Everyone’s Talking About Student Loan Debt — Here’s What You Need to Know

“The decline in state funding for state colleges and universities is the main driver of what’s increasing costs,” says Mark Huelsman, senior policy analyst at Demos, a liberal think tank. He’s the author of a 2014 proposal for increasing public higher education funding that he says has drawn interest from several presidential primary candidates.

“States used to be very generous with their state funding of their higher education systems,” he says. “It wouldn’t be such a radical idea to return us to a system of primarily debt-free public higher education.”