Free tuition for 4-year public colleges and universities would be available for all students under a bill by presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders.
This is great news for someone like me whose parents emigrated from Mexico and were unable to further their education because of the cost.
“We need to have an educational system that says to every person in this country that if you have the ability and the desire to get a higher education you should be able to get that education regardless of the income of your family,” said Sanders in an interview on thomhartmann.com
With the College for All Act, the federal government would pay $47 billion of the annual cost by imposing a so-called Robin Hood Tax on Wall Street. Under the bill, the states would pick up the remaining $23 billion to meet the $70 billion total cost of eliminating undergraduate tuition and fee from all public colleges and universities.
With this act, student loan interest rate would also be lowered to almost half from of the current 4.32 percent.
This is very important because it would allow student to finish college debt-free. According to the Institute for College Access & Success, in 2013 students finished college with an average debt of $28,000.
Moorpark College President Luis Sanchez said he is a strong advocate for affordable, although not free, education because he believes that people who invest in their education tend value it more than if it were free. However, he agrees the current cost is too great.
“There is no question that the cost of higher education, including the cost of tuition and textbooks, has gotten prohibitively expensive, and we need to provide people an affordable pathway to completing college.” said Sanchez.
It’s understandable that the president prefers affordable rather than free education, but any cost could be a barriers to education for people like me.
According to a study by the Illinois Student Assistance Commission, financial difficulty is a main reason why many students don’t attend college. The state’s Monetary Award Program, that covers 100 percent of college tuition and fees, has allowed all low-income students attend college when otherwise they wouldn’t.
“We have hundreds of thousands of bright young people who want to get into college education and they simply can’t,” said Sanders. “They’re frozen out of college because of the high cost of higher education and the fact that they don’t want to leave the school deeply in debt and then you got millions of other people who do go to college and graduate and they leave school with incredible debt.”
Free tuition opened doors for Illinois students. It’s time to open doors to higher education for all students in every state.
