Bernie Sanders unveils plan for tuition-free public colleges
Presidential candidate's proposed legislation would fund free public education through tax on Wall Street transactions
Sen. Bernie Sanders’ plan for making public college tuition more
affordable is relatively straightforward: He wants the government to
pay for it. All of it.
On Tuesday, the Democratic presidential candidate and independent
senator from Vermont introduced legislation intended to eliminate
tuition fees for undergraduates at all public colleges and universities.
Annual tuition costs at those institutions add up to roughly $70 billion,
according to a fact sheet from Sanders' office. The proposed legislation
would require the federal government to compensate for two-thirds
of that sum, with the states making up the additional third.
“It is a national disgrace that hundreds of thousands of Americans
today do not go to college, not because they are unqualified, but
because they cannot afford it,” Sanders said Tuesday at a news
conference. “This is absolutely counter-productive to our efforts
to create a strong economy and a vibrant middle class. This
disgrace has got to end."
College tuition costs have skyrocketed since the middle of the
20th century, rising by 1,120 percent between 1978 and 2012.
This has forced each successive generation of students to take
on ever-increasing debt: The recently graduated college class
of 2015 has an average debt burden of $35,051 per student, the
highest of any time in U.S. history.
As a result, college affordability has emerged as a major policy
issue in Washington and on the 2016 campaign trail. Hillary
Clinton, the presumptive presidential frontrunner in the 2016
Democratic primary, will reportedly soon announce her own
President Barack Obama has tried to get ahead of the issue as
well, introducing a proposal in January to offer students two
years of free community college. Sanders described that plan
as “an important step forward” — but not all that needs to be done.
Sanders’ proposal has little chance of succeeding in Congress,
but it provides him with another opportunity to contrast himself
with Clinton and potentially to exert some leftward pressure on
her campaign platform. Since announcing his presidential run
late last month, Sanders has also introduced legislation intended
to break up “too big to fail” banks. “Too big to fail” is a delicate
issue for Clinton, who is widely perceived to be Wall Street’s
favored candidate in the Democratic race.
Matthew Chingos, research director at the Brookings Institution’s
Brown Center on Education Policy, said Sanders’ proposal for
tuition-free public colleges is “obviously a political messaging
tactic.” Chingos questioned whether making public colleges free
across the board was the best way to make them more accessible
to low-income students.
“A lot of affluent families send their kids to college. A lot of
college students are from families that can pay,” he said. “So do
we want to make it free for everyone, to make it accessible for
kids who can’t pay? Or do we want to have a program that’s
more targeted, more progressive?"
The federal funding for Sanders’s proposal would come from a
tax on financial transactions. Stock trades, bonds, and derivative
trading would be taxed at rates of 0.5 percent, 0.1 percent, and
0.005 percent, respectively. Supporters of the financial transaction
tax, which they call the “Robin Hood tax,” say it is not only a
progressive way to raise revenue but would also discourage
dangerous levels of Wall Street speculation.
A recent report from economist Joseph Stiglitz and the Roosevelt
Institute, intended to provide a comprehensive framework for
reworking American economic policy, endorsed a financial
transaction tax as a way to “penalize short-term traders and
incentivize longer holding periods, thus reducing instability and
encouraging longer-term productive investment."
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