Business Insider Attacks Free College With Poor Reading of Data

In a new article that straddles the line between hard hitting journalism and a Vox explainer, Business Insider’s Abby Jackson told readers that despite all appearances to the contrary, college in Europe is in fact not “free.”

Jackson takes aim at Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ proposition that American colleges should provide free tuition for students. Sanders has said that public colleges should provide complete academic support. He has also called for student debt forgiveness and for refinancing student loans.

Sanders refers frequently to the European model to show how his plans would work. If college is free there, he says, it can be here as well. Jackson disagrees:

Sanders has pointed to free tuition in European countries like Germany and Denmark to prove the models can be successful.

“Free” is a relative term since tax payers absorb that cost.

The tax payers provide Jackson with her main thesis: you can’t call college “free” if it’s being paid for by the public.

This thesis is proven by two data points:

• taxes are too low in the US to think about raising them
• enrollment is higher in the US than in its European counterparts

The first data point, of low taxes, is only neoliberal propaganda. Jackson doesn’t really present any facts here, or even any reasons for higher taxes being unworkable. She just puts it out there as a nebulous “bad” that we Americans should all accept because of our national antipathy to taxes.

The second point relies on higher US enrollment in college to say that the enrollment precludes a European-style college public fund. Unfortunately, this is a false analogy. In the US there are more private universities and colleges, two and four year, than there are public. In Europe, on the other hand, private universities are hardly the norm. According to postgrad.com:

Private universities are less common than public universities, and the number of them varies from country to country. For example, in Greece and Finland, there are no private universities.

Finland is the analogous country used by Jackson in her article, with 94 percent enrollment. But as we can see, it’s a false analogy- Finland has 100 percent public college, while the US has around 45 percent. A more accurate representation of the data would be to place the US farther down the line, at perhaps 48 percent enrollment.

British expat and PR executive Ed Zitron made perhaps the best counterpoint to Jackson’s argument on “free college” on twitter:

Yeah, I give up too.