To get people to vote for you, just offer free stuff. Although that might be something of a cynical view of liberal policy, it has been a rather blatant move this year to appeal to college students and recent graduates. Jill Stein has explicitly mentioned her proposal for free college and paying off student loans as a reason that millennials should support her. Bernie Sanders made it a centerpiece of his campaign, promising free public college throughout the country and help to young people dealing with debt. Both candidates seem to have no future path to the presidency this election, but each became more popular with millennials than with the rest of the country by a wide margin.

Hillary Clinton has copied this popular policy by offering free college tuition to students whose families earn less than $125,000 after a short phasing period. The reason millennials are drawn to free college is understandable: As the cost of a college education has grown massively over the past few decades, American students have accumulated $1.3 trillion in college loans. Unfortunately, free college is simply bad policy, doing almost nothing to actually increase access to college while redistributing money to one of the most privileged groups in the United States.

Northwestern students eyeing plans for free college should be aware that both the Sanders and Clinton proposals would only cover only public schools. NU students might nonetheless feel altruistic in voting for these ideas, thinking that they are helping less-advantaged students in public colleges. This thinking, however, highlights a darker reality: The more the government focuses its efforts on public schools, the harder it becomes for lower-income Americans to aspire to less-funded and potentially better private institutions.

Many promote free tuition as a way to help college students, who are genuinely burdened by the skyrocketing costs of higher education. Still, college graduates make an income more than 75 percent higher than the general population. If society is going to give money to people in need, wouldn’t it be better to help a group like minimum-wage earners or the unemployed, instead of its most skilled and employable people?

The biggest problem with free college is that it would fail to achieve its main goal: helping more people graduate from college. The average low-income American already pays net-zero tuition for college, and barely a third of them manage to complete their degree. Only about six in ten college students finish their college education, with the rest left saddled with debt and no degree to pay it with. This suggests that the best way to generate more college graduates may be to improve college graduation rates, rather than enlisting more students likely to drop out.

Many experts warn that the factor holding back students from a successful college education is an inadequate secondary education. Secondary education is cheaper, and many of the reforms needed to fix it actually save money, so it makes more sense to focus efforts on improving access to good high schools. However, fixing secondary education would require dealing with powerful interest groups, which politicians (like Clinton) are generally unwilling to do. While the proposed plans to make free college education might seem appealing to young voters this election season, it remains an imperfect fix to inequalities rampant throughout the higher education system.

Jose Trejos is a Weinberg sophomore. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.