Persuasive Essay: Tuition Free College

There has been talk about introducing nationwide tuition free college. President's and presidential candidates are talking about it and many people are listening to it and are liking the idea. Just recently President Obama and First Lady Jill Biden created a national campaign to create tuition free college. This raises more questions than just the idea of tuition free college. The questions that are raised are: how will this affect the economy? How will we fund these colleges? What will happen to private colleges that are not tuition free? How will the quality of degrees offered by both tuition free and private colleges compare? All of these questions are important to consider because it affects us both directly and indirectly. We as a nation

These colleges will not be able to survive on sole donations, so the US will have to use taxes. A raise in taxes will indeed be a very unpleasant aspect to all who pay taxes. But if you think about it, those students that will have the opportunity to make more money because they now have a two year certificate rather than a high school diploma. This will not be an instant solution to the funding of these colleges, but roughly within two years the people who went through these colleges will have jobs. They will be able to pay taxes in order to fund these colleges and since there are more people making a decent amount of money than the taxes for each individual would be lower (Van Hook). But I'm not an economist and to be honest, I do not think it is that simple when it comes to the funding these colleges. All I can say is, that taxes will go up and making tuition free college is not really free, rather just paid for by taxpayers

One such country is Germany, where the colleges are a success because the percentage of students attending is lower than that of the US (Jackson). An additional question then arises, how do European countries fund tuition free colleges? There are many differences that set the United States apart from these countries. First of all, the US is, in terms of population, much larger, causing the US to have more students that plan to get a college education. On top of that the area of the US is much larger and thus the US would need more colleges to cover that area. Thus the more colleges, the more funding needed. Another difference is that, the percentage of the population that goes onto higher education in the European countries is a lot lower than that of the US. The US had a 94% enrolment in colleges in 2012 compared to the 62% enrollment in Germany. Also the income tax in European countries is significantly higher than that of the US. The total tax wedge, a measure of income tax, in 2014 in Germany was 49.3%, while in the US the total tax wedge was 31.5% (Jackson). The taxes in Germany are so high compared to the US and as a result Germany is even capable of offering free tuition for foreign students. This data suggests that the US is going to have a harder time creating a tuition free college system because we will need to have more colleges because of our higher population and a high