Jeb Bush received praise for his higher education plan, but it might not be the sort that will attract more Republican voters.
The Republicans have been overshadowed on higher education plans by the Democratic candidates. Part of that is because Republican candidates haven’t discussed higher education much. Marco Rubio released a plan, and then, months later, Bush released his, but otherwise, the GOP hasn’t worried about higher education.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, have spent a lot of time and energy reaching out to millennials on higher education, but the Republicans have mostly punted on millennial issues.
Now, the Brookings Institution has released a paper that said Bush’s reforms “deserve serious attention regardless of the outcome of his bid for the presidency.”
“Bush’s plan solves many of the problems of the existing loan system and improves on the leading proposed solutions by allowing individuals to pay for their college educations based on how much they spend and how much they earn after college,” Matthew M. Chingos, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, wrote.
Policy wonks like the proposal for its breadth and nuance, but the reforms could look like more federal involvement in higher education to Republican voters.
Democratic promises of tuition-free and debt-free college have left an opening for the GOP. Clinton’s plan for higher education, like Sanders’s plan, doesn’t change much in college aside from who pays the tuition bills. The Republicans, then, could present an alternative: how to reform the higher education system and make it affordable instead of a government privilege that every young American expects.
To an extent, that’s what Bush’s plan does. Like Marco Rubio’s plan, he supports income-based repayment plans instead of student loans. Bush, however, limits the credit line for college, then requires students to pay a percentage of their income for 25 years to repay the credit, but limits how much students have to pay. At the maximum, a student will have to repay 5 percent of their income for a $50,000 credit, but wouldn’t pay more than $87,500.
Republican voters might like that the Bush plan is more sensitive to tuition levels. Students don’t have as much access to large amounts of funds like with the current student loan system, so higher tuition is more of a burden. Price-sensitive students can’t be charged as much when they’re more responsible for paying tuition. Unlike the current system, where colleges can increase tuition prices because students can access more student loans, the Bush plan could better control costs.
Through tax withholding, students automatically repay the credit, and thus avoid the risk of default, something that threatens many students and can lead to suspended driver’s and professional licenses.
“The core ideas of the Bush student loan plan are worthy of serious consideration by presidential candidates and policymakers on both sides of the aisle,” Chingos wrote.
Nationally, Bush earns about 4 percent support. He did better in the New Hampshire primary, finishing fourth with 11 percent of the vote, but he hasn’t secured a spot as a frontrunner. If Bush fades, Rubio could tweak his higher education plan with some of Bush’s ideas, or another Republican candidate could salvage it and make an appeal to millennials.
