Presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders has been promoting his plan to make public colleges and universities tuition free for all students. His proposal would subsidize attendance to public colleges and universities so that students, and in many cases, their parents, would no longer have to bear the financial burden of college.
In citing numerous countries that already do this, namely Germany, Finland, Norway and Sweden, Sanders argues that his proposal is not a radical idea — I disagree. Making public colleges and universities tuition free would provide a massive overnight increase in access to higher education for millions of Americans who don’t go simply because they can’t afford it. It is a radical idea, and that’s okay.
In fulfillment of this policy proposal, Sanders introduced the College for All Act to congress on May 19 of last year. While this bill has yet to be voted on, it is not expected to garner nearly enough votes to become law. However, the bill does provide a clear outline of Sanders’ proposed vision for free access to public higher education in the United States. The bill calls for significant increases in federal higher education funding, a more streamlined student-loan application process, work-study reforms, a significant reduction in student-loan interest rates and a refinancing plan for existing student-loan holders. The act is completely paid for by an incredibly modest tax (0.5 percent on stock trades, 0.1 percent on bonds and .005 percent on derivatives) on Wall Street speculation.
While tax increases, even modest ones, are often a controversial topic in American political discourse, the price of higher education has risen to such a degree that the cost of financing an education is too great of a burden to put on individuals or their families. According to Bloomberg News, the cost of higher education has increased 1,120 percent in just the past 30 years.
I currently live in the state of Pennsylvania. The current tuition and fees for the flagship public university, Penn State, is $17,502. At the state’s current minimum wage rate of $7.25/hour, a student would have to work approximately 46 hours a week to cover the cost, and that doesn’t include any money left over for living expenses. When you add Penn State’s own estimated additional costs of $17,096 for those expenses, the number of hours a student would need to work jumps to just under 92 hours a week.
Obviously a student cannot feasibly work anywhere in the range of 92 or even 46 hours a week and attend school full time and be academically successful. This had led to a massive increase in student loans to cover the gap, with some financial analysts saying that the student loan bubble will be the next to pop. Not only could it conceivably cause another economic decline (although not as severe as the Great Recession), some economists have expressed concern that it may already be slowing economic growth. This is not a sustainable trajectory — something has to change.
It’s time for a national reinvestment and commitment to higher education. This bill would provide a very necessary influx of cash to a sector still reeling from year-over-year declines in revenue and budget cuts. As noted by the Center for American Progress, the Great Recession hit the sector hard, leading to cuts in per-student funding more than 40 percent in some states such as South Carolina and Arizona. At the same time, the economic reality of the recession led to large increases in demand for higher education among the general public.
