Denouncing Free College in the Name of the Poor
March 12, 2016
By Amber A'Lee Frost
Although corporate media outlets have blasted presidential candidate Bernie Sanders for “living in an economic fantasy world,” his proposed plan for free tuition in public universities is hardly radical. To be funded by a modest financial transaction tax—0.5 percent on stock transactions and 0.1 percent on bond transactions—it’s essentially an older policy being reinstated to create revenue for a social program.
Many countries, including the UK, France, Japan, India and Taiwan, already have similar taxes and the US had one until 1966. And a number of industrialized nations, like Germany, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and the Scandinavian countries, have instituted free college tuition without evident chaotic societal breakdown.
And yet a flurry of media “experts” have rushed to denounce not only the financial tax as a means to fund college tuition, but the prospect of socialized higher education as a concept.
Oddly enough, they present their fight against free higher education as advocacy for the poor.
At the Washington Post (2/23/16), education writer Jeffrey J. Selingo capped off “The False Hope of Free College” with “expertise” from the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, concluding with touching concern for students in poverty: “Free tuition fails to change the college-going patterns of low-income students and quickly becomes an entitlement for those students who need it the least.”
http://fair.org/home/denouncing-free-college-in-the-name-of-the-poor/
= new reply since forum marked as read
