College Access as a Social Right II

Service-to-School as a Universal Pathway to Adulthood

Post 20: 13 May 2025

Last week, I started to make the case that we should ensure that everyone has access to post-secondary education. College is one of the life choices that ought to be guaranteed as a social right of citizenship. Whether or not I convinced readers of that, I will likely address the question again at some point.¹

Today, I will describe a practical approach to achieving something like universal college access. The notion of a universal pathway to college—really, to adulthood—is daunting, but we as a society have done something very much like this before. I will address briefly why the plan I propose is not as simple as “free college” and point out some of the obvious issues with tuition-free higher education. Finally I will sketch my specific plan. My proposal includes a large-scale expansion of national service programs; some of the details of that element of the proposal will have to wait until another time.

A Pathway from Adolescence to Adulthood

In the discussion of a “Public Inheritance” I endorsed Ackerman and Alstott’s notion that every member of our society ought to be able “to begin adult life under fair conditions.”² This is not much more than a restatement of my fundamental social citizenship maxim—that everyone ought to have a set of life choices that is comparable to others in society—except that we are now focused on a specific point in our lives in which these choices are especially concentrated, the transition to adulthood. The set of choices made entering adulthood, like choosing to attend college, which college and which course of study, or entering a trade, reverberate for years, as do other decisions made during the early years of adulthood, like one’s first job, or the decision to marry and then have children (or not). Protecting each person’s ability to choose is always important, this is the essence of freedom, but it seems obvious that enabling choice is especially valuable during critical transitions like these.

One of the conceptual difficulties here is that the range of choice that we ought to protect at this life juncture is enormous. When students and their families make decisions about the kind of high school education to pursue, they have a manageable set of options. These can be too limited, and wealthy families almost always have more options, but all that is for another post. At the next transition, the set of possible paths expand a thousand-fold. Given that, what do I even mean by a “universal pathway to college”?

What I am looking for is a way to structure the transition from adolescence to adulthood such that everyone can conceptualize the process as a common one despite the wide array of possible options. We are all heading in different directions, but we should feel as though we went through the same transition and can relate on that level in a way that affirms both our common membership and our individuality. In the short coming-of-age novel, The Shadow Line, Joseph Conrad put it this way:

One knows well enough that all mankind had streamed that way. It is the charm of universal experience from which one expects an uncommon or personal sensation—a bit of one’s own.

We’ve Done It Before

If this seems impossible, let me remind you that we, as a society, have done it before. During the fifty years between 1890 and 1940, give or take, we created a universal pathway from childhood to adolescence in America. Prior to the twentieth century, very few earned high school diplomas, official estimates put the share at 6.4% in 1900. But this percentage was already growing exponentially; in 1940, a majority of American youths earned a diploma (see chart). I will revisit and extend this graph in a later post.³

See Note 3

The high school movement was a broad-based and grassroots effort. The premier scholars of this event, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, have estimated that very little of the increase can be attributed to mandatory education laws. The causation ran the other way. Parents demanded more school options, largely in response to the relative attractiveness of office work relative to manufacturing and the trades.⁴ Nowadays, especially since 1980, we increasingly see high school merely as a prerequisite for college, but in the mid-century United States, high school, even without college, prepared students for a wide range of futures. In addition, despite the fact that the foci of high schools and high school curricula range(d) from vocational to college prep, high school was and is very much a shared American experience.

Every state guarantees each person a path to a high school diploma. Though I will argue elsewhere that we are not guaranteed an “adequate” secondary education, this is still as close as we get to a genuine social right of citizenship. The universality of high school, ironically, makes it easy to overlook. It is part of our shared assumptions about how our society works. Because of this, we can plan our lives around it. This “given-ness” is an essential element of the concept of a “right.” There is certainly a lot of politics that go on around local education policy, but this bedrock commitment to provide something for everyone doesn’t seem “political” at all.

Why Not Free College?

We make primary and secondary public education free to students. Why not public post-secondary education? Since I am NOT proposing “free” college, I think it’s appropriate to spend a moment on explaining why I don’t. Tuition-free college is a simple, easy-to-sell policy that polls well. A 2021 Pew poll found that 63% of Americans favored tuition-free college.⁵ The simplest answer is the wrong one here. This is a complex topic, but my objections fall into two broad categories.

First, many of the returns to education redound to the individual. The best analysis of this that I have seen places the public-private split of the benefits of college at about 50/50.⁶ We can only justify a public subsidy for college if (a) the public benefits are so great they outweigh the potential inequity of these private benefits, or (b) these private benefits are distributed universally. Our starting place in this process, however, is a very unequal distribution of college access [my focus last week], so we know that, initially at least, most of the benefits of “free” college will accrue to relatively advantaged Americans.

I note that the public benefits of K-12 education are so great that it has to be free. We can flip this equation and say, almost equivalently, that the public cost of having large numbers of citizens without a basic education is so great that it must not only be free, but mandatory. Today in the United States, the typical state requires students attend school to the age of 18 (or through high school). While I believe that almost all young adults should attend college, I am not proposing mandatory education after high school.⁷

Second, proposals for free tuition are typically too limited in one of two ways. Many proposals limit this benefit to public two-year colleges. While it is good that such a policy opens some doorway to post-secondary education to the least advantaged students, this lure could inadvertently induce students whose best choice is a four-year program to focus on a goal that is inappropriate for them, given their aspirations and talents. There is already a significant and unnecessary class divide in the sorts of colleges and universities students attend; this could make it much worse.

More seriously, “tuition” can be a relatively minor part of the total cost of college, so making colleges “tuition-free” sounds great but actually extends much too little help to students. This is especially true for community colleges where tuition is already low. The main cost for students in these programs is the opportunity cost associated with full-time study while they have to live somewhere, eat, and so forth. Many people struggle their way through college as part-time adult learners, but virtually all of these folks would be better off if they could concentrate on their educational goals full-time.

In brief, we need a program that can be generous enough to allow students to pursue their educations aggressively across the full range of their post-secondary options. We want a program that makes the set of life choices facing students more similar across social class. Finally, we would like the program to be universal, but while it is expanding to that point, the benefits of the program ought not to make material and educational inequalities worse.

Service-to-School: The Educational Benefit

Here’s my opening bid. I made a version of this proposal in The Tools to Be Free.⁸ I expect I will change the details a bit as I refine the policy in this space, but what I sketch below is still very close to what is in the book.

The core idea is simple. Students should earn educational benefits through national service, making up the difference between their educational costs and available benefits with a simple flexible national loan program.

Americans can earn educational benefits through service now, but the benefit levels are absurdly low. Presently, the educational benefit is pegged to the Pell grant. In this proposal, benefit levels would be calibrated so that students could pay for one year at a public college or university—not “tuition” but the full cost of full-time study—with one year of service. I’ll leave the math for another time, but this would require benefit levels at roughly triple what they are now. This benefit change should be adopted across the entire service system we already have in place.

Since post-service benefits are intended to cover public college costs, the program must include commitments from states to control the overall student budget. We must be honest about the cost of attendance; always including the cost of housing, food, and transportation.

Students would not always have enough educational benefits to pay for their planned course of study. In those cases, they would make up the difference by assuming public loans. All loans would be paid back on an income-sensitive schedule (I would propose an 8% income cap), with a procedure for converting loans to grants after an adequate effort at repayment. Those details would need to be worked out, but something like at least 15 years of good-faith repayment efforts that at least repay the original principal.⁹

This represents a major reform of the college financing system. The new system would place students rather than parents at its center. Indeed, parents have no individual obligations to pay in this system—every student is treated as an “independent” student. Students with means, or whose parents want to help, can avoid the loan portion of the system. Instead, the whole structure should be thought of as a society-wide intergenerational transfer. Parents would contribute mainly by paying higher progressive income taxes. Other revenue tools, such as the estate tax and, possibly, a general wealth or property tax may also be appropriate. In this way, taxes supporting the public post-secondary system would be more analogous to local educational taxation. Rate-payers fund local education regardless of whether they have children in the local public schools; the same should hold for public college. A number of transitional issues arise that need to be worked through including how to handle 529 plans, what to do about parents who recently bore the brunt of these costs, and so forth.

By treating all students equally, the proposed plan eliminates the current bifurcation in the system between “traditional” and “independent” students. The system now assumes that students younger than 24 are dependent on their parents. Yet these students are “adults”. Need-meeting (as well as other) financial aid is based entirely on the parents’ ability to pay. The ugly secret, however, is that now there is no parental obligation to pay—parents are always free to renege and a great many do.¹⁰ This leaves many students on their own, at least until they reach “independent” status (reach 24, marry, serve in the military, or become legally emancipated). Treating everyone the same is a basic social rights principle. There is still “college financing” in the new system but not really any “financial aid”—nothing that distinguishes students by social class.¹¹

Service-to-School: Expanding Service

My proposal would significantly expand, refocus, and properly fund the system of national service that the United States already has in place. With AmeriCorps at its center, that system gives about 80,000 people a year a chance to serve, but most of these are after-college, even after-career opportunities. We want to keep those but create more forms of service more appropriate for 18-year-old volunteers, ranging from environmental work to classroom aides. Besides dramatically increasing the educational post-service benefit, discussed in the previous section, the new scaled-up service system would be different in two basic ways.

First, the in-service stipends need to be much higher than they are now. Today, service mainly provides an opportunity for people to express and develop their altruism; it is a way to give back and a channel for personal growth. Stipends are set so that volunteers will not make more than the local poverty threshold. This necessarily limits the range of people who can “afford” to participate. Mostly service ought to be a way for everyone to engage in the common project of building America, not a way for relatively advantaged people to pursue their own heroic journey. People should choose service based on ordinary economic rationality. To be a truly national system, the immediate rewards of service must make sense to individuals pursuing their own economic self-interest and personal goals. Many propose mandatory national service. There is no need for that, but we do have to make the decision to perform service make economic sense.¹²

Second, the service system should include both military and non-military options, including opportunities to combine the two. Raising the in-service and post-service benefits of civilian service may require increasing military benefits as well. It makes sense that those who incur physical risk in their service be rewarded at higher levels, but that principle ought to apply to risky civilian work as well. This shift would require the armed services to adapt somewhat, but breaking the sharp distinction between military and non-military service can have broad-based benefits both for individuals and for American military readiness.

By establishing an attachment to service accessible to everyone with a high school diploma, the service-to-school system would establish a universally shared sense of entitlement around post-secondary education, give all incoming students an equal stake in their educations, and allow every student to begin college on more equal terms than they do now. The time spent in service would also provide an opportunity for students in need of remediation before college to do that important work. Simply starting college a few years later would also improve college graduation rates. Students would begin college as (more) equal adults, not as their parents’ dependents.

That’s enough for now. I will revisit the idea of national service in later posts to consider some basic estimates as well as to explore the non-educational benefits of service.¹³

I’m planning something very different for next week: Rebuilding Congress (20 May 2025)

1. I did not make every argument in last week’s post. In particular, I did not emphasize the need for everyone to have some access to “leadership” roles in society—including positions in the professions, the clergy, and representative government—all of which usually require college in some form (we could elect MCs without a degree, of course, but could they really do their job?).

2. Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott, “Why Stakeholding?”, Politics and Society (32:1, 2004), 42.

3. US Department of Education, Digest of Education Statistics. The current chart is here. This table leaves historical gaps that can mostly be filled with earlier editions of the Digest or using 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait (DOE, 1993). For continuity, I have interpolated some years in the series (in this chart, 1939).

To foreshadow later posts: The trend shown in the chart continued until 1970, when nearly 80% earned diplomas, then stalled for three decades before rising again in the 21^st century. The COVID pandemic seems to have halted progress at about 90%.

4. See, especially, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, The Race between Education and Technology (Harvard, 2008). Many of the chapters in the book are available separately online. With David Autor, the authors updated the main study in 2020: “Extending the Race between Education and Technology”, AEA Papers and Proceedings 2020, 110: 347–351.

The main focus of Goldin and Katz’s work is on the wage differential associated with college. This is a major contributor to inequality today, so I will revisit this topic in the future.

5. Hannah Hartig, “Democrats overwhelmingly favor free college tuition, while Republicans are divided by age, education”, Pew research Center, August 11, 2021.

6. Walter McMahon, Higher Learning, Greater Good: the Private and Social Benefits of Higher Education (Johns Hopkins Press, 2009).

7. The states that still only require school attendance to 16 should update their laws to require attendance until age 18 (or through graduation).

8. Stephen Minicucci, The Tools to Be Free: Social Citizenship, Education, and Service in the 21st Century, Lexington Books, 2004. Use promo code LXFANDF30 for 30% off (the very high list price).

9. I’ll repeat a point I made a couple of weeks ago here. All loan made or guaranteed by the federal government ought to be convertable, through some procedure like th eone suggested here, into grants. This would include small business loans, loans for disaster relief, even mortgage guarantees, though each type of loan would require its own conversion logic.

10. In The Tools to be Free I estimated that between one-tenth and one-third of all parents do not feel an obligation to pay for their children’s college education. Page 99.

11. I will revisit the issue of private colleges and universities in this scheme at a later time. They would have access to the same benefit stream but generally have much higher student budgets. One step at a time. The American system of higher education is mostly public (four-fifths), even if you would not get this impression from reading the New York Times.

12. I’m avoiding numbers today but would say that the minimum package of stipends (covering work time, room, and board) would have to be $30,000 per year, a little bit more than the most generous AmeriCorps stipends now.

13. To anticipate: service can serve an important integrative and nation-building function by bringing students from different backgrounds together; I just mentioned that it could enhance military readiness; it can also provide the resources needed to respond to the many natural disasters we expect in our climate-affected future.