I hail originally from Spain, a country with extremely cheap college education compared to the US. Did free college provide better outcomes? Only to a point. Sp

I hail originally from Spain, a country with extremely cheap college education compared to the US. Did free college provide better outcomes? Only to a point. Spain is a country with over 20% unemployment. The country is full of people with college degrees who can't get a job anywhere near their field. Given that degrees are so common, they become artificial gates: You are asked for a degree to do jobs that do not need a degree at all! How do you really find a good job then? Mostly through family networking. And who has a good family network? The same kids that could afford college regardless. Many college educations are just years wasted, not unlike bad degrees in the US. No matter how many people might think about the wonders of classical educations, and how college taught them to learn, and similar drivel, in practice, those things only matter if you have opportunities handed to you anyway. For people that do not get the opportunities, college is only helpful if it helps them get the opportunities! Whether that's through non-family networking, or because what they studied in college is something in demand in the job market. When studying the effects of any policy change, we have can't just stop at the first level: We have to see how the rest of the world will react to the primary results to the policy change. It's a bit how student loans didn't really make it that much easier to go to college: What they really did was make all colleges a lot more expensive, making a mistake in major and/or institution that much more dangerous. I think of a friend of mine, Ph.D in Biology with a 6 figure college debt, and no good American jobs that would take her. She's teaching technical english in Japan, because it pays marginally better than her American options! All those years of study, all that money, to go unused, along with being saddled with terrible debt. So all I am saying is, bad outcomes can happen in a whole lot of cases. Want better outcomes? Create more jobs.