There was an article in the State Press (ASU’s newspaper) recently about student groups pressuring congressmen to help make college more affordable for everyone. Normally I ignore everything in the State Press except the crossword and the word jumbles, but this one caught my eye because this argument is made quite often. It goes: a college education is getting more and more expensive; therefore, Congress, or state legislatures, must give more money to young people (and of course, taxes must go up).
What puzzles me about these arguments is that there is a very simple alternative to taxing some people to let others go to college: pressure the universities to lower their costs. This changes the transaction from one involving coercion (government forcibly taking money from some and giving it to others) to one of voluntary agreement (the college/university can lower its prices or risk losing students or bad media attention).
The simple reason why student groups would not utilize this method is that a reduction in the price of something necessitates a reduction in the level of service. Rather than lower the quality of the university they are attending, it is more rationale for the student groups to pressure government institutions to spend other people’s money to help still others pay for college.
