SCOTT SHACKFORD: What Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Understand About Germany’s “Free” College:
Anyway, you won’t see any discussion in Sanders commentary about why college prices have exploded far above and beyond increases in the consumer price index or even the costs of healthcare. There will be no discussion of how subsidies and administrative bloat have massively driven up prices and eliminated any incentives for colleges to restrain costs. It’s just a thing that happened. . . .
ince Sanders left out any analysis of why college is so expensive, it’s worth exploring what exactly Sanders has left out when he invokes Germany’s college system. Note that Sanders has said “A college degree is the new high school diploma”? That attitude is exactly backwards from how Germany approaches higher education. Germany does not have a work environment that demands a college degree for every well-paying career. The apprenticeship program that Sanders bemoans having lost in America is well intact in Germany. Many careers that require college degrees in America do not require college degrees in Germany.
Even with the free tuition, Germany actually has a lower college enrollment rate than many other Western countries, including the United States (check out World Bank data here). Actually, America has a higher rate of college enrollment than all of the countries Sanders lists except for Finland.
Oh, also: America has a higher college graduation rate than Germany, too. And a greater percentage of young Americans have college degrees compared to every country on Sanders’ list except for Norway and Ireland.
Instead, Germany has a very robust vocational education track that partners businesses and the government to provide apprenticeships, so the government (and citizenry) is not paying the full burden for the students’ training, though Germany is still covering classroom costs.
It is also a highly regulated, centrally controlled, and very inflexible system that probably won’t fly in the United States. . . .
It’s certainly easy to see how a guy who thinks we have too many types of deodorant would not grasp that flexibility and innovation could be lost as a result of standardizing college the way we have public education. It’s also possible Sanders wouldn’t even grasp that this is a problem.
Indeed. Maybe he should do some remedial reading.