What about socializing college tuition? In Scandinavia tuition is free and today’s socialists love free. But nothing in life is truly free. As we’ve seen, citizens of the Nordic countries pay for “free” college tuition with the highest middle-class taxes in the world.
And before socialists go all wobbly in the knees for the Scandinavian system, realize that not everyone gets to go to college. If anything, Scandinavia and most of the world are a much harsher meritocracy than America when it comes to college admittance.
Take China, for example. College is “free” but to get there, you have to take perhaps the most difficult college entrance exam in the world: the Gaokao, a nine-hour exam taken over two days. Ten million Chinese high school seniors take the test each year, but only 0.2 percent score high enough to be admitted to a top college.1
In Denmark, there are strict limits on degrees. The state and the university system together regulate the number of degrees in each field. “Let’s say you want to be a political scientist, or a midwife, or a doctor, those are the most difficult educations to get into, and you would have to be in the top 10% to get into those fields. If your grades aren’t good enough, you will have to choose a field that is less competitive or else in high demand by the state,” says Annegrethe Rasmussen.
In fact, despite “free” tuition, the percentage of Scandinavians who matriculate into college is not any higher than in the United States. In Norway, for example, there are disparities in who goes to college. About 14 percent of children from the least educated families attend university compared with 58 percent of children from the most educated families. Statistics on admissions to American colleges is similar. Income statistics also largely follow the degree of education, so even in Norway there are still more college students from wealthier families than poor families.
John Larabell summarizes the situation well: “the problem isn’t just money, it’s about familial and cultural values. Also, since many blue-collar jobs pay quite well in Scandinavian countries, and the welfare state is almost paternal in its scope, there’s not as much incentive to actually go to college and pursue a degree.”
Larabell makes another point that is worth pondering: “If everyone gets a college education, such an education essentially becomes worthless, no better than a high-school diploma is now. Plus, under a tax-funded system, those who choose not to go to college, for any number of reasons, would still be paying for it, much the same way parents who put their kids in private schools in America still pay for the public schools via property taxes.”2
Many American students who are laden with enormous college debt and either no degree because they flunked out, or a worthless degree because they chose a worthless degree, would not be saddled with that debt anywhere else in the world. Not because of a lack of “free” tuition but because of stringent test scores that most of the rest of the world requires.
Interestingly, while tuition is free in Sweden, students still wind up with nearly as much debt as their American counterparts. The average Swede ends up with about $19,000 in debt while the average American has about $24,800 in debt. While the debt burden is less, more Swedes have debt than Americans. Eighty-five percent of Swedes finish college with debt, while about 50 percent of Americans graduate with debt.
How does that happen? Well, while tuition is “free,” rent, food, and entertainment are not. Sweden also has one of the highest costs of living in the world. Another reason that the Swedes graduate with so much debt is that in Sweden college students are expected to pay for their daily expenses.
So, if today’s socialists want to import Scandinavian “free” tuition, they must realize it comes with a price: extremely high middle-class taxes, the state gaining much more control over who gets to go to college and their academic field of study, and college debt not markedly dissimilar from American college debt.3 Nothing is free.