What Karl Marx Thought about 'Free' College
Marx was wrong about a great many things. But he was at least true enough to his egalitarianism to recognize that “free” college would benefit the upper crust of society and make inequality worse.
Few things get progressives more excited than “free” stuff: free health care, free housing, free college.
Evidence for this could be found in a New York Times article from 2022 that was published under the headline “Should College Be Free?” The writer pointed out that surging tuition costs are making college less affordable to Americans.
“In the past three decades, the average cost of attending a private college in the United States has tripled — landing at around $50,000 per year,” Callie Holtermann explains.
College is indeed expensive these days—the result of a virtually endless supply of federal loans that have allowed universities to quadruple the price of tuition since the early 1960s (in real dollars). And the enormous price tag is probably why a majority of Americans support making it “free,” a policy that 85 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of Republicans say they support.
Though President Joe Biden eventually scrapped “free” college form his agenda, some states have forged ahead in recent years.
In 2021, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed into law a bill that offers free tuition to all high school graduates (regardless of income) to enroll at public colleges and universities in the state.
Other states are creating less ambitious programs. Lawmakers in Michigan passed a law to offer free college to residents who were deemed “essential workers” during the pandemic, and to extend free community college to individuals 25 and older. The University of Texas System, meanwhile, recently expanded tuition assistance with a $300 million endowment.
While lawmakers around the United States continue to try to make “free” college a reality, it’s worth noting that perhaps the most famous collectivist in history was opposed to the idea: Karl Marx.
In his “Critique of the Gotha Programme” (pdf)—a letter written to Germany’s Social Democratic Workers’ Party in May 1875—the father of communism explained the problem with “free” college.
“If in some states … higher education institutions are also ‘free,’” Marx said, “that only means in fact defraying the cost of education of the upper classes from the general tax receipts.”
Readers will notice two things from Marx’s statement.
First, Marx makes it clear that “free” education isn’t truly free, which is why he (unlike The New York Times) put the word in quotation marks. As Marx makes clear, this education isn’t free, but paid through tax receipts.
Marx may have been a lousy economist, but he at least understood (to some degree) a basic economic truth: There’s no such thing as a free lunch, an adage popularized by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman.
“That is the free lunch myth,” Friedman explained in a lecture on the topic. “The myth that somehow or other, government can provide goods and services—can spend money—at nobody’s expense.”
Second, Marx is clearly skeptical of the idea of making taxpayers pay for higher education, seeing it as a giveaway to wealthier individuals in society (“the upper classes”).
As it happens, this is precisely why many Americans oppose “canceling” student loan debt. As the left-leaning Brookings Institution pointed out earlier this year, about a third of all student loan debt is owed by the top quintile in America (i.e., the wealthiest 20 percent of households). The bottom 20 percent, meanwhile, hold just 8 percent of student loan debt.
Indeed, comedian Bill Maher has pointed out on HBO that 50 percent of student debt is held by people who went to graduate school. This means that student debt “cancellation” is essentially a wealth transfer to wealthy individuals, since people with advanced degrees earn more than double those who received a high school diploma, on average—$2.7 million in lifetime earnings compared to just $1.3 million for high school grads, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
Now, Marx was wrong about a great many things. He was a poor economist, a racist, and an all-around bad person.
But he was at least true enough to his egalitarianism to recognize that “free” college schemes would inevitably benefit the upper crust of society and make inequality worse—something many of today’s progressives stubbornly refuse to acknowledge despite the overwhelming evidence.
I read your republished blog on FEE titled "Why Karl Marx Desperately Needed Jordan Peterson’s Advice" and I'm genuinely shocked that a history major could be so uncritical of the world around him. Marx's hygiene and personality don't change the fact that our current society has an unexplainable and unjustifiable distribution of wealth that leaves millions in poverty with only a few people holding most of the US' wealth.
My words can't do this visualization justice: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
Hopefully you take a look at it.
Also, this article about college completely ignores the fact that if the barrier of cost were gone, not just rich people would go to undergrad or even grad school. You’re operating under the assumption that the socioeconomic breakdown of students would remain the same despite the whole framework changing drastically, making it possible for anyone to go to college. And, when people say “free” they know the money has to come from somewhere, they know taxes pay for this kind of thing. That’s what progressives are in favor of, using taxes to redistribute the benefits of that wealth through public libraries, public parks, public schools, medicare/medicaid, food stamps, etc. It’s all in an effort to support those who are less well-off through the funds of more fortunate people who don’t need it all.