After skimming through it, I don’t agree with a lot of the assumptions. First of all, it assumes that college income demographics would remain constant. They wouldn’t. Many middle class families opt out of college because they aren’t comfortable with six figure debt for a degree. Free college would bring those families in. But like you mentioned before, many poorer families would still have trouble reaching college because of academic disadvantages like property tax funding. But that has nothing to do with this argument and I don’t see why we can’t tackle both issues.

Also the Vox article shows that over 60% of the benefits would go towards households making less than $120K. That sounds like a massive accomplishment to me, but the article tries to spin it as a negative in a weird way for some reason.

Also in general, I don’t like targeted policies like Pete’s suggestion to expand Pell grants. The government is awful at determining who does and doesn’t need help and often is too restrictive. A free college no questions asked policy would be fair because the government isn’t picking winners and losers. I think as neoliberals we get too caught up in trying to achieve maximum efficiency sometimes and it doesn’t always work. I’d rather someone get help that doesn’t need it than someone not getting help that needs it.