HN Explorer

Ask HN: Is free college an existential threat to ISA-funded schools?

2 points by tempsy ↗ HN
Thinking from the perspective of an ISA funded school like Lambda, would free college effectively destroy, or at least severely limit the growth potential, of those types of schools?

2 comments

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LeoSolaris
Theoretically, free colleges would eliminate 90% of the colleges. Only the high end, Ivy League, and exclusive colleges would be able to survive as private paid colleges. There wouldn't be much of a point to cost saving or tuition sharing colleges if state run colleges were free.
clintonb
It depends on how free college is implemented. If it’s a voucher system, where students get a certain amount to spend, the ISA night go away if the voucher covers the full cost of education. Otherwise, an ISA could still be used to cover the excess funds.

If the money goes directly to the institution, and the price exposed to students is always $0, the ISA goes away completely.

Regardless of how we implement free college, there will most likely not be a restriction on the existence of programs that are not free. These programs may have a drastically smaller market, but a market of some sort may still exist. This is primarily due to [my guesstimation] that we simply don’t have enough seats and beds to cover every high school student going to college.