Making college expensive by making it free
Religion & Liberty Online

Making college expensive by making it free

“Most Christians would agree that more flourishing is good and that educational choice is important for us to enhance our God-given creativity,” says Anne Rathbone Bradley in this week’s Acton Commentary. “The question over which many Christians disagree is the means for making these desires possible. Are the tools of policy the best mechanism for increasing educational choice and quality? Or is that better left to the market?”

The debate continues but now with a new policy twist. On April 7, the state of New York passed legislation initiated and pushed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to make college “free.” Well, not really free. The Excelsior Scholarship, as the program is known, attempts to provide free tuition to New York public universities for families making $125,000 or less.

This legislation is billed by the governor himself as “First-in-Nation Tuition-Free College for the Middle Class.” Cuomo signed the bill in hopes that other states will adopt this bold policy to help the neediest students get to college. Will it work?

The full text of the essay can be found here. Subscribe to the free, weekly Acton Commentary and other publications here.

Joe Carter

Joe Carter is a Senior Editor at the Acton Institute. Joe also serves as an editor at the The Gospel Coalition, a communications specialist for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and as an adjunct professor of journalism at Patrick Henry College. He is the editor of the NIV Lifehacks Bible and co-author of How to Argue like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History's Greatest Communicator (Crossway).