“If we begin to think of education as a part of the economic mobility system, then we can begin to think of education’s implications for children long after school,” Elliott, who also serves as the founding director of the Center on Assets, Education, and Inclusion (AEDI), explained at a recent New

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.

“This view that college pays off and that most people pay off their loans, is narrow and tragically flawed,” Heulsman said in his opening remarks. “This is a crisis of equity, it’s a crisis of opportunity and we’ll argue it’s a crisis for the economy.”

With college tuition costs at an all-time high, Demos, a D.C.-based public policy organization, recently proposed a debt-free college initiative.

Education-loan borrowing among students pursuing an associate’s degree has increased significantly in the past decade, particularly among low-income students. For the 2011-2012 academic year, 55% of students who received Pell Grants and earned associate’s degrees also graduated with debt, according

“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

"Debt-free" might not sound as sexy as simply "free," but O'Malley's approach could in fact create a more effective mandate for radically reducing the cost of college in the United States.

We need a systematic approach to tackle the student-debt crisis. We can easily find one if we look in the not-too-distant past.

European countries also differ substantively from the US in terms of the percentage of college attendees that their debt free models serve. “Germany has a lower percentage of students go on to college than we have here in the US,” Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at think tank Demos, told ATTN

Policy makers are also exploring ways to maintain a safety net for seniors with defaulted student loans, while still ensuring the Education Department gets the money it’s owed. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and McCaskill, Democrats from Massachusetts and Missouri, respectively, sent a letter to the GAO