CITY COLLEGE USED TO BE GOOD.

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed is not happy about efforts to turn the Democrats' tripling down on the failures of the "Great Society" into nothing worse than doubling down.  In particular, he doesn't like the idea of means-testing the community college stipends.  "Means testing for free community college doesn’t merely exclude the wealthy."  That doesn't strike me as the strongest argument.  People who have the means might invest in what they perceive as stronger credentials, or, failing that, in the college experience (yes, even at converted community colleges!)  In an earlier riff on the same theme, he notes, "It’s a commonplace of policy studies that in America, programs for the poor become poor programs."  Yes, and if your objective is to take some of the stigma away from community colleges (#EndCCStigma) you don't want to give the impression that community college is for the poors, which is what means-testing for the stipend does, but it's unclear that making the stipend available to high school graduates in Waukesha or Waukegan, Hartland or Harlem alike would have much effect on applicant behavior in the upscale neighborhoods.

There was less such effect once upon a time as the state-supported converted teachers' colleges served students in their own state, perhaps not as well as their flagship universities, particularly in Big Ten country, but well enough.  These days, many of those institutions have embraced the subprime party school model, and they compete for out of state students paying full freight.  I wonder if the state university lobbies are intriguing against the community college lobbies for a slice of whatever Democrat spending spree gets through.

What's more interesting about those columns is the intrusion of reality checks.  In the earlier riff, for instance, the stipend has a pay-for-performance component.  "For example, a full-tuition scholarship for the second year (credits 31 to 60) contingent on successful completion of the first 30 credits would both reduce costs and satisfy the American cultural imperative to earn a benefit. An earned benefit is much harder to take away; the old Lockean idea that you claim property by mixing your labor with it remains powerful."

Envision, dear reader, the grade-grubbing that will follow.  "I really need that higher grade in your class in order to meet the 'satisfactory progress' criterion for the second-year stipend."  (Undergraduates always whine in italics.  I stole that from D. N. McCloskey.) Repeat the whining among the marginal students in all five second-semester courses, or perhaps in all ten first-year courses and judge for yourself whether it's possible to do "free" community college right.  On the other hand, maybe that's the way to cut the tenure depth when the next baby bust hits, community colleges will be full of disgruntled professors, tenured or not, who will pursue other careers just to get away from the grade-grubbing.

There's something off in the history, as well, here from the later riff.  "The point of free community college is to establish higher education as a public good, just like high school is. That’s hardly a new idea; CUNY was free until the 1970s. Treating 'free' as a handout to be given only to the 'deserving' gets the purpose wrong. It misses the point."  As does the argument.  (In what follows, understand that there is no such thing as "free."  Somebody else is buying.)

My post title identifies where public provision went wrong.  I forget whether City College, now City University, started charging tuitions before or after an earlier generation of wokesters mau-maued the faculty into lowering standards.  Regular readers will also recognise that no-charge community college on top of no-charge high school doesn't make sense when the high schools are failing at their jobs, and the fiscally responsible thing to do might be to have the underachieving high schools reimburse the community colleges for teaching the high school classes a second time.  The elementary schools ought also be on the hook.  "A shocking number of high school students are unable to read, write, or calculate effectively."

As an aside, the technical and industrial preparation the community colleges do is also something high schools used to do.  It was a mistake, fifty years ago, to turn shop classes into holding pens for burnouts, which ultimately culminated in the destruction, for instance, of Milwaukee's Trade and Technical School for Boys. Years ago, that was the only Milwaukee high school that admitted ninth graders, and somebody who had the aptitude for plumbing or electrical work could complete a fifth year culminating as an Entered Apprentice plumber or electrician, and where do you suppose those blue collar aristocrats who could carry water for a patternmaker came from?

On the matter of public goods, I have to, again, pick nits.  It is true that my benefit from interacting with an educated person does not detract from the benefit somebody else might derive from interacting with that person, and, in like manner, my opportunities to spout off about the failures of education do not in any way reduce the opportunities of people with bigger platforms, such as Richard Vedder or George Leef or Michael (Hard America) Barone, to hold forth about those failures in their own way, although we ought respect conventions with respect to citation and attribution.  It is also possible that at the margin, the public part of education, whether it is that interaction effect or the positive nonpecuniary externalities, diminishes with time in school (the Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten phenomenon) and the earned benefits produce positive pecuniary externalities, which leads us directly to engineers being paid more than gender studies professors.  There are no bright line distinctions between "rivalrous" and "nonrivalrous" or "appropriable" and "not appropriable."  Not only that, I'm not interested in what most of the gender studies types spout.

Then, because I like the idea of being "acerbic and forthright" I might venture that in the same way that having sufficient nuclear warheads to destroy life three times over is inefficient, having sufficient third-grade teaching to teach reading in elementary school, again in high school, and again in Biden-subsidized community college is inefficient.