Left Out and Left Behind: Logistical Problems with an Ideal Solution on the March PF Topic

Nearly everyone agrees that the goal of the topic - universal education and a higher standard of living - is desirable. It would be very difficult to say otherwise. Who could coherently advocate for the creation of an un- or under-educated subclass of people in the most industrially advanced country in the world? Who could expressly wish a lesser standard of living on others? The impact level has an unbreakablable normative association with desireability.

The near-total consensus at the topic's terminal impact level has two implications. First, there is almost no literature making arguments at the impact level. Even if such arguments were possible to make - for example, "deficit spending bad outweighs making an accessible and educated future for everyone" - those arguments are dry and unpalatable at best. Who could look in the face of a child striving for a better future and respond with "you are not worth the money"? Second, negative debaters should structure their cases away from the impact level. The argument that spending on education is bad is an unstrategic uphill battle that negatives should avoid. That is especially true given the amazing and diverse literature available to the negative on this topic. Negative debaters are well-served in focusing on the ways in which the affirmative's proposal will both fail to educate students and the ways in which it will make educational problems worse. This article will focus on the former line of reasoning: the ways in which the affirmative's advocacy is insufficient to provide access to education[1].

Other Costs

College is expensive. High school students - especially younger high school students - may not anticipate the complete and complex set of expenses that accompany pursuing a college education. The programs proposed by the affirmative deal exclusively with tuition, and eliminate the cost of enrolling in and taking courses. They do not, however, eliminate the dozens of auxiliary costs that make college otherwise inaccessible to students with financial barriers.

All students will retain a core set of constant costs: transportation, food, housing, and medical care. Let's look at each of those in turn.

Tired of Spinning Your Wheels

The first, transportation, varies in total cost depending on whether the transportation is public (a bus) or private (a car). The first option - public transit - is unavailable to the majority of students. To use public transport, the students must have access to a reasonably close bus stop; the bus must take them on a route that reaches the school; the route must be quick enough to get the students to class on time - multiple intervening stops may make that impossible. Many small municipalities - the areas that most aggressively need development and access for students - do not have widespread public transport systems. Still many more do not have regular public transport to poor neighborhoods. Even where the the combination of factors necessary to make public transportation work is perfect, public transit still costs money. For students[2] living paycheck to paycheck, even the moderate cost of public transportation may put access out of reach. Private transportation - a car - comes with an immense number of auxiliary expenses. Those include a car payment (several hundred dollars), car insurance (several hundred dollars), gas (several hundred dollars per month, with a sliding scale depending on distance and car gas quality[3]). These are merely the routine costs - cars also require regular maintenance (oil changes, light replacement, tire alignment, rotation, and replacement). A new set of tires can easily cost $1,000, and tire replacement is required more frequently when the car does not receive regular maintenance or when the car is older. Students who drive cars must also purchase expensive parking decals to park anywhere on campus - my basic decal at UF cost $154.00, and only applies to a single law school parking lot. Transportation alone may be enough to force students into work.

Eat Free or Diet Hard

The second major constant cost is food. There are numerous studies analyzing the relationship between poverty and food costs. Students who are also young parents - or who are responsible for care work in multigenerational houses - must factor in constant spending on food. Food costs are also proportionately higher as the food gets healthier: fresh kale, raspberries, and skinless chicken breasts cost massively more than off-brand soda and fast food. Healthier options are also less likely to be provide energy-producing calories[4]. Low-income students are forced into a choice: minimize food costs but eat terribly, or eat healthy food but break the bank. If students choose the former, they face deleterious health consequences that impact their academic success; students who primarily eat fast food - or who fail to eat food fully filling their nutritional needs - are likely to be more sluggish, less productive, and more vulnerable to illness due to diminished immune capacity.

Debt bill-itating illnesses

Though food choice impacts health, medical expenses are an inevitable part of any student's life. Because low-income students are less likely to seek proactive care[5], which drastically increases the scale of healthcare costs. For pregnant students, prenatal care costs further erode already stretched budgets. Dental work - which is not surprisingly related to heart health, upper respiratory infection and death[6] - is regularly uncovered by insurance and extremely costly for families on fixed incomes. Regular medical costs - such as mammograms - are permanent drains on a family budget.

Home my God! House it going?

Housing is a similar problem that will scale with increased enrollment in community colleges. Housing costs increase along two axes; demand and proximity to the school. The former is clearly exacerbated by higher enrollment - as more people try to enroll in community colleges, the market for leases becomes saturated with tenants. Though new housing is likely to be built, that housing is not instantly constructed, unlikely to match demand's exponential rapid growth (if the affirmative is correct about their degree of solvency), and capped at a finite level because there is a limited amount of land reasonably close to the school. The latter puts students in a double bind; to minimize transportation costs, students must live close to the school. However, premiums for apartment rentals skyrocket as housing becomes closer to the school because the housing has the added benefit of being conveniently located. As demand increases, the scope of housing that charges extra for proximity will inevitably increase, because the market growth permits it to do so[7].

I don't have a topical pun for framing.

The negative should frame the debate around the question of work: Will students still need to work in the affirmative's world? This is important for two reasons: first, the majority of the affirmative literature assumes - to some degree - that these programs alleviate the need to work. If the negative wins that students will still work, it both functions as a solvency deficit to the affirmative and a takeout to their evidence. That leaves the affirmative with no case firepower and a substantial solvency deficit to answer. Second, the program's effect on work is one of the most important arguments in round because it is well-settled that work hurts student success. Work detracts substantially from academic achievement because it directly trades off with student study time, it decreases the quality of study time because students are exhausted from working, and it increases the likelihood that students will seek catharsis from the high stress levels created by work through substance (ab)use. Debaters seeking this type of framing can and should find literature discussing the relationship betweens student failure rates and student work rates.

Footnotes

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[1] Though I have contemplated this article's substance long before I judged at Florida's State tournament this past weekend, the language and framing of 'access' to reference the solvency deficits in the affirmative advocacy is inspired by one particular debater who I judged in semifinals. She went on to win the tournament (not shocked at all) - shoutout to Belén Mella!

[2] It is important to remember the demographic profile of many of these students - low socioeconomic status correlates strongly with young parenthood and high crime rates. The cost of raising a child paired with the cost of repairing and replacing items lost during break-ins is immense. These are not students who could trim their home budget down by using off-brand paper towels - they are people struggling for basic survival.

[3] Students who are struggling to make ends meet are likelier to purchase old and used cars, or to rent cars. Both older cars and rented cars are likelier to have comparatively bad mileage, increasing the amount of money these students are likely to pay for gas. The students who have the least to pay end up paying the most for gas.

[4] Dollar Menu McDonalds chicken nuggests are remarkably filling and remarkably cheap. No-Name Soda costs substantially less than fresh milk - and does not spoil like milk does.

[5] Though the Affordable Care Act put an impressive dent in global health coverage, many families still lack basic insurance (or lack funds to pay the deductibles even when they have insurance). As a result, lower-income families are often reactive instead of proactive in seeking care: they reach out to doctors when problems become too severe to ignore, rather than when a hint of a problem first arises.

[6] The link is immediately intuitive after a small amount of thought. The mouth is the gateway to the body: air, food, and water all pass through it. Bacteria that gestate in the mouth then enter the rest of the body and bloodstream, and can resultantly infect a person. This is especially harmful to the lungs: when a person's mouth is filled with bacteria, the person necessarily breathes some of those bacteria into their lungs. Unlike the stomach and the mouth, lungs do not have the same digestive enzymes and chemical combatants to fight off pathogens. As a result, periodontitis and other basic oral issues have a settled and statistically significant relationship with heart disease, pneumonia, and premature death.

[7] Debaters seriously interested in reading these arguments should look up the economic concept of "elasticity" and then find studies asserting that the rent around colleges is an inelastic good.