Public College Should Cost What Public School Costs: Nothing
We decided a century ago that high school was public infrastructure. The economy moved; the promise didn't. Free public college finishes the thought.
America already believes in free universal education; it just froze the promise in 1910. Public high school became free because an industrial economy required it. Today's economy makes the same demand of the credential beyond it, and we answer by loaning eighteen-year-olds the price of a house and calling it opportunity.
The debt system is the argument against itself. Two generations have now delayed homes, families, and business formation servicing loans for degrees the labor market told them to get, while the anxiety around cost pushes working-class students away from enrolling at all. Tuition-free public college removes the toll booth: the price becomes legible, zero, and the calculation stops filtering by family wealth. States that piloted free community college found the signal itself changed who applied.
The standard rebuttal, that free college subsidizes the affluent, has it backward: the affluent already attend, tuition or not. Universality is what makes programs durable and dignified rather than means-tested and stigmatized; nobody asks whether public high school is regressive. Pay for it the way we pay for everything we actually value, and the toll on aspiration disappears.