants.

But the New Mexico proposal does go further than New York’s Excelsior Scholarship in two

regards: It is available to all students, regardless of family income, and it includes funds for

adults looking to return to school at community colleges.

“This program is an absolute game changer for New Mexico,” Governor Lujan Grisham said in a

statement. “In the long run, we’ll see improved economic growth, improved outcomes for New

Mexican workers and families and parents.”

Officials contend that New Mexico would benefit most from a universal approach to tuition

assistance. The state’s median household income is $46,744, compared with a national median of

$60,336. Most college students in the state also come from relatively disadvantaged

backgrounds; almost 65 percent of New Mexico undergraduates are among the nation’s neediest

students, according to the state’s higher education department.

The new program in New Mexico would be open to recent graduates of high schools or high

school equivalency programs in the state, and students must maintain a 2.5 grade point average.

In contrast to other states, like Georgia, that have curbed access to public colleges by

unauthorized immigrants, New Mexico would open the tuition program to all residents,

regardless of immigration status.

Carmen Lopez-Wilson, the deputy secretary of New Mexico’s Higher Education Department,

said the program would benefit about 55,000 students a year at an annual cost of $25 million to

$35 million. She added that the state was trying to bolster its higher education system, which

endured spending cuts of more than 30 percent per student from 2008 to 2018.

“We’re giving money directly to students,” Ms. Lopez-Wilson said. “This is the best way to

begin rebuilding the infrastructure of higher education in New Mexico.”

Ms. Lopez-Wilson said the relatively low cost of the program reflected low tuition costs in the

state, with many students already receiving forms of assistance. Other states that have less

extensive tuition assistance proposals are spending far more.

A year of tuition at the state’s flagship campus, the University of New Mexico, costs $7,556 for

state residents. At the state’s largest community college, Central New Mexico Community

College, tuition costs are generally less than $3,000 per year.

New Mexico already has some of the lowest debt rates for graduates of four-year colleges. In the

class of 2017, they owed $21,237 on average, compared with a national average of $28,650,

according to the Institute for College Access & Success.

The program will rely on approval and appropriations from the State Legislature if it is to

commence as expected in 2020.

“This will take some high-quality politicking from the governor and others to make it happen,”

said Tripp Stelnicki, a spokesman for Governor Lujan Grisham, a Democrat.

But both chambers in New Mexico are controlled by Democrats, and while fiscal conservatives

still have considerable sway in the state, legislators have already shown willingness recently to

increase spending on public education. State and federal spending on early childhood programs,

including prekindergarten, is climbing to $546 million this year in New Mexico, a $135 million

increase from the previous year.

In a departure from the belt-tightening after the 2008 financial crisis, New Mexico also gave

raises to public-school teachers and the faculty and staff of the University of New Mexico this

year.

The free-tuition plan points to the shifting political landscape in New Mexico, traditionally a

swing state that was up for grabs by both major parties. It is now emerging as a bastion of

Democratic power in the West, standing in contrast to other large oil-producing states controlled

by Republicans. At the same time, an oil boom in the Permian Basin shared by New Mexico and

Texas is lifting the state’s revenues.

In some ways, the burst of interest in free public college is a return to the nation’s educational

past. As recently as the 1970s, some public university systems remained largely tuition-free.

As a bigger and more diverse group of undergraduates entered college in recent decades, costs

rose, and policymakers began to promote the idea of a degree as less of a public benefit than a

private asset akin to a mortgage, according to Professor Zaloom, of N.Y.U. Many states raised

tuition, and students became more reliant on grants and loans.

“We should be looking at the examples from our own history,” Professor Zaloom said. Free

college educations from the University of California, the City University of New York and other

public systems, she added, have been “some of the most successful engines of mobility in this

country.”

Simon Romero is a national correspondent based in Albuquerque, covering immigration and

other issues. He was previously the bureau chief in Brazil and in Caracas, Venezuela, and

reported on the global energy industry from Houston. @viaSimonRomero

Dana Goldstein is a national correspondent, writing about how education policies impact

families, students and teachers across the country. She is the author of “The Teacher Wars: A

History of America's Most Embattled Profession.”

The Nation - Why Public College Should Be Free

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Why Public College Should Be Free By Bryce Covert DECEMBER 19, 2019 The Nation

Nearly all of the Democratic presidential candidates have plans to reduce the exorbitant cost of

college. But there’s an emerging rift: On one side, candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie

Sanders have proposed making public college free for all; on the other, candidates like Pete

Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar want to make it free for only a slice of the population.

The latter worry that by providing free college to everyone who wants it—including, in

Buttigieg’s words, “the children of millionaires and billionaires”—too many resources will be

squandered on the rich.

In reality, we already subsidize college for kids from wealthy families, and those further down

the income scale would benefit the most if public institutions were free.

In 2017, the most recent year for which we have data, all of the tuition and fees charged by

public colleges came to $75.8 billion. That’s less than what the federal government spends to

subsidize the cost of college. In the same year, the government disbursed about $160 billion in

the form of student loans, grants, and tax breaks to help make higher education less of a burden

on American families.

Certainly the students who take advantage of those federal funds use them to go to a variety of

higher education institutions, not just public colleges. But it would be more efficient to simply

eliminate public college tuition than to spend all that money propping up institutions through a

maze of grants and tax breaks.

Right now, the government’s money flows largely to well-off students. After student loans, the

biggest chunk of student aid is delivered through the tax code; excluding loans, it makes up more

than half of all aid. In 2012 the federal government gave $34 billion in tax breaks, a billion more

than it spent on Pell Grants for those in financial need. And most of that money is going to the

wealthiest families. In 2013, for example, families that made $100,000 or more a year captured

more than half of the tuition and fees deduction as well as the exemption for dependent students.

Instead of pouring money into higher education through the tax code, where the rich soak it up,

or subsidizing school through loans and grants, the government could make public college free.

As Mike Konczal, my colleague here at “The Score,” argued in June 2016 in the journal

Democracy, it would act much like a public option in health care: Private institutions would be

forced to compete with free, high-quality public ones and as a result would be incentivized to

lower their costs in order to keep attracting students. Predatory for-profit schools would also face

stiffer competition to offer an actual education. “A free, but excellent, option would force private

colleges to look harder at what they offer and how much they charge for it,” Konczal wrote.

Subsidizing student loans and grants, on the other hand, doesn’t give schools an incentive to cut

costs. In fact, by covering increases in tuition and fees, it may do the opposite, encouraging

colleges and universities to raise their prices.

So what, then, of the charge that creating a free public option would funnel resources to the

children of the richest Americans? This argument doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Konczal

recently crunched the numbers and found that just 1 percent of students at public institutions hail

from the wealthiest 1 percent. This means just 1.4 percent of the total spending it would take to

make public college free would benefit these students, leaving the vast majority for the rest of us.

Even if this small group of rich families would benefit from sending their children to a free

school—and even if more wealthy families would join them when there is an option without

tuition—that doesn’t mean they would come out on top financially. Warren and Sanders propose

paying for their plans by increasing taxes on the well-off. Rich families would end up paying

more than they would get in return, just as a progressive system is supposed to operate.

We already offer free education to the children of the rich from kindergarten through 12th grade.

A college education should similarly be available to all. Not everyone goes to college or

necessarily needs to, as Buttigieg has been pointing out, but that’s the point of having a public

option. It would offer a choice: Enter the workforce or get a high-quality education, regardless of

financial resources.

Bryce Covert is a contributor at The Nation and a contributing op-ed writer at The New York

Times.

Dissent - Why Free College Is Necessary

Why Free College Is Necessary

Tressie McMillan Cottom Fall 2015 Dissent

Free college is not a new idea, but, with higher education costs (and student loan debt)

dominating public perception, it’s one that appeals to more and more people—including me. The

national debate about free, public higher education is long overdue. But let’s get a few things out

of the way.

College is the domain of the relatively privileged, and will likely stay that way for the

foreseeable future, even if tuition is eliminated. As of 2012, over half of the U.S. population has

“some college” or postsecondary education. That category includes everything from an

automechanics class at a for-profit college to a business degree from Harvard. Even with such a

broadly conceived category, we are still talking about just half of all Americans.

Why aren’t more people going to college? One obvious answer would be cost, especially the cost

of tuition. But the problem isn’t just that college is expensive. It is also that going to college is

complicated. It takes cultural and social, not just economic, capital. It means navigating

advanced courses, standardized tests, forms. It means figuring out implicit rules—rules that can

change.

Eliminating tuition would probably do very little to untangle the sailor’s knot of inequalities that

make it hard for most Americans to go to college. It would not address the cultural and social

barriers imposed by unequal K–12 schooling, which puts a select few students on the college

pathway at the expense of millions of others. Neither would it address the changing social milieu

of higher education, in which the majority are now non-traditional students. (“Non-traditional”

students are classified in different ways depending on who is doing the defining, but the best way

to understand the category is in contrast to our assumptions of a traditional college student—

young, unfettered, and continuing to college straight from high school.) How and why they go to

college can depend as much on things like whether a college is within driving distance or

provides one-on-one admissions counseling as it does on the price.

Given all of these factors, free college would likely benefit only an outlying group of students

who are currently shut out of higher education because of cost—students with the ability and/or

some cultural capital but without wealth. In other words, any conversation about college is a

pretty elite one even if the word “free” is right there in the descriptor.

The discussion about free college, outside of the Democratic primary race, has also largely been

limited to community colleges, with some exceptions by state. Because I am primarily interested

in education as an affirmative justice mechanism, I would like all minority-serving and

historically black colleges (HBCUs)—almost all of which qualify as four-year degree

institutions—to be included. HBCUs disproportionately serve students facing the intersecting

effects of wealth inequality, systematic K–12 disparities, and discrimination. For those reasons,

any effort to use higher education as a vehicle for greater equality must include support for

HBCUs, allowing them to offer accessible degrees with less (or no) debt.

The Obama administration’s free community college plan, expanded in July to include grants that

would reduce tuition at HBCUs, is a step in the right direction. Yet this is only the beginning of

an educational justice agenda. An educational justice policy must include institutions of higher

education but cannot only include institutions of higher education. Educational justice says that

schools can and do reproduce inequalities as much as they ameliorate them. Educational justice

says one hundred new Universities of Phoenix is not the same as access to high-quality

instruction for the maximum number of willing students. And educational justice says that jobs

programs that hire for ability over “fit” must be linked to millions of new credentials, no matter

what form they take or how much they cost to obtain. Without that, some free college plans

could reinforce prestige divisions between different types of schools, leaving the most vulnerable

students no better off in the economy than they were before.

Free college plans are also limited by the reality that not everyone wants to go to college. Some

people want to work and do not want to go to college forever and ever—for good reason. While

the “opportunity costs” of spending four to six years earning a degree instead of working used to

be balanced out by the promise of a “good job” after college, that rationale no longer holds,

especially for poor students. Free-ninety-nine will not change that.

I am clear about all of that . . . and yet I don’t care. I do not care if free college won’t solve

inequality. As an isolated policy, I know that it won’t. I don’t care that it will likely only benefit

the high achievers among the statistically unprivileged—those with above-average test scores,

know-how, or financial means compared to their cohort. Despite these problems, today’s debate

about free college tuition does something extremely valuable. It reintroduces the concept of

public good to higher education discourse—a concept that fifty years of individuation, efficiency

fetishes, and a rightward drift in politics have nearly pummeled out of higher education

altogether. We no longer have a way to talk about public education as a collective good because

even we defenders have adopted the language of competition. President Obama justified his free

community college plan on the grounds that “Every American . . . should be able to earn the

skills and education necessary to compete and win in the twenty-first century economy.”

Meanwhile, for-profit boosters claim that their institutions allow “greater access” to college for

the public. But access to what kind of education? Those of us who believe in viable, affordable

higher ed need a different kind of language. You cannot organize for what you cannot name.

Already, the debate about if college should be free has forced us all to consider what higher

education is for. We’re dusting off old words like class and race and labor. We are even casting

about for new words like “precariat” and “generation debt.” The Debt Collective is a prime

example of this. The group of hundreds of students and graduates of (mostly) for-profit colleges

are doing the hard work of forming a class-based identity around debt as opposed to work or

income. The broader cultural conversation about student debt, to which free college plans are a

response, sets the stage for that kind of work. The good of those conversations outweighs for me

the limited democratization potential of free college.

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth

University and a contributing editor at Dissent. Her book Lower Ed: How For-Profit Colleges

Deepen Inequality is forthcoming from the New Press.