There are many countries across Europe that offer its citizens college at no cost. Or, to put it another way, the cost of going to college is embedded in their taxes, so the students don’t have to pay any tuition fees when they enter college because it’s already paid for. What countries currently offer free college tuition, or have done so in the near past? Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Finland, France, Austria, and Greece are all nations that have some form of free college education for their citizens, or for other citizens that are part of the European Union. This same concept is being pushed here in the United States under the name “free college for all.”
When democratic socialists in the United States, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, endorse the idea of “free college for all,” they are ignoring the decades of evidence as to how that set-up played out in Europe. And how did it play out in Europe?
If any of you have traveled to Europe, and have eaten at a restaurant, sipped a coffee at a cafe, or drank a beer at a pub, and you had a chance to talk to your server, barista, or bartender, you’d quickly find out that many of them have college degrees. In fact, many of them have advanced degrees, such as masters and doctorate degrees.
So, with their college degrees, why are they working as servers and bartenders? Because they couldn’t find any work utilizing the education and skills for which they received their college degrees. In fact, there’s large segments of the population in countries that offer tuition-free college that can’t find work utilizing their college degrees.
So, why can’t they find work utilizing their education? There are two reasons. One of the reasons, you’ll discover, is that European colleges in countries that offer free college are usually overcrowded and thinly stretched – that is, there are way too many people getting college degrees than the labor market needs, which means that there are a lot of people in Europe not utilizing the college degrees for that reason.
The second reason has to do with the economy. You see, in order for European countries to pay for their “free college for all” programs, along with other socialist programs, they had to levy a heavy tax load on Europeans and European businesses. This heavy tax load hinders economic growth, which you need to have for jobs to be created that need people with college degrees. Because those jobs don’t get created, there are a lot of people who can’t utilize their degrees and have to find work elsewhere.
In other words, the high taxes levied to pay for everyone to get college degrees hindered the kind of economic growth that allowed many people from using their degrees that those taxes paid for. And that’s on top of the fact that tuition-free college causes way more people to attend college than their labor markets need. That means that billions, tens of billions, or even hundreds of billions of Euros of tax money going to waste to pay for something that never gets used.
Going the Other Way
You should also note that many of these European countries that offer tuition-free college for their citizens are starting to offer tuition fees. For example, Sweden and Germany didn’t used to charge tuition and fees, but now they do. So, it seems that as politicians in the United States are trying to push the concept of “free college for all,” European countries are starting to realize that there may need to be tuition and other fees to lower their tax costs.
In other words, the “free college for all” program democratic socialists are pushing won’t work the way they want it to. Unless we can figure out a way to expand our education to include not just K-12 education, but a college-level education as well, and do it by utilizing all the tax money already brought in for education purposes by local, state, and federal taxes, without raising taxes one more cent, then the “free college for all” program is a bust.
