Free Tuition for Higher Education: Helping a Great People Get the Best for Themselves

Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham is right when she says that “everything we want to do in New Mexico begins with higher education.” And by that I think she means more than “higher” job training. The more opportunity we give our inherently industrious, hardworking and ingenious people, the better chance we all have of honoring the great gifts of culture, tradition and landscape we share as New Mexicans.

Governor Lujan Grisham’s idea of an Opportunity Scholarship, free tuition to the state’s colleges and universities for all people, including returning students, is a humane and respectful initiative. And it’s also why immediate objections about a richly schooled population is so absurd. A conservative think tank was quoted in the morning daily as worrying that if more New Mexicans have a college education, more of them will be brained-drained by head hunters out of state. So I guess the conservative solution is to deny educational opportunities to people who, for no reason other than finances, cannot afford them. And to add balderdash to absurdity, the think tank opined that it was sure free tuition would be seen by wild-eyed liberal universities as a license to tax and spend into oblivion.

The prosperity of our future does depend in large part on higher education, but not because it will turn our population into a golden new job-luring commodity. Nothing is more galling to New Mexicans to hear than the moronic chatter about the inadequacies of our workforce, as if our people were somehow inherently impaired. It’s the same kind of insulting and racist rubbish that’s been directed at New Mexico since before statehood.

For a financially battered, largely rural state like ours, huge in size with a tiny population, and chronically among the worst economies in the nation, we spend a huge amount of our tax dollars on education relative to our impoverishment. But it’s never enough because we refuse to tax ourselves sufficiently to support public education, its overworked and dedicated teachers, and, of course, our own children, who are, like kids everywhere else, the bedrock of our future. And we refuse to do that, largely because of the endless and effective voodoo propaganda from the Right about the bad mojo of demon “taxes” and the public services they make possible.

Given all that, I’m sure the majority of our graduates from public and charter schools are as ready for the work-a-day world as kids in any state around us. But higher education is not about “higher” job training. It’s not primarily a jobs thing, though it is that, too. It’s about making it possible for people to enrich their knowledge base, fortify and explore their curiosities and live perhaps more enjoyable and rewarding lives all around.

Creating Opportunity Scholarships is an egalitarian, anti-elitist idea, and one that is humanely optimistic, wagering public money on the belief that indeed all people are created equal and are equally endowed in our democracy with the right and capacity to expand their horizons and strengthen their lives with knowledge regardless of wealth, birth or status.

By giving older, returning students the same chance, Opportunity Scholarships also bolster the fortunes of many of us who are later bloomers, like I was — people who come alive to their minds and their curiosities as a sudden fluorescence a little later in life.

Opportunity Scholarships won’t lower the quality of our student population. To keep the scholarship, a student would have to maintain a better-than-average grade point. Will free tuition occasion the need for more remedial classes in English and math? Most likely it will. But when I came to UNM in 1958, my basic skills needed such refurbishment after I graduated from the public schools of Los Angeles. The classes in writing and math that I took were not dumbbell nothings taught by cranky grad students who had better things to do, but fascinating, well-constructed courses of study taught by some of the best teachers on campus, teachers who didn’t think helping others learn was somehow below them.

It might even occasion the rise of teaching scholars at New Mexico’s colleges and universities, professors who spend their time researching and learning for the benefit of their students, not to achieve increasingly higher echelons of academic status and the money that goes with it.

I know teaching scholars from my undergraduate days at UNM — teachers like Shakespeare scholar Katherine Simons, or Dudley Wynn, the founder of the UNM Honors Program in the 60s that has only now morphed into the rather grand Honors College, or wonderful student-oriented scholars like anthropologists Nibs Hill or Florence Hawley Ellis, and Spanish-language scholars Sabine Uliberri and Ruben Cobos — would see the Opportunity Scholarships as a chance to discover and nurture hidden geniuses and leaders and inspired, thoughtful citizens-to-be in communities all across the state.

Opportunity Scholarships are not about “jobs,” necessarily, although “education” matters, but perhaps not quite as much in the real world as the ability and the willingness to learn and work harder than anyone else, qualities that mark New Mexican kids and their parents as among the finest in the land.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it