No Such Thing As A Free Lunch? Fairfax County Schools Offer $14 “Free Lunch”

My son Aidan ran across this item below on the website for Fairfax schools in signing up for its economics course.  Aidan has come face to face with, as he noted, “proof that there really is no free lunch.”  He has now learned the first central tenet of economics.

Fairfax is clearly incorporating a key concept of economics at lunch hour.  Economists have long questioned the validity of a “free lunch” since, even with a free lunch, you have opportunity costs as well as your time and energy. In this case, without the $14 charge, you get the lunch only be enrolling in the course.  Milton Friedman wrote a book entitled There is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (La Salle; III., 1975).

It is notable that the grading shows less variation than the pricing.  You get “full” for $140 but “reduced lunch” for a fifty percent reduction.  However, “free” means not free but a ten-percent pricing.  Yet, you either “Pass or fail” based on five course assessments.  If “free” means ten percent, shouldn’t “fail” also mean ten percent of the full pass value?  Thus, eleven percent is a pass?  This way the students get some value for paying for their free lunches.