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March 20, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
12:05
What would really happen if college tuition were free?
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What would actually happen if college tuition were free all across America?
I know it sounds like a great idea.
Let's make college free.
And then we can have more students afford more tuition because it's free and we'll have more people who are better educated and they will uplift America.
Right?
That's the idea.
That's the intention.
The people who say they want college to be free are not coming from a place of bad intention.
They're actually coming from a place of good intention.
But as it turns out, good intentions don't control the laws of economics or cause and effect.
And just as an example of that, Obamacare was passed out of good intentions.
Let's have free health care for everyone, or at least affordable health care, if not free, but mostly free.
Let's do that.
So they pushed Obamacare, they passed it, and the mandate came down on employers and said, you've got to provide free health care to your employees.
At least full-time employees working over 30 hours a week, you do.
So what happened?
Companies began cutting everyone's hours to below 30 hours a week.
They began laying off people, firing people, offshoring jobs.
And now unemployment continues to rise.
I'm talking about real unemployment, not the fake government numbers which are fabricated, but the number of people out of work, which is almost 95 million, I think, in America today, who are not working.
Why is that?
It's the law of unintended consequences.
That's what I'm trying to say.
People wanted free health care, but they ended up losing their jobs.
Well, one of them actually caused the other because you made it unaffordable for employers to keep you as an employee.
So now let's look at free college tuition.
What would actually happen if college tuition were free?
Well, first, let's understand what the word free means.
It doesn't mean that it doesn't cost anybody anything, right?
Because the colleges have to get paid, don't they?
They got to pay their professors.
They got to pay their real estate.
They got to pay their loans and, you know, maintenance, heating and cooling costs, electricity, all these things, right?
The universities have to pay their bills, correct?
So where do they get the money?
If the students aren't paying for it, if it's free to the students, that means the government must be paying all that tuition and room and board instead of the students.
So let's be honest about what free really means.
It means somebody else is paying for the students, right?
In other words, free means the government is offering a 100% subsidy for university tuition and room and board.
That's what, quote, free really means.
Now, if the government is paying all the tuition and room and board so that students can attend colleges, Then what will happen?
What will happen to the price of tuition across America?
Well, as a great example, to answer that question, look at pharmaceutical companies.
Back during the Bush administration, that total sellout of a president did a deal with Big Pharma that said the government will be disallowed from being able to negotiate prices or discounts with the drug companies.
And as a result, drug companies began hiking their prices, sometimes 100% a year, sometimes all at once, 5,000% price increases.
And you know why they did that?
Because they already had the deal with the government, and the government could not negotiate with the drug companies.
So, hey, the government was going to reimburse those drug companies for anything they wish to charge, anything.
Just make up a number.
A pill that used to cost $5 a pill, they just raise it to 50.
Why not?
Move the decimal point.
Times 10.
Boom.
We're making huge profits.
And that's what the drug industry did with so-called free health care or free prescription drug benefits through Medicare, for example.
So anytime that something gets subsidized 100% by the government, That institution or those businesses will immediately seek to artificially raise the prices of the services they're offering in order to make more money off of the 100% subsidy.
Wouldn't you?
If you own the college and the government said, we'll cover 100% tuition costs for every student you enroll, what would you do?
You would say, well, hey, tuition just went up 5,000%.
Right?
Because you'd collect all kinds of money, the government would just write you a big fat check, and you'd be laughing your way all the way to the bank.
But you'd do more than that, though.
I know you.
I know you would.
You'd do more than that.
You wouldn't just raise the price of admission.
You would lower the standards of admission, wouldn't you?
You'd want every possible student you could get into your college to join because you're getting a big fat check for every one of those people.
So now instead of having strict entrance standards where you only want the highest academic achievers, you would start to lower those standards rapidly.
Hey, we'll take C students.
We'll take D students.
Ah, you know what?
We'll take F students.
We'll take kids that can't even read or write because they exist, right?
They come out of public schools.
They get a high school diploma.
can't even read, largely illiterate.
They would qualify for college if college tuition were free, right?
Because these colleges would say, we're raking in the box now, look.
Look how many people we're educating now.
Wow, this is higher education.
We're going to make the country better.
But what would really be happening on campus?
the quality of the education would begin to collapse because all the classes would have to be watered down now to reach the illiteracy of the F students that the colleges would be accepting.
Remember, the colleges want to maximize the admissions.
They want to maximize their revenues.
So they would bring in all these F students who really probably don't belong in college, and they would be getting all kinds of money for doing so.
At the same time, the A students, who used to be the cream of the crop, now they're back in the classes with all the F students.
College now becomes essentially a daycare center for high school graduates.
That's what it becomes.
Education is no longer the point.
The point is to enroll as many people as possible, right?
And then to allow them to graduate, you have to lower the academic standards.
And so now colleges would become really an academic joke.
You wouldn't really get a serious education there at all.
This is the result that would happen if college tuition were free.
Interesting, isn't it?
Because the intention is, let's educate everyone, let's make America better, let's uplift the level of academics among the population.
But what you would actually get is a crumbling, a collapse, if you will, of the academic standards of most schools And they would become overcrowded with a bunch of students who do not belong in college because they don't have the academic strength to be there.
But the colleges would be making money.
They'd become huge institutions.
So they have to give these students something to graduate with, right?
So they would start making up degrees in things that are really easy to get degrees in.
Like, well, I don't know, gender studies, for example.
That's already been done.
Oh, well, study gender.
We'll have classes about Caitlyn Jenner.
This media communications professor at the University of Missouri, Melissa Click, she was the one who was bullying the protesters, and she's actually been charged with assault now by the cameraman, the photojournalist who was working for ESPN, and she shoved around, and she incited mob violence against him.
She said, let's bring some muscle over here.
She was teaching classes that were about things like Fifty Shades of Grey.
And she was doing a research project on the social media fan base of Lady Gaga.
So I think she's actually ahead of the curve on this.
She's already in the daycare mode of dealing with F-level students, right?
Those are her classes.
Because I remember when I went to college, I was studying calculus, thermodynamics, anthropology, let's see, international trade and economics, a lot of mathematics classes, writing.
Composition, reviewing novels, things like that.
I mean, I was actually getting an actual education, a four-year degree, which I was happy to earn.
And to some degree, it has served me well today.
After all, I am a professional writer and journalist, and I learned a lot of these skills in college.
Oh, and by the way, I graduated with about $20,000 in debt.
Yep, and I worked, by the way, I worked multiple jobs when I went to school.
I worked at UPS on the late night shift during the holiday season as a loader.
I loaded cardboard boxes into the back of UPS trucks.
Yep, I did that work.
In fact, they liked me so much that I continued through the summer and I was loading boxes in UPS trucks that were 125 degrees.
So I worked really hard.
And then I got another job selling computers.
I was a computer salesperson for a local outfit that built custom computers.
So I worked those two jobs.
And then when I graduated, I still had about 20 grand in debt, if I recall correctly.
And it took me, I think, only about a year to earn and pay that off.
I earned money after I got out of school.
I did well.
I was an entrepreneur.
I worked for myself.
I went out and did writing projects for high-tech companies.
And I earned and collected quite a lot of money, and I was able to pay off my entire student debt in one year.
I think it was a year.
It might have been one to two years.
It's been a while, so excuse me if it's not exact.
So I'm going to go researching all this.
No, it was 12.5 months.
Okay, whatever.
But the point is, you know, I got an actual education from the university where I went, and yeah, I incurred student debt, and I paid it off.
I didn't put a gun to somebody else's head to say, you've got to pay for my education, you've got to wipe out my debt.
I wasn't a cry bully or a cry baby, for that matter.
I was someone who was willing to work and pay off the debt that I had voluntarily incurred because I knew that that debt was going to make me more valuable in the marketplace and that I could earn the money to pay off that debt pretty quickly, which I did.
And that's how student loans really work.
You take on the loan voluntarily because you know it's an investment in you.
It's going to make you a more valuable person.
It's going to allow you to earn more money that you will use to pay off the debt.
Makes total sense, right?
But that's not the way the system works today.
Oh no.
Students, they pout and they whine and they cry and they bully and they scream and they intimidate and they bitch, just endlessly bitch, to get other people to pay off their loans and pay their tuition and pay their debt.
That's the difference between my generation and today's college generation.
It's like day and night difference.
So I wanted to explain this to you because Even this idea of, hey, let's have free education for everyone, is a really, really bad idea for the reasons I've outlined here.
It would set into motion a series of unintended consequences that would destroy the value and the quality of education for people all across the country, and it would turn colleges into daycare centers with lowered standards in order to maximize their revenue.
And it would also be a rip-off for the taxpayers because the colleges and universities would artificially hike their admissions prices, their tuition, and room and board in order to maximize their revenue.
That's what would happen.
So let's not make college tuition free, but let's support students with loans who are willing to work and pay them off like I did.
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