Simply put, debt-free college means that every student in America, regardless of their financial means, should be able to attend a public college or university and graduate without student debt.
In weekly calls and in meetings over the past few months, Hillary Clinton’s policy team has been soliciting input from policy experts with ties to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, with the goal of making student loan reform the core of Clinton’s economic agenda.
The general idea is that students who attend a four-year public college would have their tuition and debt reduced almost to zero through a combination of moves. The federal government would increase its aid to states for higher education, so schools could bring down tuition. Pell Grants would be increased for low-income students, and with lower tuition this money could be spent by students on costs like books.
Last night, Hillary Clinton announced several important voting reforms: expanded early voting, an end to voter ID laws, felon voting rights restoration and making election day a federal holiday. Most importantly, she came out in favor of universal, automatic voter registration.
Yesterday, presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton visited Texas Southern University, a historically black college in Houston, where she called for stronger election administration practices to protect voters. Along with asking Congress to reboot the Voting Rights Act—which had “its heart … ripped out” by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013, Clinton said—she called for mandatory voter registration and at least 20 days of early voting.
The cost of college has risen 1,120 percent over the past three decades. Today, students are united in the near-universal nature of paying for school through student loans. However, this reliance on student loans does not create a more equal cohort of graduates.
Increasing tuition costs are largely held to be at fault for rising levels of debt. However, the cause of rising tuition is subject to debate. Some believe that public subsidies have encouraged colleges to avail themselves of the “free money” and jack up tuition prices. Others say it is the competition among institutions to build the most expensive and cutting-edge amenities on campus.
"We're at a really interesting and troubling point where student debt has become sort of normalized," Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at the think tank Demos, told Mic. "Tuition used to be low enough and grant aid used to be high enough that total cost of attendance at higher university was manageable with a summer job."
In FY 2014, per-student state appropriations for higher education were 24 percent below the funding level in 1989. The result, also shown in the chart, is that net tuition revenue (the tuition received by public colleges and universities after grant aid is subtracted) has more than doubled during this period. Considering that three-quarters of all undergraduates are enrolled in public institutions, it’s not surprising that this increase in tuition prices has led to a large increase in student loan borrowing.
Vermont will allow voters to cast ballots the same day they register to vote, effective January 2017. It used to be that voters would need to register close to a week before casting a ballot, but that’s changing.
Republicans claim voter ID laws aren't racist, but numbers don't lie.
Sean McElwee, a researcher for progressive think tank Demos, compared measures of racist sentiments among white people in each of the 50 states (such as whether they believe blacks are trustworthy or intelligent) to dataon voting laws in each state, including when they were introduced and how strict they are.
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 standards.
Voting matters. Though many Americans believe that voting is either useless or merely a civic duty, in reality it carries huge consequences for the decisions of politicians.
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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.
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 unlikely to own a home, while homeownership is the norm for households headed by someone who finished college.
A separate report this week by the left-leaning think tank Demos suggests that black students may also be disproportionately impacted by such policies.
The nation’s yawning wealth gap is a major reason why minority students end up borrowing more for college. Structural racism has created disparities in home ownership rates, income and other wealth-building vehicles, providing minority borrowers with fewer resources to tap to pay for college, on average.