Andrew Ross, Michael Cheque, and Luke Herrine:

Top-level lawmakers are finally turning their attention to the student debt crisis. On August 22, President Obama announced a plan to “fundamentally rethink how higher education is paid for in this country.” A few weeks before, Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon declared that he would introduce a bill that would spread Oregon’s “Pay It Forward” loan repayment proposal across the nation. No doubt, there is a widespread hunger for a new way forward in education funding, and it has only sharpened in the wake of the sorry spectacle, earlier in the year, of legislators squabbling over how much to raise interest rates on federal loans. But the well-intentioned proposals floated by Obama and Merkley fall far short of a sustainable, effective solution to the problem.
Before dealing with these plans, let’s be clear: making college affordable would hardly put a dent in the federal budget. If we subtracted all of the tax exemptions, outlays, and programs that currently subsidize public education, only $12.4 billion in additional annual funding would be needed to cover the current tuition at all two and four-year public colleges and universities. In other words, the cost of a genuinely “public option” that would turn education into a binding democratic right turns out to be not much more than a rounding error in the federal budget–less than one percent of yearly spending. That’s all it would take for the federal government to join the long list of other countries that fully fund higher education. By way of comparison, U.S. taxpayers are currently subsidizing too-big-to-fail banks to the tune of $83 billion a year. If we just turned off that faucet we could provide public education completely tuition-free with $70 billion to spare.