Viva la “revolution!”
Just don’t ask Sen. Bernie Sanders how he expects to pay for it.
Sanders called for a “revolution” in higher education Tuesday, going one step further than President Obama’s free community college proposal. Sanders wants offer two free years of tuition to all freshmen and sophomores at public colleges and universities.
“We need a revolution in the way higher education is funded,” Sanders said at Johnson State College in Vermont, The Hill reported.
He called the student loan debt crisis “absurd” and said the current funding structure was “absolutely counter-productive to our efforts to create a strong economy.”
But despite his lofty rhetoric, Sanders offered no suggestions for how exactly to pay for this grand idea. Considering that Obama’s plan just for community college would already cost about $60 billion over the next decade just to send 9 million students to community college, the baseline cost for Sanders’ plan would be even more immense.
Sanders pointed out that the U.S. does not rank as highly against the education levels of countries where college is free and tried to use that as a justification.
In addition to his free college proposal, he also wanted to see a restructuring of the student loan program.
“It makes no sense that students and their parents are forced to pay interest rates for higher education loans that are much higher than they pay for car loans or housing mortgages,” he said. “We must also end the practice of the government making $127 billion over the next decade in profits from student loans.”
