GO TO COLLEGE FOR FREE? Highered Intelligence (a September 29 post, the permalinks are currently bad-ordered) sees some difficulties with universal, state-provided college education. Working backwards, the conclusion is

"In fact, part of the value of a college education is that it helps you stand out from the rest of society - it's a badge of accomplishment to have a degree. If everyone goes to college.... well, EVERYONE can't earn a relatively better standard of living, and that's really what this is all about. It's a nice thought, free college. But I just don't see it working."

That's the old Washington Monthly "Catch-85" argument (loosely, only about 15 percent of the jobs are high pay and high prestige) that I've never found totally persuasive. Perhaps what the proposal is really all about is raising the general standard of living: perhaps it's less important that some people do better relative to others as long as the conditions are improving for all (that's the old "rising tide" argument). But I'm not persuaded that universal college gets you that, as long as "college" presupposes a snubbing of the skilled trades. (There are a great many competent to outstanding mathematicians and poets that the Superintendent does not want anywhere near a Westinghouse automatic air brake.) To the extent that universal college snubs the skilled trades, the reward to people in the skilled trades rises relative to the reward to college graduates, providing incentives for some to opt out of college (and master the latest version of the blended air brake.)

The greater challenge is in an earlier paragraph:

"A free-uni system is at least theoretically possible, given sufficient funds. But the quality of teaching already varies tremendously between universities. Harvard is good, but what about the instructional level you get at University of Phoenix or through a correspondence course? In order to provide state-funded college, you'd have to dramatically increase the number of professors. The quality differential would become something on the level of what we see in public high schools."

Is it really the quality of teaching at Harvard, or is it the quality of the dorm room bull sessions? The selling point the University of Phoenix and Robert Morris and some of the other proprietary colleges offer is practical training from practitioners rather than invisible researchers. And there might be $100 on the sidewalk for the right kind of entrepreneur: someone who can do for the delivery of education what Sears did for the delivery of stoves or Fed Ex did for the delivery of packages: fast, reliable, cheap.