“Thanks to you, the children of your friend Bernard Arnault will be able to go to the Crous and only pay one euro” : this argument of a Renaissance deputy was brandished during the discussion in the National Assembly of a Law proposition aiming to ensure a meal at 1 euro for all students, whereas the measure today only concerns the 38% of scholarship students. It is therefore not only the children of billionaires who are currently excluded from the benefit of the measure.
The explanatory memorandum to the bill justifies the measure by the fact that the reference to the tax household of the parents excludes many students in need. This proposal voted by all the left and the National Rally, and the negative vote of the LR parliamentary groups and those supporting the government, reveal two visions of social justice, one based on universality and the other on the targeting of poorer.
First, as many people point out, a subsidized Crous meal is not the most striking example to illustrate the argument of anti-redistributive public spending. The restaurants of the Regional Centers for University and School Works (Crous) are not exemplary of the “Gold of the Republic” and the children of billionaires probably don’t fight to take the supplement there, especially since they are studying abroad.
Equal rights and fairness
However, this argument, while true, runs somewhat counter to a second, more important argument. In reality, the ideal would be for all students to eat at the Crous, for the food to be (therefore) good and for the meals to be subsidized. There is a Crous at Sciences Po where children of privileged origin benefit from subsidized meals. But this is likely to benefit all students from the middle and working classes: the parents of these students and the students themselves when they have positions of power are thus likely to defend quality and inexpensive meals for all.
The saying goes that “a policy for the poor is a poor policy”. The argument is quite intuitive: reserving free public schooling for the poor would certainly not benefit them in the long term. In terms of inequality, the argument is corroborated in the facts: the Anglo-Saxon countries which tend to target spending and transfers on the poorest are much more unequal than the Scandinavian countries with more universal policies. This is the paradox of redistribution highlighted by Korpi and Palme.
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