What if education
were available without tuition charges to every resident meeting
admissions criteria, as a right, at any public, post-secondary
educational institution in the United States? Is this idea feasible?
Is there potential public support for it? What would be its likely
effects if implemented? What would such a commitment cost? How
could those costs be met? These questions are not on the radar
screen of American public discourse today. In fact, they are virtually
unthinkable in the current consensus that sets the boundaries
of acceptable policy debate.
Yet paying
for higher education is a major concern for most Americans. In
2000, polls indicated that respondents included education, along
with the economy, as one of the two highest priority issues in
choosing a presidential candidate. Although much of this expressed
concern is centered on the quality of pre-collegiate schooling,
Americans are also worried about access to post-secondary education.
Legitimately so, for post-secondary education is increasingly
a prerequisite for effective labor force participation, for any
hope of a relatively secure, decent job. If that is the case,
shouldn't society have an obligation to provide universal access
to such an essential social good? Why should we accept a putative
consensus that preempts consideration of an issue so important
to so many Americans?
Universal
access to higher education is not entirely unprecedented in recent
American history. The most dramatic approximation to it was the
Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, popularly known as the
GI Bill, under which a generation of Second World War veterans
received what was usually full tuition support and stipends (up
to nearly $12,000 per year in 1994 dollars) to attend post-secondary
educational institutions. By 1952, the federal government had
spent $7 billion (nearly $39 billion in 1994 dollars) on sending
veterans to college. This amounted to 1.3 percent of total federal
expenditures ($521.8 billion) during that period. A 1988 report
by a congressional subcommittee on education and health estimated
that 40 percent of those who attended college under the GI Bill
would not otherwise have done so. The report also found that each
dollar spent educating that 40 percent produced a $6.90 return
(more than $267 billion in 1994 dollars) in national output due
to extra education and increased federal tax revenues from the
extra income the beneficiaries earned.
The dynamics
set in motion by the GI Bill had broad, positive ramifications
for the country as a whole, extending far beyond the direct beneficiaries.
Not only did the latter benefit from increased income, occupational
and employment opportunities, and personal growth and enrichment;
these benefits extended intergenerationally, making for greater
opportunities for their children and families, which contributed
to a general expansion in college enrollments through the 1970s,
far outstripping population growth. Enrollments increased by nearly
21 percent between 1950-1960 and nearly 167 percent between 1960-1970.
In 1950, for example, 1.7 percent of the total U.S. population
were enrolled in colleges and universities; by 1975, the figure
had risen steadily to 5.2 percent. This growth also fueled a dramatic
expansion of colleges and universities. Bulging enrollments led
to substantial enlargement of physical plant and capacities at
existing institutions. Increased demand for higher education also
prompted creation of new institutions, many of them public campuses
in urban and under-served rural areas that brought higher education
physically within reach of new segments of society. The Bureau
of the Census counted 1,708 institutions of higher education in
1940 and 1,959 in 1960; by 1981, the number had risen to more
than 3,200. All this expansion in turn stimulated construction
and other employment opportunities, ranging from faculties and
staff to support services and the commercial sector. It also dramatically
democratized college and university life and broadened and deepened
the intellectual life of campuses and academic disciplines. Michael
J. Bennett writes movingly of the GI Bill's democratizing cultural
and intellectual effects in When Dreams Came True: The GI Bill
and the Making of Modern America.
Of course,
factors other than public tuition support contributed significantly
to the postwar explosion in higher education. Among them were
the general economic prosperity of the period; the rising wages,
benefits, and job security available to many unionized workers
as part of the Fordist capital/labor accord that prevailed at
least in the industrial sector through the 1960s; and the perceived
need to invest in education sparked by the Soviet Union's launching
of Sputnik in 1957. After 1965, the Vietnam War no doubt also
contributed to increased college attendance, insofar as student
deferments from conscription made enrollment more attractive to
draft-age males.
And the expansion,
particularly in cities, was often a mixed blessing. To the extent
that new construction for higher education was linked to urban
renewal schemes, it frequently came with the unacknowledged cost
of destroying inner-city neighborhoods. Any overall cost-benefit
analysis would have to account for the social losses of such dislocation,
which included seriously disrupting the lives of people already
precariously situated financially, severing ties to place and
social networks, intensifying pressures on affordable housing,
and exacerbating racial inequalities. (As Martin Anderson noted
in The Federal Bulldozer, more than two-thirds of those displaced
nationally for urban renewal site clearance and construction through
the early 1960s were black or Puerto Rican.) Nevertheless, expanded
access to higher education almost certainly has had substantially
democratizing effects in the general population and in the long-term,
even among the racial groups whose stigmatized status and segregated
living arrangements made many of them particularly vulnerable
to victimization by the redevelopment juggernaut.
The history
of the City University of New York provides a local, but instructive
illustration of the general social benefits that result from removing
financial constraint from access to higher education. The free
tuition policy in effect in the CUNY system until the 1970s also
brought higher education within reach for tens of thousands of
people for whom it would otherwise have been no more than an unrealizable
dream. In addition to the impressively lengthy roster of prominent
public officials, academics, and others who took advantage of
that access, exponentially more people were able to translate
it into more secure and rewarding jobs than would otherwise have
been attainable.
Similarly,
many states responded to increased demand for higher education
by expanding and rationalizing public systems to facilitate access,
often by enlarging and integrating community college, regional,
and state university tiers in ways that enabled students to move
fluidly from one level to another as their accomplishment and
interests warranted. For decades, the California system was a
model of this kind of egalitarian access and fluidity. The aftermath
of Proposition 13 (the 1978 California ballot initiative that
radically cut property taxes and imposed draconian restrictions
on subsequent increases) and the constrained revenue base resulting
from tax revolt politics has reduced this mobility within the
California system since the early 1980s. However, graduate admission
records underscore its persistence: applicants from California
still commonly display transcripts that mark the journey from
community to state college and then to the university system.
Beginning
in the 1970s and accelerating during the 1980s, costs of attending
colleges and universities rose nationally, and sources of federal
grant-in-aid support decreased relative to need. Aggregate tuition
and fees at all kinds of institutions of higher education (private
and public) rose from slightly more than $5 billion in 1970 to
more than $55 billion in 1996. When adjusted for inflation, this
amounts to a 170 percent increase, which was nearly two and a
half times greater than the rate of growth in aggregate enrollments
over that period (while real wages remained flat, or even declined,
during that time). Meanwhile, in 1970 federal grants covered only
2.7 percent of total tuition and fees, but that was at a point
when such costs, especially for in-state students at public institutions,
were generally low and more easily manageable. By 1980, increasing
concerns about rising costs had prompted increased government
aid-covering more than 23 percent of tuition and fees nationally,
though this increase hardly kept pace with increased costs. By
1996, such grants had declined and covered less than 12 percent
of total tuition and fees. This retrenchment was partly the result
of intentional rightist strategies to rein in what was perceived
as a source of "adversarial culture" in universities
and an expression of the corporate-led attack on social wage benefits
of all sorts that might weaken labor discipline.
Increasingly,
college attendance for all except the wealthy has become contingent
on qualification for interest-carrying student loans. This filters
out many potential students who either cannot afford the encumbrance
of loan indebtedness or cannot qualify for loans. More students
are prevented from completing degree programs because they exhaust
the sums for which they qualify before satisfying the requirements.
Still more take much longer to complete their courses of study
than they otherwise would because they have to take off time to
work. Still more are pressured by their debt burdens to pursue
courses of study, or even subsequent lines of employment, outside
their interests in hopes of earning enough to pay off their loans.
This state
of affairs is inimical to a decent and just society. It imposes
unacceptable, though typically unacknowledged, human costs in
terms of social waste and unfulfilled potential, and it perverts
the values of higher education. Moreover, it is unnecessary. A
1999 report from the US Department of Education's National Center
for Education Statistics indicates that in 1996 tuition and fee
revenues at all two-year and four-year degree-awarding public
educational institutions totaled just over $23 billion. This is
a relatively small sum, equivalent to roughly 2 percent of current
federal budgets. Even if increased access were to double the number
of students attending colleges and universities and double the
annual tuition demand to $46 billion, that would still be a sum
easily absorbed within current budgets. Even potential increases
in other forms of federal aid to students, such as Pell Grants
for non-tuition expenses, would not prohibitively increase the
total cost. The expenditure commitments could be absorbed easily
by restoring minimal tax justice; for instance, simply closing
corporate tax shelter loopholes introduced since 1990 would generate
an estimated $60 billion annually.
One of the
most regrettable and self-defeating developments within progressive
policy circles during the last two decades has been an atrophy
of practical, programmatic vision. This is especially true with
respect to those policy areas that lie in the domain of social
wage provision-for example, health care, education, affordable
housing, income support, old-age security, civil rights, and labor
rights. This has been one of Reaganism's subtler, but more far-reaching
victories. By seizing the political initiative and setting the
terms of public debate, the right has so demoralized us and put
us so completely on the defensive politically that we often seem
capable of struggling only to minimize losses or, at best, to
press for minimally incremental, often concessionary reforms.
The result is that we have been unable effectively to counter
the right wing's fundamental proposition that government has little
or no responsibility for securing the general welfare and providing
access to opportunities for the enhancement of the lives of the
general population. We seem to have lost the ability or the will
to articulate policies for making the society as just and democratic
as it should be; instead, we have become increasingly focused
on trying to secure what we think might actually be attainable
within a policy universe dominated by the right's denial of the
efficacy of public action.
This failure
of progressive policy vision is understandable. Activist and advocacy
groups that have faced the brunt of the endlessly escalating right-wing
assault are necessarily forced into a defensive mode as their
often already precariously situated constituencies have been its
prime targets. However, the only way to turn the tide of the right's
war against the social gains won in the middle half of the twentieth
century is to present clearly-and generate public discussion around-an
affirmative policy agenda that addresses people's most basic concerns
and is a practical expression of a different view of public responsibility
and governmental capacity. We need to shift the terms of public
debate, to break the stranglehold of Margaret Thatcher's right-wing
mantra that the late Daniel Singer summed up pithily as TINA-There
Is No Alternative-to the unrestrained action of market forces.
This task does not contradict or override the more immediate struggles
to preserve past gains that have been under concerted attack,
such as commitments to racial and gender justice, social security
for the elderly, and governmental provision of quality public
services. Indeed, it is a necessary complement to them. The only
way to preserve those gains is to challenge the arguments used
in attacking them.
We need a
clear voice that seeks to shift the terms of public debate by
reasserting the principles of social solidarity and public responsibility
that have become increasingly marginalized during the past two
decades. This means focusing on objectives that speak to people's
immediate, everyday concerns-even if these lie beyond today's
political horizon and cannot reasonably be expected to bear fruit
within less than several election cycles. Objectives such as universal
health care and universal access to higher education are practically
realizable if political will can be generated to implement them.
How can we generate that will? We have to open a broad policy
discussion that begins with the question, What would American
public policy look like and how would our institutions operate
if their first priority were to meet the most important concerns
of the vast majority of the population?
This majority
is not currently included among those that define the parameters
of policy debate; they have not participated in calculating the
supposed limits of feasibility and practicality that narrow the
political horizon. Yet, as Michael Zweig has argued persuasively
in The Working Class Majority: America's Best Kept Secret, they
are the American demos, the democratic base. The left's most vital
task, therefore, is to encourage a truly popular discussion about
national priorities and the means to fulfill them. Not only do
poll data indicate that education is already a broadly shared
concern; in our own lives and in our interactions with others,
we all recognize the strain that paying for higher education imposes
throughout the population. So it makes sense to argue that significant
potential exists for building grassroots support for realistic
strategies that would make access to higher education available
to all Americans, so far as interest and ability can take them.
In the comparably
critical area of health care, the Maine legislature's passage
of a single-payer bill, signed into law by the governor, is the
most dramatic recent indication of openness within the public
to policy strategies that break sharply with neoliberal orthodoxy.
In last year's elections, single-payer ballot initiatives won
by at least 60 percent majorities in non-binding referenda in
six legislative districts across Massachusetts and in Alachua
County, Florida (where the initiative received more votes than
any presidential candidate). These are admittedly modest victories,
but they at least reinforce a suspicion that popular sentiment
can be cultivated in support of policies that address broadly
shared needs in just and egalitarian ways, without subordinating
them to market theology. The key ingredient missing from left
politics at this juncture in the United States is a concerted
strategy for building popular constituencies to pursue objectives
that resonate with people's concerns and harnessing those objectives
to a social vision that lies outside the limits defined by current
elite consensus.
That is in
large measure how the right was able to change the terms of political
debate in the first place, though the vision around which it articulates
those concerns is largely a scam. After Barry Goldwater was swamped
by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, militants of the right embarked on
a strategic, long-term campaign that was largely grassroots-based.
They realized that their push had been premature; the Johnson
landslide showed them that it was necessary to take a step back
and try to create a popular constituency for their political agenda.
They pursued this objective by doing several things that we have
consistently failed to do since the high period of civil rights
and antiwar activism in the 1960s. They mobilized activists at
the local level around issue-based campaigns that challenged the
prevailing axes of incrementalist policy debate-for instance,
for school prayer and tax cuts, against abortion, affirmative
action, the Equal Rights Amendment, and school busing. They identified
and cultivated bases of support around each of these issues and
worked to knit them together into a coherent movement.
This is the
stuff of social-movement building. For too long now progressives
have operated as if we already have the mobilized constituencies
that we need. The governing consensus in national politics indicates
that we don't. This is one of the strategic limitations of the
domestic mobilization to challenge the World Trade Organization
and other neoliberal globalization initiatives. While a focus
on mounting highly visible international protests is understandable
and perhaps necessary, by themselves those actions do little to
deepen popular awareness of the dynamics and dangers that activists
wish to combat. To that extent, these mobilizations may be self-limiting
in scope and effectiveness.
Their continued
success requires planting roots within the broader population.
Most Americans, however, have at most inchoate and incoherent
views of the stakes of economic globalization; the interpretation
of this process for popular discourse remains-at least outside
the ranks of already committed progressives and attentive union
members-the province of corporate media and its sound-bite analyses.
It is past time for us to learn the same lesson that the right
learned after Goldwater's defeat.
A common
objection to this comparison is that the right succeeded because
it plays to people's fears, which are supposedly easier to mobilize
around than more abstract, less emotionally charged political
programs. But the concrete fears that most people experience most
acutely connect much more immediately with the programs of the
left: for example, fear of job loss and declining living standards,
lack of access to adequate health care, affordable housing, and
quality education. Another objection, largely a smear by smug
neoliberals, is that the left proposes no new ideas and offers
only opposition without clear, practical alternatives. But the
right galvanizes its ranks largely around opposition to abortion,
taxation, civil rights, immigration, and social spending. And
what ideas are more shopworn in American politics than racism,
nativism, and unrestrained property rights? Indeed, the right
persists in presenting itself as an opposition movement even as
it consolidates its dominance of the political landscape under
the mantra of bipartisanship.
It is only
by taking up the challenge of building a coherent movement, creating
and cultivating popular support for a long-term struggle focused
on everyday needs-what are sometimes described as "practical
utopias"-that it will be possible to redefine the terms of
national policy debate. Removal of financial constraint on access
to higher education could be such an initiative. It could appeal
immediately to students, parents, university faculty and staff,
and the organizations that represent them. It also has a natural
and historic base in the labor movement, and not only among unions
that represent workers in the education sector. Free public education
was one of the two main demands of the earliest American unions,
along with the shorter work week.
Despite the
right's attempts to characterize public support for higher education
as an upper-middle-class giveaway, this is an issue that has resonance
throughout the population. The "Joe Sixpack" imagery
that drives so much disingenuous right-wing populism is simply
bogus. Interest in educating oneself and one's children-for both
instrumental reasons related to employment and noninstrumental
reasons related to intellectual curiosity and self-fulfillment-is
not by any means the exclusive property of the upper middle class.
It is a condescending caricature that other working people do
not have similar aspirations. Indeed, an element of this issue's
appeal is its broad resonance within the population; it has the
potential to cut across the familiar lines of division by race,
gender, age, inner city, and suburb that the right has successfully
exploited and intensified over the past two decades.
The Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute, a nonprofit educational organization
associated with the Labor Party, will put out a call this fall
for a grassroots campaign to make higher education universally
accessible to all academically qualifying potential students.
(Accessibility also should require adequate remedial and developmental
support for borderline admits and easy movement from community
college through university on the basis of interest and demonstrated
ability.)
This could
be the beginning of a significant popular movement-on the order
of earlier agitation for black Americans' civil rights, for the
eight-hour day, or for old-age assistance-that helps to redefine
the terms of national political debate. As those earlier movements
did, it could also achieve its own objectives and, in the process,
expand the foundation of American democracy.
Adolph Reed, Jr., is professor
of political science on the Graduate Faculty of Social and Political
Science at the New School for Social Research, a member of the
Interim National Council of the Labor Party, and serves on the
board of Public Citizen, Inc. His most recent book is Class Notes:
Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene.
