Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez never met a problem she didn’t want taxpayers to cover.
A room full of college students handed her a microphone and a question the left wanted an answer to.
And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez let slip one scheme that will make taxpayers’ blood boil.
Ocasio-Cortez pitches free college at a “Students vs. Billionaires” rally
US Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) headlined a “Students vs. Billionaires Town Hall” on September 27 in Ithaca, New York, an event Breitbart reported the More Perfect Union hosted.
The Cornell Daily Sun reported that Cornell Young Democratic Socialists of America helped put the event together and that more than 1,000 people showed up.
An audience member wanted to know what Ocasio-Cortez and the Democrat Party are “doing to ensure that middle and low-income families can continue to afford a quality, higher education.” The question noted that Cornell University “recently broke $100,000 a year for tuition.”
Ocasio-Cortez called that number “far more than what many households make in a year in this country.”
She’s right about that much. A hundred grand a year is an obscene price tag, and no retiree who paid his own way through school in 1968 would argue otherwise.
Ocasio-Cortez then told the crowd that what a lot of schools “do with their funds is more of a real estate investment strategy, than an educational strategy.” She said the money flows to “new buildings, and facilities that are often marketed as luxury,” while adjunct faculty is “barely paid a living wage.”
And here is where a conservative could almost nod along.
“What we need to do is increase accountability, because a lot of these schools receive federal funds,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Sometimes, what they do is that they’ll charge you $100,000 so that you can get a lot of that financial aid to increase the number of financial aid that someone may get to attend that institution.”
Read that again. A self-described socialist just admitted that federal aid dollars give colleges a reason to jack up the sticker price.
The cure she prescribed is more of the disease
But Ocasio-Cortez didn’t follow her own logic to the obvious place.
“The best thing that we can do to rein in runaway cost at private institutions is by having fixed, affordable, high-quality services of public institutions,” she said. “Which means, tuition-free public colleges and universities across the United States of America.”
So government money inflated the price of college, and her fix is a much bigger pile of government money.
“Free” is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence. Professors still draw salaries. Somebody still pays for the luxury dorms she complained about. The bill just moves from the student who gets the degree to the plumber, the trucker, and the retiree on a fixed income who never will.
The Education Data Initiative pegs the yearly price of universal free college somewhere between $34.59 billion and $99.49 billion in 2025 dollars, depending on the design. Governments don’t create that money. They take it from the private economy first.
And Breitbart noted that Ocasio-Cortez has previously defended the idea of “free college for all children in the United States, even for wealthy families.” A waitress in Ohio would be covering tuition for a hedge fund manager’s kid.
Every country that handed the state control over one more slice of economic life promised the same thing she is promising. Costs didn’t vanish. They turned into taxes, shortages, and waiting lists.
She blamed baby boomers and then reached for the race card
Ocasio-Cortez knew the pushback was coming, so she went after the generation most likely to object.
“For anyone who wants to say that that’s pie in the sky and unrealistic and just another expensive, progressive wish list, this is literally what baby boomers gave themselves,” she said. “Public colleges in America were tuition free, they were tuition free in the sixties and in the seventies.”
That’s a stretch, and a big one. America never had a national tuition-free college system. A few places ran one, and the City University of New York was the famous example.
But the New York City Comptroller’s office tells what happened there. CUNY dropped its tuition-free policy in 1976, in the middle of the city’s fiscal crisis, under pressure from the federal government and the financial community.
New York City ran out of other people’s money. Ocasio-Cortez represents that city in Congress, and its best-known experiment in free college ended because the city couldn’t pay its bills.
She offered the crowd a different story. “And, just like many things, like public housing and public education, you know when they started to get defunded?” she said. “They got defunded when they started to get integrated, racially integrated.”
Activists have made that argument about CUNY for years, and it’s fair to note the system opened its admissions shortly before the money dried up. But a city on the edge of bankruptcy doesn’t need a hidden motive to stop handing out free services.
The Left runs this play constantly. A program collapses under its own cost, and the explanation is never the cost. The explanation is that America is a racist country and the taxpayers who balked are bigots.
It also works as a way to shut older voters up. Tell a 70-year-old that his generation got a free ride and then pulled up the ladder out of racial spite, and maybe he won’t ask who pays this time.
What the media calls populism on the Left tends to look like this up close. The enemy is “billionaires,” the answer is state control, and the invoice lands on working people.
But there is a real populist case to make on college costs, and Ocasio-Cortez stumbled onto half of it. Schools that soak up federal dollars while building resort campuses deserve scrutiny. Cut the subsidy spigot, force colleges to compete on price, and tuition has somewhere to go besides up.
She won’t go there. Her answer to a government-made mess is to put government in charge of the whole thing.
And the next step is predictable. Once tuition is “free,” the same politicians will discover that room, board, and books are a human right too.
Sources: Breitbart News, “AOC Suggests ‘Tuition-Free Public Colleges’ to ‘Rein In Runaway Cost at Private Institutions'”; The Cornell Daily Sun, “More Perfect University Hosts Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for ‘Students vs. Billionaires’ Town Hall”; Office of the New York City Comptroller, “Spotlight: CUNY and the New York City Economy”; Education Data Initiative, “How Much Would Free College Cost?”