I agree with the larger point, and mostly agree with the quote. "Free college" (and its true underlying meaning "free four year college") is largely appealing to upper-middle class kids who bungled the decision of where to go to college and are saddled with debt as a consequence.
Many schools inadequately service the poor by 1) piss-poor recruiting which means they have few poor kids coming in with each freshman class and 2) attrition that occurs over the course of four years as children either fail to adjust to the new environment or can't afford to continue (this can be due to, e.g., having to work at least one job while being a full time student). The first one obviously won't come close to being addressed by "free college" and the latter would take structural reform
at the university level to solve.
Making schools like UW Madison or the University of Michigan free is a great deal for upper middle class kids in Dane/Washtenaw county but the kids in Milwaukee/Wayne who supposedly would be benefiting from this probably wouldn't be able to take advantage of this if they wanted to, let alone some kid in the UP or along the Superior Shores. Baked into the cost of sending your kid to one of the large magnet universities is travel costs (especially if the family is still somewhat dependent on the income of the child), homesickness, social costs like student fees to pay for nice rec centers, textbook costs, etc. Besides, the average poor student who these policies are touted as helping probably fell out of the college pipeline somewhere around eighth grade. These students would be better served by putting more money into their elementary school systems, increasing federal funding to school aid
without reducing the revenue stream from kids who pay full tuition, and making smaller schools, e.g. two year and technical schools, cheaper or even free.
Also worth noting here that schools with high sticker prices rely on wealthy students who pay the full sticker price in order to subsidize lower-income students. We already have a system where students (or their parents) are willing to pay full price to subsidize the students who can't pay for themselves. Transferring that to income taxes is a great way to 1) make parents unwilling to pay for the taxes because it makes the benefits further from their own child and 2) puts University funding at higher risk of being canceled at the wing of populist budget zealots (which is a part of the reason we are in this situation in the first place).
So, yes, Pete is 100% right here.
College is already free for poor people that want to go, making it free for everybody would just make every tax payer subsidize college for the children of the rich and the middle class...and screw those bastards. They have "privilege" already, why should the rest of us have to pay to give them even more of it?
I agree with the overall sentiment but the bolded point is quite wrong. Tuition is free. Moving costs, textbook costs, etc. are most certainly not free for underprivileged students
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