Government Waste and Cheap Education

The long awaited moment came today when I found out that I would not be paying for my education next year.  For me, this means that I will graduate with a degree from UC Berkeley without ever (seriously ever) paying a dollar to any college that I have attended. I’ve had to pay for student government fees, health care, and textbooks, but never a dollar in tuition. West Valley is still hounding me for the $76 I owe them—the cumulative total cost of my three years there.

While this is exciting for me, my purpose here is to provide a basis for altering the direction of conversations about government waste as a political and economic issue. 

The political side comes from the fact that many people are eager to criticize the government’s (mis)management or subsidizing of public institutions like Medicare, schools, the post office, welfare, or Social Security. Many people use specific personal examples or stereotypes. The problem with this reasoning is that the government has an almost four trillion dollar budget. So an example of a friend siphoning an extra $50/ week in his unemployment check, or the example of a single mother on welfare who spends her “extra” money on Lotto tickets don’t begin to explain how much the government actually does; not even if there are millions of unemployed people and welfare recipients wasting money. 

The truth of the matter is that many more people have succeeded not despite the government, but because of it. These success stories however, don't grab headlines. The media doesn’t cover the commencement of tens of thousands of students at publicly funded universities in this country, but everyday they find a story of some waste in the government. 

Another common argument about government spending is that if the government just gives stuff away, people won’t value it. A recent TED talk by Esther Duflo (highly recommended) provides another example of how this "economic" reasoning is baseless.  Duflo talks about ways to alleviate poverty in Africa by studying the most cost-effective ways to get Africans to use bed nets (to prevent mosquito bites) and deworming medications—two factors that have been shown to increase lifespan and surprisingly, school attendance.  After comparing various strategies, she found the most effective way to get people to use these items in the long and short run was to make them easily accessible and then pay people to use it. In America, this means limiting the economic, medical, and social/cultural barriers to education at all levels. 

What the Africa example and the thousands of graduates who used financial aid show is that if you give someone a little bit, they often want more; meaning that if you provide someone a high quality high school education for free, they will be more likely to go to college. If you provide an unemployed person training in a new skill, they will be more likely to use it than stay on unemployment for fun. While this runs contrary to basic economics, it seems to correspond nicely with reality.

The take-home point is that while the government is certainly not perfect at distributing resources, I think the recently developing anti-government hatred seems to have lost touch with reality.  So when people complain about the millions of dollars that have been wasted, remind them there are thousands of students who have made a great use of their tax dollars. The same students who will soon be paying for their social security.