>Off the top of my head - if you declare bankruptcy to evict student loans, you are ineligible for retirement account contributions like IRA and 401ks for the 7-10 year window. Additionally you take a 5% tax increase for the duration of that window.
Why don't we just do that for everyone, and make higher education free. This works for the absolute majority of students. Provide an opt-out for the few that can pony up the cash up front.
You could probably turn education free by reducing the defence budget by a few percentage points.
One of the reasons I'm happy to be European. Education is free in most countries. It makes no sense to burden young people with a load of debt when starting out.
> You could probably turn education free by reducing the defence budget by a few percentage points.
According to https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=75, in the 2014–2015 school year U.S. colleges & universities spent $536 billion; the 2014 defense budget was $526.6 billion[0]. We could spend our entire defense budget and still not cover our higher education bill.
I'm not sure this is the best number to use. This is what is currently spent, it is not how much we would need to provide a free higher level education option. The entire department of education budget is 70 billion [0]. Using Pennsylvania as a baseline, they have approximately 185 million planned for public education[1]. Let's round that to 200mil and multiply it by 50. This gives us a ballpark spending of 100 billion at the state level. So let's approximate 170 billion spent on K-12 and higher education last year.
We were able to fund our entire K-12 system and give money to public universities for under half that 536 billion figure. So yes, we may not be able to cover our current higher education bill with the defense budget. However, what we are currently doing is not the best or cheapest system. Someone could definitely come up with a free higher education proposal for half of that 536 billion figure. The system needs reformed badly. Everyone knows the costs of higher education are out of control. Using it as the baseline isn't fair IMO.
It's a double whammy as they say in US because, students that can't find a job are both liable for student debt and also have to pay for health insurance.
I would too! I just think it’s important to understand that “free college” is only half the story and to recognize maturely that you’re making tradeoffs.
Why don't we just do that for everyone, and make higher education free. This works for the absolute majority of students. Provide an opt-out for the few that can pony up the cash up front.