At the end of WWII our country provided the G.I. Bill for returning servicemen. A key part of the bill was funding college education. This was done solely to keep servicemen out of the job market so as not to return to the economy of the great depression.
But the G.I. Bill had an even larger effect than keeping us at full employment. By sending people to college who otherwise never would have gone, those people then moved in to jobs they otherwise never would have been able to hold, making more money for themselves and their families. A large part of the reason our economy grew so well after WWII was we significantly increased the number of college graduates in the workforce.
We face the same issue today as to the end of WWII. We need to get people out of the job market and we need more college graduates for the information-rich economy of today and tomorrow. The most valuable stimulus effort medium term is one that will get people out of the workforce and in to college. It eliminates high unemployment today and in 2 – 4 years starts injecting highly trained people back in to the economy.
So lets look at this for Colorado, and we can then multiply it by 63 to see numbers for the country as a whole. Colorado has 2 million employees. Very roughly we want to pull about 5% out of the job market so we want to send 100,000 additional students to college in Colorado.
My rough estimate is we have 400,000 college students presently in Colorado. We have roughly 100,000 at the 4 largest campuses. But there are a boatload of additional schools and to pick just one, CCD has 13,000 students.
To this would add 25% to the student body at each college. This is significant, but doable. The business school at C.U. has virtually no classes on Friday (by student & faculty quiet agreement) so they merely need to spread classes across the entire week. This additional 25% also means that the colleges will be hiring a lot of people – putting a further dent in unemployment.
What will this cost? Lets say $20,000.00/student to put it on the high side for tuition, books, room & board. That would be 2 billion for Colorado or 126 billion for the country. In the scope of the stimulus package, this is very doable. And I think this could replace the tax cuts for business because most businesses would much prefer to see a significant increase in the number of college graduates available to them than a small tax cut.
What about the speed to put this in place? It’s there. Between the present federal college financial aid system and the G.I. Bill administration, we have the systems and people in place. Once again some more people would need to be hired, but at a rate that is very manageable.
We could have this in place for this spring semester if it was made a top priority and the bill was ready for Obama’s signature in January. It easily can be in place for this summer’s semester. So it is clearly “shovel ready.”
Now lets get to the final key piece of this proposal. Giving a college education for free won’t fly politically. It would be unfair to all those who have paid to date and the political consensus is that while K-12 should be free, higher-ed should not. (This will change, but not tomorrow.) So this comes with a pair of requirements:
This would provide a system that people would see as equitable where people are given a hand up, but they are then repaying that effort. Not only that, but it then injects into the workforce people who have contributed back to society and that viewpoint will carry over to the workplace.
I think if this is done that 40 years from now when people look back on our response to the financial meltdown this will be seen as the effort that had the largest long term benefit for our society.
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Where are these 100,000 students supposed to come from? Are there that many people willing to follow the requirements you’ve set up in order to go to school?
Next, where is CU, for example, supposed to put 7,000-odd extra students? We don’t have that kind of space…not just for students, but new professors and staff. Are we willing to make a huge infrastructure investment that thus far people have been unwilling to provide? 20K a student won’t cover that.
We also have to look at where the Public Universities in the state get a huge chunk of their money: out-of-state students. The $7,500 Colorado students pay in just tuition and fees at CU doesn’t cover what it costs for them to be here. Any government program would need to cover that to be successful.
Anyway, I agree that a program like this would be a good thing, but the price-tag seems like it would be higher.
A lot of people will consider college if they are unemployed/underemployed in a lousy job market, as will those in dead end jobs who want a chance at something better. And if we get 50K instead of 100K, that’s still gigantic.
Where do we put the students? Walk around the classrooms, especially on a Friday. Lots are empty. There’s romm for the additional classes.
The professors & staff – you would have to have a lot double up in offices, or have the new ones hot-swap desks they use. With a laptop they can even go work at Starbucks.
And I think the cost would be ok, because each additional student is a lot cheaper than the base students – because all you face is the additional costs of educating that student.
You could also have classes later in the day when campuses are more or less deserted. With the way classes are scheduled now, there’s not room for 25, or even 15% more classes. Something like 80% of classes at CU are scheduled between 9a-2p…which I’ve always found reasonably annoying… Change that and you’re right, it would probably work.
Fran Coleman was forever trying to work out the plan for finishing high school in 5 years, with an associates degree. The thought was that kids that wouldn’t normally have any higher education would stick around and leave with something beyond HS, while kids that would drop out because school’s a waste would stick around for the extra benefit.
She also had the idea (and IIRC, the logic to back it up) that Hispanic males in particular would hang around. HS dropout with no training (if you’re lucky) often equals construction grunt, but with a degree you have a shot at being a construction boss. This is an important aspect because the percentage of Hispanic males who dropout of HS is eerily close to the percentage who end up in jail, usually as repeat offenders.
Of course it didn’t fly, in Colorado alone it would have cost… Christ, can’t remember! Maybe it was like $300 million? Anyway, a fortune.
In your scenario, if you add Fran’s, the price tag goes down and it would do nearly as much good, IMO.
First, where do you think those students would live? CU had a record number of incoming freshmen and had to kick out graduate students to make room for them. And those are much smaller numbers than you’re talking about. Building new housing takes a few years, and until then you basically just have to kick people out. Then they get stuck in a small rental market, making prices go up for everybody.
Will they hire more faculty? Perhaps, or perhaps they’ll just hire adjuncts. More likely they’ll just increase class sizes. Or put students on waiting lists, so that they can’t get the courses they need and have to take longer to graduate.
More broadly, you have the issue of what to do with all these new college graduates after college. Lots of college graduates can’t get jobs that use their skills now. Adding more college graduates makes current degrees less valuable, especially since they’d likely be easier to get. (There’s a reason not everybody goes to college now, and it’s not all about affording tuition.)
There’s a lot of merit in having education funding be a part of a serious stimulus package, but it really needs to be better thought out than this proposal, I think.
As for the notion that the GI bill was “solely” to reduce unemployment, I’d like to see some kind of evidence for that.
First off on the purpose of the G.I. Bill, read the history of the time – the goal was keep the returning troops out of the workforce because they were scared we would have a return to the depression.
On housing, these will not be 18 year old graduates from High School. Most will be people who are not going to move from where they are living. So housing should not be an issue.
On covering all the students, I think it would be a combination of hiring adjuncts (some of those college graduates without jobs) and having professors teach an additional class or two.
I also think online classes could be a large part of this. If someone is living in Limon but has the brains to go to C.U., online is the way to go.
Finally, when the economy is booming there is a severe shortage of college educated workers. During the .COM boom I spent ¼ of my time trying to find qualified people to hire.