In addition, federal student loans — which usually cap at $27,000 over four years — don’t always cover the full cost of a higher education, and many students are forced to secure private loans or work jobs to pay for their degree. “Student debt is not the same to every borrower,” Mark Huelsman, a

Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, compared the movement to the one seen with universal health care, which had been an issue for quite awhile until “a moment of consensus” came in 2008.

A striking piece of the 2016 Democratic primary is the consensus among the candidates on substantially lowering the price students pay to attend public colleges.

“Student debt has become a kitchen-table issue at this point,” says Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos. “Because borrowing is now a prerequisite to college, it’s now embedded in traditional issues of economic fairness and things that students tend to be active about.”

On a late evening this past summer and without warning, one of the oldest buildings in Atlanta caught fire. Gaines Hall — a former dormitory on the campus of Morris Brown College — had been shuttered for years, closed when the school fell on hard times. After firefighters extinguished the two-alarm

Parents and students enter into an often complicated and opaque process when trying to secure financial aid, making some kind of financial discussion essentially a requirement for anyone hoping to successfully pay for college, said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning

Critics — and even some supporters — of the program say its designations are arbitrary, and raise questions about whether the benefit should be rethought, expanded, or even eliminated. Adding farming to the list could introduce further complexity, since farmers in the U.S. work mainly for for-profit

“There are political advantages to saying we’re not going to provide aid to students who aren’t putting in the effort for their education,” said Mark Huelsman, a policy analyst at Demos, a think tank that has been promoting debt-free college.

Over the summer, the call to return the United States to debt-free college has been loud and clear. To fulfill the promise of our higher education system, we must ensure that today’s students, the most racially and socioeconomically diverse college class in American history, have the same