I always get the same guy-I call him, “Oh No, It’s That Guy.” He hangs out by the cafeteria, clutching clipboards, always wanting my signature. Today he patrols and I hurdle a hedge to get away.

“Decrease school enrollment fees,” he says, shoving his way through the crowd, toward me.

I fake left, then spin right, but he shimmies.

“We won’t stop until education is free,” he says.

Free education, I think, as I break for the cafeteria door, Is that really what we want? I use a student as a pick, then roll over a picnic table-SORRY, EXCUSE ME-into a bush. Unnoticed, kind of, I crawl. I thought school was free.

High school, junior high, elementary, kindergarten-you know, no child left behind. Then you’re 18, a full-grown man, or woman, or whatever, and if you want to play, you’ve got to pay.right? Because this is America.right?

Land of the free, home of the brave, and United States of the “you better get a damn education, or else.” In this country, if you want to work in a factory, move to China, because that’s where your job is. Here, brains count. A college graduate in this country can earn $1 million more than a high school graduate. And as education becomes more and more valuable, the man with the clipboard is telling me that people want it for cheaper and cheaper.

The average annual tuition at public community colleges across the country is $2,191, according to the American Association of Community Colleges. A full-time student at Mesa can spend as little as $508 for a full year.

I commando through the shrubbery, pondering these stats. I’m slithering like a snake. Only $20 a unit, starting this January, I think to myself, but there’s a squirrel eye-balling me, and I hear Mr. Petitioner preaching again.

“Even the less-well-off deserve the right to an education,” he says.

In New York, tuition is more than $120 per unit. It’s the same all over the country. In Minnesota, community college tuition is $140 per unit; in Texas, it can be just as high. It’s the cheapest here, and, as a bonus, we don’t have to deal with minus 20-degree weather or people who say “y’all.”

Also, a little advice for y’all-free stuff usually sucks. I’d rather get a four-star meal for a bargain price than a McCardboard burger for free.

I’m just trying to say that free education might mean crappy education, which creates a profound question: how do we get free non-crappy education? That question might be unsolvable. Maybe even a computer couldn’t solve it.

Fortunately, I’ve been working on it. We have to do like everybody else-completely sell out. It’s the American way.

At Mesa’s new Coca-Cola Community College there’s a Nike swoosh on the corner of every syllabus, there are product ads surreptitiously placed in the text of books-TIDE: it’s bleachy clean-and the classroom walls are dressed like stock cars.

If my plan is followed, free education will be ours. Professors will get solid benefit packages, classrooms will sparkle, and computers will be state-of-the-art. We’ll have the best PowerPoints-the ones where the words bounce onto the screen-and white boards, oh so beautiful the white boards will be, and all for free.

The ads will pay for everything. Like when a chemistry student is in the middle of her test, between pages four and five, she’ll find a full-page beer ad-Tastes Great, Less Filling-she flips the page, and is back to chemistry. It’s so subtle. It’s so innocuous. It’s so perfect.