This week’s readings was a great wrap up to all that we’ve read and discussed this semester. With the International Higher Education essays having various views from various scholars about the issues to face higher education in the coming two decades and the Bridges to the Future chapter examining trends and issues to internationalization and what is means to be a global citizen (a term we’ve encountered multiple times this semester).

With the primary elections approaching to a close, I have been increasing alert to the promises that the candidates have made on the Democrat side (since there’s not much of a race left on the Republican side). The idea of free college as proposed by Bernie Sanders, or even the free community college previously put forth by President Obama, has always been something that interested me, especially when I learned how many European countries offer tuition-free higher education to its students. And taking this course has given me the opportunity to see how and why free college is a thing in certain places. To tie it by to the readings, I was reminded again of this idea when I was reading one of the IHE essays: “Sustaining Quality and Massification: Is It Possible?” by Marcelo Knobel.

While the essay does not specifically touch upon tuition-free higher education, it reminded me of the idea when the author mentioned how despite the rapid increases in enrollment to higher education around the world, it remains restricted to selected populations and not to everyone overall. The idea of providing tuition-free higher education is to increase access especially for those who are underprivileged and to relieve the financial burdens that can come with higher education in some countries. But many critics say it is either impossible or will mostly benefit the wealthy and more privileged individuals. Sanders alludes to European countries like Germany and Finland to give examples of countries who offer tuition-free higher education to their residents, but one thing that has been mentioned in class is that countries like Germany and Finland are very different from the United States, whether it be size or types of higher education institutions available.

The second article I link mentions that Sanders’ plan will most likely benefit the wealthy more than the intended group of people because there is so much more than tuition costs that would keep a low-income student from going to college, i.e. housing, textbooks, fees, and etc. And the article also mentions how removing tuition at public institutions would potentially move all those more well-off students from attending private institutions to public ones and thus competing with students who can only afford to go to the public institutions. There are so many things that need to be considered in order to make tuition-free higher education plausible. (Although it is important to note that in combination with some of the things that Sanders has also proposed, his plan for free-tuition may just work.)

Going back to Knobel’s essay, he mentions how the funding sources influence the quality of education provided, which is not surprising especially with for-profits as we have discussed in class. And Knobel also mentions that by expanding access to higher education, countries need to be exercise care when dealing with increasingly diverse groups of students, particularly the potential gaps in their previous education, which is definitely a big challenge the US faces. Thus, while I am all for tuition-free college, there is so much more that needs to be addressed or changed (i.e. the gaps in quality of primary and secondary education, other fees like books and healthcare that students face besides tuition, etc.) in the US in order to successfully implement this plan.