WASHINGTON — A Republican strategist threw shade on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s plan for free college Tuesday but conceded he had nothing to report on where Republican candidate Donald Trump might be headed with higher education.
The barb took place when Jason Delisle, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, derided the Democratic plan for free college as a ploy for Democrats to garner votes come Election Day.
“People always want free things,” Delisle said after Courtney Hagen, senior lobbyist with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a Democratic grass roots organization, revealed that the issue of college affordability “popped” among voters during surveys Democrats conducted leading up to the 2016 election.
“But these things are never paired with: Would you like debt-free college at higher taxes?” Delisle said.
While the issue of college affordability is often cast as one on the minds of everyday Americans, the reality is that graduate students have the biggest stake in the game, Delisle said.
“The reason why debt-free college is really popular is part of it has to do with graduate students,” Delisle said. “The people with most of the debt, the really big debt balances, are people who went to graduate school.
“What a really good voter group,” Delisle said as he continued to take shots at the Democratic college affordability plan, which he called an “off-the-shelf” policy to subsidize upper middle income families — a group for whom he said it would be inexpedient for politicians to state outright that they wanted to subsidize.
