Senator Bernie Sanders may be shaking up the 2016 presidential election already, but he’s also continuing to make waves in Congress. The senator from Vermont has proposed something pretty radical: free college for all at public four-year colleges and universities for those who meet admission

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[...] The debt-free college initiative is based on a plan sketched out by liberal think tank Demos. It calls for the federal government to award grants to states that increase spending on higher education and increase need-based grant aid.

The fact that student debt continues to soar is troubling enough. Now there is clear evidence that it also deepens the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

[...] A separate report this week by the left-leaning think tank Demos suggests that black students may also be disproportionately impacted by such policies.

Student debt can weigh you down long into adulthood, and might make you less likely to ever be able to retire. That's according to a new analysis from Demos, a progressive think tank. This chart shows the clear benefit of getting a college degree. Households with some college but no degree are

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Most students go into debt to pay for college. And while no one wants to be in the red, a new report from left-leaning think tank Demos argues that the increasingly debt-financed higher education system in the United States is especially harmful to low-income, black and Latino kids.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson vowed that no student wishing to attend college would "be turned away because his family is poor." Half a century later, a shift in the way college is funded and the declining fortunes of minorities and poor families since the recession have created a college-debt