What is usually meant by that is that public universities should be tuition free.
There are examples in the USA of free public higher education.
For example, since 2005, graduates of the public schools in Kalamazoo, Michigan have been awarded private scholarships to attend Michigan's public universities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalamazoo_Promise
The Kalamazoo Promise is a pledge by a group of anonymous donors to pay up to 100 percent of tuition at any of Michigan's state colleges or universities for graduates of the public high schools of Kalamazoo, Michigan.[1] To receive the minimum 65% benefit, students must have lived within the Kalamazoo School District, attended public high school there for four years, and graduated. To receive a full scholarship, students must have attended Kalamazoo public schools since kindergarten.A WSJ podcast explores the outcomes of this program.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/free-college-is-already-here-11561759950
College attendance rates soared as soon as the program was initiated in 2005. Also, the hemorrhaging of Kalamazoo's population has been reversed during this time.
There were unanticipated outcomes. For example, one consequence of the program is that affluent white students from Kalamazoo attended more prestigious public universities in Michigan than they would have because it is now cheaper for them. This was not the intended purpose of the program.
Many low income and minority students who did go to college thanks to the program almost immediately dropped out. This type of student is unprepared for college, doesn't understand college, and has a whole world of problems and burdens that typical college students cannot even imagine (e.g., taking care of drug-addicted family members).
The silver lining is that when these working-class students did drop out, they did not have a mountain of student debt hanging over their heads, so they sometimes were able to start businesses, which has helped to fuel urban renewal in Kalamazoo.
Disruptive innovation in higher education
It has been stated that higher education is resistant to disruptive innovation. For example, online learning has yet to shake up the halls of academia.Language learning in human infants might explain why online learning cannot be disruptive to higher education.
Human infants enter a babble stage in which they randomly enunciate all sorts of sounds (phonemes) produced in human speech. After a while, they limit their babbling to only those sounds which are reproduced by other people in their environment. This can limit later facility in a foreign language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbling
One might think that if one left the radio or television on a foreign station, then the child would develop his or her ability to speak those foreign speech sounds, but this is not the case. The child needs face-to-face interaction to learn which sounds to reproduce. So as pragmatist educational philosophy might suggest, the social context of the learning environment is central.
It might be true as well in the realm of higher education that there is no replacement for f2f learning. The real disruptive force on higher education, then, might be community college. Online learning might be better suited to those who are already educated (comparable to videos of lectures by professors that so many retirees subscribe to).
In an interview in the journal The Presidency, the legendary UC system president Clark Kerr claimed that community college was originally envisioned to be the first two years of actual academic college, but community colleges were hijacked by the their local communities and turned into vocational training centers. The question today is how to improve community colleges to fulfill that academic mission without turning community colleges into stationary cruise ships the way that their four-year counterparts have been Disney-fied in order to attract and retain students in a winner-take-all university competition for ranking and money.
To some extent, however, if society wants to send more people to college, college becomes more expensive. Take the growth of student services, for example. In the 1950s, at most 25% of students graduated from high school and less than 10% graduated from college. Back then, college was only for the most brilliant or the wealthiest students, and they did not really need student services (aside for library cards). Today, colleges host all types of students who have all sorts of needs. For example, in contrast with an earlier era, on campus today there are transgender students and military veterans with brain injuries, and these students require counseling, attention and medical care. Students and professors complain that university presidents have become highly paid CEOs and that tuition has gone through the roof, but this is precisely because universities have swollen in size and complexity and become small, super-advanced cities.
The question for community colleges is how to add needed services like advising for students whose parents did not go to college without indulging in luxury that would drive up costs.
Clark Kerr argued that students whose parents did not go to state universities should pay no tuition, effectively bypassing the affirmative action controversy. Community college is perfect for that.
Along these lines, it has been pointed out that the real diversity in higher education is at community colleges. If you walk through the parking lot of an elite university or state university, you will notice that the cars are quite similar. In contrast, if you walk through the parking lot of a community college, you will find every possible type of car, ranging from brand-new, high-end luxury vehicles to ancient, dilapidated economy cars. There are plenty of Asian and Hispanic students at Stanford, but they are the sons and daughters of doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors. The real diversity is at the community college and in the military. The more advanced a university, the more fake its diversity.
