Imagine General Motors announces that an internal review found that 42% of its engines were defective. Rather than addressing the manufacturing problems, retraining its engineers, or improving quality control, the company announces a new initiative: It will produce twice as many engines but sell them for half the price.
Would anyone consider that a solution? Of course not. Producing more defective engines at a lower price does not solve the problem. It simply makes the problem more accessible.
We’re right to prioritize affordability in higher education—but we must not lose sight of the quality and purpose of the education students are receiving.
In a recent essay for the American Enterprise Institute, the author makes a compelling case for a conservative affordability agenda in higher education. He explains why Republicans should prioritize reducing tuition, controlling university expenditures, increasing price transparency, and reining in accreditor overreach. These are worthwhile reforms. Families should not have to mortgage their futures to obtain a college degree, and universities should be held accountable for the financial value of the education they provide.
But we must do more than make college educations more affordable.
The author writes that ideological fights on college campuses matter, but do not necessarily address the concerns of ordinary American families in South Carolina and Kansas trying to figure out how to pay for college.
Yet the ideological fights are not peripheral. Those conflicts go to whether universities still teach (or even recognize) the principles on which the American regime rests: individual natural rights rather than group equity, the possibility of objective truth rather than “my truth,” and the equal human dignity that makes antisemitism (or any racial/ethnic essentialism) incompatible with the Declaration of Independence.
Universities that systematically undermine those principles are failing at their public and educational mission, regardless of sticker price. The surrender of principle under pressure was precisely what people experienced in the 1960s college campus riots.
While market competition and disclosure of net prices are compatible with free institutions, none of these addresses the deeper pathology in American higher ed. Making a corrupted education cheaper simply spreads the disease more efficiently.
The findings of the Buckley Institute’s 2026 National Undergraduate Student Survey illustrate why these questions deserve serious attention. Among 803 undergraduates surveyed nationwide, 42% said they would rather live under a socialist economic system than a capitalist one. Only 28% chose capitalism. The survey also found that 45% believed physical violence could be justified to stop speech they considered hateful, while 54% reported often feeling intimidated from disagreeing with a professor.
What are universities actually preparing students to think and believe? A university should be a place where students are guided toward truth and are formed into citizens capable of self-governance. When students express a preference for socialism over capitalism, we should ask whether they have been adequately introduced to the principles of economic and political liberty that underpin the American regime.
Education, therefore, is not merely a means of securing employment. It is essential to the preservation of self-government.
The right response is the recovery of liberal education oriented toward the Great Books, classical political philosophy, and the American founding’s natural-right teaching. Liberal education, properly understood, is education for freedom: It forms citizens and human beings capable of recognizing the “abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times” of human equality and of exercising prudence in light of permanent standards.
Vocationalization and ideological capture both abandon that task. Cost-control policies are necessary, but without a parallel effort to restore the possibility of serious, non-relativistic inquiry leave the academy’s contribution to “the decline of the West” intact. Federal student-aid streams and accreditation have themselves helped entrench the administrative and ideological apparatus; reining them in is most useful when added to the higher end of restoring the conditions for free inquiry and civic education.
Abraham Lincoln understood the relationship between education and the survival of the American republic. In his 1838 Lyceum Address, Lincoln warned that the greatest threats to the American experiment could come from within, as the nation grew complacent toward the principles and institutions that secured its liberty. His warning was ultimately about the character of the American people and their willingness to preserve the inheritance of self-government.
That inheritance is not guaranteed to the next generation. Ronald Reagan famously stated that freedom is only one generation away from extinction. Each generation, to earn its freedom, must learn the basis of human freedom.
None of this diminishes the importance of the AEI article’s affordability proposals. Cost control, price transparency, institutional accountability, and alternatives to traditional four-year degrees deserve serious consideration. But we should combine access to higher education with the achievement of its purpose. A cheaper degree is not necessarily a better education. A larger number of graduates does not necessarily mean a more educated citizenry.
If we make college more affordable while leaving students in institutions that discourage intellectual independence and fail to equip them with an understanding of the principles that sustain our republic, we have not addressed the fundamental problem. We have simply made a broken product cheaper.
A bad education is expensive at any price.