Today, Sec. Hillary Clinton will announce her plan to return to debt-free public college for future students and relieve the burden for existing borrowers. Tamara Draut, Demos Vice President of Policy and Research, released the following statement:
Today, Sec. Hillary Clinton will announce her plan to return to debt-free public college for future students and relieve the burden for existing borrowers. In anticipation of the release of Sec. Clinton’s plan, Demos prepared two new analyses that underscore the need for bold solutions to our college affordability crisis.
Hillary Clinton just released a bold plan to return the United States to debt-free public college for future students and relieve the burden for existing borrowers.
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.
The dominance of big money in our politics makes it far harder for people of color to exert political power and effectively advocate for their interests as both wealth and power are consolidated by a small, very white, share of the population.
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.
Popular theories for rising tuition like administrative “bloat” and student aid are at most minor contributors to tuition increases. Here's the real causes.
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.
(New York, New York) – Today the national public policy organization Demos and The National Council of La Raza (NCLR) released a new report that explores the use of credit cards and the impact of debt on Latino households in America.
The housing crash resulted in a tremendous loss of wealth in the Latino community. Households have fewer resources to draw on in times of need.
Connecticut’s investment in higher education has decreased considerably over the past two decades, and its financial aid programs, though still some of the country’s most expansive, fail to reach many students with financial need.
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.