The News: How Not to Sell Public Goods

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe

Today, I’m repeating something I wrote on Twitter yesterday about an interview on NPR’s Here and Now with New Mexico’s Secretary for Higher Education, Stephanie Rodriguez.

Rodriguez was describing a new program that will make public universities and colleges in New Mexico free to all residents of New Mexico, including prisoners and undocumented residents. There’s no means testing: all residents can attend for free. The state is using covid-targeted funds to support the program in its first year, and moving it into the operational budget afterwards.

I think this is great public policy, and though it’s a significant new expense for the government of New Mexico, I suspect it’s cheap compared to many other line items—say, for example, the cost of housing inmates in the state’s correctional facilities.

What bothers me from the interview is that Democratic officials and candidates nationwide fall into such a defensive and technocratic rhetorical space when trying to justify and explain public policy of this kind. I don’t think Rodriguez is unusual in that respect. The party (and its wider array of supporters in think-tanks, public opinion writing, etc.) has been repeating the same rhetorical and conceptual error since the Clinton Administration, using a cramped, evasive kind of neoliberal reasoning whenever it is challenged to explain policies that are built around the provision and expansion of public goods, reasoning that suggests that the party doesn’t understand or particularly embrace the fundamental idea of the public as such.

In this case, for example, the interviewer asks why prisoners, undocumented residents, etc. are eligible as well as other New Mexican citizens. It’s a question that is meant to produce that defensive crouch, mind you, but the secretary complies by rattling off an explanation of the policy’s objectives as being about continuing New Mexico’s recent economic growth by further expanding its skilled labor force, and that to “fill the gaps” in the labor force requires offering higher education and its credentialling powers to all residents.

Then the interviewer asks another question that’s also meant to produce a defensive response, which is why wealthier New Mexicans aren’t being asked to pay some kind of tuition where the promise of free higher education is reserved on a means-tested basis for poorer residents of the state. Once again the secretary obliges, this time palpably trying to evade the question altogether by invoking the negative financial impact of student debt and the fact that many college and university students in New Mexico aren’t dependents any longer but are instead young adults who are trying to gain new skills and credentials to improve their economic situation.

Here you see the unfortunate alignment between higher education leaders and political leaders around the idea that higher education is both the cause and the cure of an economy that doesn’t work for many Americans. It’s a trap for higher education because it establishes a no-win scenario: no amount of funding for higher education can ever fix an economy that is built around wage suppression, low-skill service work, and accelerating inequality. If every American over 18 was funded to go to college and received an ostensibly high-value undergraduate credential, there would not be a matching number of high-value jobs to go along with the credential. We would end up lamenting that more Americans hadn’t gotten graduate degrees so they could fill an imaginary gap in the labor market and live a better life.

It’s a trap for Democratic politicians, too. It means that when they talk about public education—or any other public good—they’re forced to justify it in narrowly economistic, narrowly instrumental terms that foreground efficiency rather than justice, profit rather than equity, business rather than democracy. This just intensifies the core tensions inside the Democratic coalition, inviting educated upper middle-class Democratic voters to view public goods as a form of generous largess they provision to the poor and marginalized, an act of philanthropy, rather encompassing all parts of that coalition (and even its enemies) as a whole.

You include prisoners and undocumented residents in a public entitled to higher education not as an act of generosity to them or even as a specific provision of equity to them but because they are part of the public—the whole of a democratic society. Part of the economy, yes, but part of communities, part of everyday life, part of the whole range of relations that structure all our lives.

You don’t charge rich people more because rich people are already paying their share into public funds on a graduated basis through income tax. The moment you say that a public good is available to rich people only if they’ll pay more for it—more for entry to the museum, more for use of the roads, more for putting out fires—the more you sanction the unequal provision of public goods to those who pay more. Neoliberalism is fine with that, fine with a world where everything is divided into first class, business class, coach, and going on Greyhound. But that’s a disaster for a democratic society based in equality and the strategic graveyard of Democratic hopes for a durable majority. No one likes sitting in coach (or going on Greyhound for a long-distance trip) even if they concede the right of wealthy passengers and privately-owned companies to trade money for a higher class of service.

Public goods are for all: that’s a simple answer to those questions. They have to be. And the reason to make higher education a public good for all is not just “to fill in gaps in the labor force”. A public exists for other reasons than to make businesses happy, even though businesses are also part of the public and should benefit from public provisioning. You provide public higher education and let a free citizenry decide for themselves, freely, what it is for. For intellectual enrichment and personal development, for the acquisition of a specific skill set that is not necessarily related to the labor market, for a credential, for forming new social networks and escaping isolation, for being in a new community, and more. That freedom, that provisioning of capacity and possibility to a public, is justification enough. The needs of the labor market are in there somewhere but that’s too small and too mean a reason to hold on to. A visionary public policy deserves a more expansive explanation—and the Democrats need a bigger vision to thrive.

Image credit: "New Mexico State Capitol in Santa Fe" by Simon Foot is marked with CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.