Just because there's no upside, doesn't mean there isn't a downside.

From Obama's College Plan Bows to Elites by Megan McArdle.

Years ago, I lived in Australia. The country is obviously much smaller than the US (fifteen times smaller in population) and this fostered a wonderful communal intimacy. However, smallness also came with some downsides. In the area of government these showed up as a tendency for government proposals or legislation to get a long way down the line of implementation with major issues still being uncovered. I recall marvelling one morning driving in to Sydney, at an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio report on some fairly consequential government policy issue that had been presented to Parliament the day before. It wasn't but a few hours before someone pointed out that there was a large math error in calculating the cost or some similar issue which undermined the raison d'etre of the proposal in the first place. I was brand new to Australia at the time and initially quite shocked. Eventually I came to realize it was simply a function of size. Smaller organizations have less error checking and consequently more stuff gets through that should not.

This comes to mind with the recent proposal regarding making Community Colleges free. The sentiment is obviously an attractive one - make self-improvement easier to achieve for all citizens. But, as in Australia, even with the first broadcast, there are some readily identifiable problems with the proposal.

McArdle is not comprehensive in her criticism but quite devastating.

President Obama has announced a plan to make community college "as free and universal as high school." A lot could be said about this plan, and most of it already has been--see Tyler Cowen for a comprehensive roundup with a bottom line I endorse: "Overall my take is that the significant gains are to be had at the family level and at the primary education level, and that the price of community college is not a major bottleneck under the status quo."

The major barriers to completing college do not include community-college tuition, which is low for everyone, and basically free for low-income families (you automatically qualify for a Pell Grant if your family income is less than $24,000 a year, and many others qualify above that line).

Fundamentally, the proposal addresses no known material problem. If you want to help people improve their personal productivity, then it is not clear that free CC tuition will actually change the current equation. While there may be little upside potential, there is clearly a downside which seems to have been completely ignored.

There is a significant class issue which McArdle calls out.

If you graduated high school without mastering basic math and reading, and can't complete the remedial courses offered by your community college, what are the odds that you are going to earn a valuable degree? Why are we so obsessed with pushing that group further into the higher education system, rather than asking if we aren't putting too much emphasis on getting a degree?

Asking that question usually raises accusations of elitism, of dividing society into the worthy few and the many Morlocks who aren't good enough for college. I would argue instead that what's elitist is our current fixation on college. It starts from the supposition that being good at school is some sort of great personal virtue, so that any suggestion that many people aren't good at school must mean that those people are not equal and valuable members of society. And that supposition is triple-distilled balderdash.

[snip]

Higher education is becoming the ginseng of the policy world: a sort of all-purpose snake oil for solving any problem you'd care to name, as long as we consume enough of it. Education is a very good thing, but it is not the only good thing. An indiscriminate focus on pushing more people into the system is no cure for society's ills--and indeed, often functions as a substitute for helping the people who are struggling in the current system.

What if people in the policy elite stopped assuming that the ideal was to make everyone more like them, and started thinking about making society more hospitable to those who aren't? My grandfather graduated into a world where a man with a high-school diploma could reasonably hope to own his own business, or become someone else's highly valued employee, a successful pillar of a supportive community. His grandchildren graduated into a world where a college diploma was almost the bare necessity to get any kind of a decent job. Why aren't we at least asking ourselves if there's something we can do to create more opportunity for people without diplomas, instead of asking how many more years we can keep everyone in school? Why do all of our proposed solutions essentially ratify the structure that excludes so many people, instead of questioning it?

This proposal seems to fail to help people become more productive but instead focuses on helping them to look more like the privileged elite. A classic example of Reynolds' Law.

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.