Treating these issues as mutually exclusive obscures part of why student debt is a major issue for so many, and what debt-free college would hope to achieve.
We’ve allowed the price of college and its attendant debt to rise well beyond the point where it is actually helpful in getting people through college.
(New York, NY)- During the next few weeks thousands of students across the country will graduate from college, an accomplishment that used to symbolize a step toward financial independence and entry into the middle class.
The most important fact about higher education is that only a minority of people go to college. That fact would change if college was affordable for more people.
New Demos Report Shows State Disinvestment in Public Higher Education is Driving Tuition Increases
Decreased State Funding is Responsible for Nearly 80 Percent of the Rise in Public Education Tuition
Recently, there has been much debate about the real cause of tuition increases, which have risen by nearly $3,000 at public four-year universities in the last decade alone. To meet these costs, U.S. students must take on crushing levels of debt just to access education that was readily affordable for previous generations.
In the case of for-profits, not only has the government been unable to properly force institutions to account for their behavior, but it has been unable to stop providing the majority of money that keeps these colleges standing in the first place.
Policies like this would incent states to return to an era when college could be funded through a summer job, part-time employment, and maybe modest savings when available, for the largest and most diverse generation of students in our history.
Today, President Obama announced a proposal to make two years of community college tuition-free. It’s a big deal. But it would be just as powerful a signal if we promised students a debt-free system of public higher education, one that could be financed entirely through part-time or summer work and modest savings.
While Corinthian and its campuses may downsize or disappear completely, we should be concerned the students who attended its campuses and are currently in no man’s land.
This past Friday, in a speech to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Federal Reserve Chair, Janet Yellen, spoke out on the evils of economic inequality in the United States. She noted that the steady growth in inequality over the past several decades represents the most sustained rise since the 19th century.
Public colleges and universities took in $62 billion in tuition in 2013. These are schools that educate three of four American college students, and eliminating that entirely could be done just by rearranging what we already spend on student financial aid.
(New York, New York) — As the country struggles to find remedies for its growing student debt problem, the national public policy organization Demos has released The Affordable College Compact, a new a proposal for a federal-state matching program to alleviate this burden for students and address many of the contributing factors of rising college costs, most notably state disinvestment.
When the Senate went to college, they paid an average of just over $11,443. If they attended the exact same institutions today, they’d pay an average of $32,279.
It’s hard to make broad causal inferences about student debt and homeownership among recent graduates, because there are simply too many factors in play.
Sticker price matters because sticker price inflation dictates how much the federal government spends. High sticker price is one of the main reasons the feds dole out almost $170 billion in grants, student loans, tax incentives, and work study money each year.
"The steady erosion of state investment in public higher education over the last few decades reflects a stunning abdication of responsibility on the part of states to preserve college affordability."
Nestled in Part H (section 499!) in the Democrats’ laundry list of ideas is an idea that has by far the most potential to solve one of the most vexing problems in higher ed: the rising cost of college.