A case study in empty “compassion”

In 2022, the city council in Columbus, Ohio—my hometown—announced a new program called The Columbus Promise. For the price of a cool $10 million in higher local taxes and private donations, every Columbus city high school graduate would be offered free tuition at the local community college.

The city council sold this program to the public with noble and lofty language: this would finally allow Columbus students to “achieve [their] dreams.” It would “remove hurdles” and grant “access,” particularly for low-income students and students of color.

Those of us well-versed in the social-justice language of the 2020s will read this message loud and clear: This program is a Righting of Wrongs, a salve for the “oppressed,” a no-other-option handout that promised to finally give the right sort of people the leg-up they so profoundly deserved and of which they’d been robbed for too long.

Except it didn’t.

According to a damning new report, in the four years since the Columbus Promise launched, only around five percent of eligible students successfully earned an associate’s degree. Only a few hundred of Columbus’ roughly 10,000 high school graduates even applied, and roughly half of them dropped out within the first year. Reader, it was free.

The failures of programs like Columbus Promise aren’t just data points. They are the entirely predictable fate of politics that privilege virtue signaling over strategy. Christians should recognize our moral fingerprints—or, more accurately, those of Jesus—in the cited justification for these programs: that we ought to be mindful of those in need, that we shouldn’t ignore the plight of the poor. But their foreseeable failure should remind us that we also have a duty to be wise and strategic with our help, and that we ought to be brave and motivated enough to measure the impact of our efforts rather than settling for the pleasure of our own back-patting before simply wandering away after the red ribbon is cut.

So what can we learn from this cautionary tale? First, when we seek to help the poor, our efforts must take human nature into account. Our efforts should value what’s truly good, and they should require sacrifice both on the part of the giver and the receiver.

As to human nature, throwing money at a problem like college enrollment suggests a wildly myopic and, frankly, fanciful belief—that everyone, if they only had “enough” money, would make exactly the decisions we think they should.

If Columbus officials were truly concerned that more kids weren’t going to community college, there were several questions they should’ve asked before throwing money into the air at the local cap-and-gown ceremony. Questions like: is this community college a good school, actually? Is a degree from this institution worth the time and effort? Are Columbus high schoolers academically prepared to go here? Do they want to? Do they even know how to?

No one asked these questions because they are messy and inexpedient. But if they had, they might not have been so blindsided by the new report, which found that 60 percent of kids who dropped out of the Columbus Promise program said they did so either because the “workload was too much” or they were not academically prepared for their classes. That’s a big, fat, embarrassing problem. That’s a slow-to-solve problem. That’s a grown-ups-are-failing problem. It’s not a money problem, and most of all, like every real problem on earth, it is not a problem that cries out for empty sloganeering.

It is a problem that forces us to define our terms. What is the actual good we’re trying to accomplish? Knowledge is Good. Education is Good. A piece of paper that says we took a series of classes is morally neutral; it is fully meaningless if it doesn’t correspond to the successful accumulation of actual knowledge. Programs to help low-income and students of color (and all the buzzwords!) with their education will be likewise meaningless unless their stated goal really is education and a better life, and not numbers on the enrollment sheet.

Lastly, effective and worthwhile charity must require sacrifice from both the giver and the receiver. It’s a widely accepted principle of behavioral economics that giving away something for free cheapens its value in the eyes of the consumer. This principle is unquestioned in the marketing industry yet never seems to translate to progressive politics. But people are more motivated to work hard when they have skin in the game. They’re also more motivated to make healthy decisions when they’re confident they have agency. That’s the paradox of so much ill-fated “charity”: it is entirely possible to hand-hold people into total inertia. Throwing money at people—especially other people’s money—is easy. It’s also demeaning. And it keeps us from asking what people really need, which is almost always community. And that is much, much harder to give.

But we should try. Christians have always been people of tremendous charity. But we should avoid the pitfalls of empty virtue signals. We ought to walk alongside real people as they really are, and press together towards what is really and truly Good.