Last year, there was a lot of talk about the “Pay it Forward” concept of higher ed financing, under which students would pay no tuition while in school, but later repay the state based on their income. The American Association of State Colleges and Universities has just released a paper that’s very critical of the idea. The author of the paper, Thomas Harnisch, does a good job of explaining why this concept won’t have the lovely, egalitarian consequences that leftists envision, but he also makes what I think is a questionable claim that there are “right-wing” supporters who “believe that the policy change could introduce market dynamics into college financing and ultimately eliminate taxpayer subsidies….”

I don’t know of anyone who got enthusiastic over “pay it forward” for that reason. Harnish adverts to Milton Friedman’s 1955 paper on education in which he suggested that government might front students who wanted to pursue useful training programs and later collect the money back, but that is quite far from the financing scheme that the “pay it forward” enthusiasts have in mind for college in 2014. Friedman did not argue that his plan would eventually eliminate government support for higher ed, but only that it might alleviate a market imperfection. Later in his career, Friedman backed away from that idea. In 2003, he confided to Rich Vedder in an email that he thought a much better case could be made for taxing colleges than subsidizing student enrollments.