At the end of WWII our country provided the G.I. Bill for returning servicemen. A key part of the bill was funding college education. This was done solely to keep servicemen out of the job market so as not to return to the economy of the great depression.
But the G.I. Bill had an even larger effect than keeping us at full employment. By sending people to college who otherwise never would have gone, those people then moved in to jobs they otherwise never would have been able to hold, making more money for themselves and their families. A large part of the reason our economy grew so well after WWII was we significantly increased the number of college graduates in the workforce.
We face the same issue today as to the end of WWII. We need to get people out of the job market and we need more college graduates for the information-rich economy of today and tomorrow. The most valuable stimulus effort medium term is one that will get people out of the workforce and in to college. It eliminates high unemployment today and in 2 - 4 years starts injecting highly trained people back in to the economy.
So lets look at this for Colorado, and we can then multiply it by 63 to see numbers for the country as a whole. Colorado has 2 million employees. Very roughly we want to pull about 5% out of the job market so we want to send 100,000 additional students to college in Colorado.
My rough estimate is we have 400,000 college students presently in Colorado. We have roughly 100,000 at the 4 largest campuses. But there are a boatload of additional schools and to pick just one, CCD has 13,000 students.
To this would add 25% to the student body at each college. This is significant, but doable. The business school at C.U. has virtually no classes on Friday (by student & faculty quiet agreement) so they merely need to spread classes across the entire week. This additional 25% also means that the colleges will be hiring a lot of people - putting a further dent in unemployment.
What will this cost? Lets say $20,000.00/student to put it on the high side for tuition, books, room & board. That would be 2 billion for Colorado or 126 billion for the country. In the scope of the stimulus package, this is very doable. And I think this could replace the tax cuts for business because most businesses would much prefer to see a significant increase in the number of college graduates available to them than a small tax cut.
What about the speed to put this in place? It's there. Between the present federal college financial aid system and the G.I. Bill administration, we have the systems and people in place. Once again some more people would need to be hired, but at a rate that is very manageable.
We could have this in place for this spring semester if it was made a top priority and the bill was ready for Obama's signature in January. It easily can be in place for this summer's semester. So it is clearly "shovel ready."
Now lets get to the final key piece of this proposal. Giving a college education for free won't fly politically. It would be unfair to all those who have paid to date and the political consensus is that while K-12 should be free, higher-ed should not. (This will change, but not tomorrow.) So this comes with a pair of requirements:
- For each year of college the student owes the country 1½ years of community service. This can be teaching in a designated school, joining the Peace Core, AmeriCorps, the military, etc.
- For each year of college, for the same number of years after completing their community service, that person pays 10% of their salary back to the government as repayment of the loan.
This would provide a system that people would see as equitable where people are given a hand up, but they are then repaying that effort. Not only that, but it then injects into the workforce people who have contributed back to society and that viewpoint will carry over to the workplace.
I think if this is done that 40 years from now when people look back on our response to the financial meltdown this will be seen as the effort that had the largest long term benefit for our society.
