Bernie Sanders's Plan For College Tuition Free

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During the presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders purposes a plan for college tuition free. He suggests that public colleges and universities in the United States should be charge free. The federal government has made over $110 billion dollars through student loan, so Senator Sander suggests that the government should cut the interest rate of student loan from 4.29% to just 2.37%. In current economy, the interest rate of auto-loan is 2.5% on average, so students should not pay more interest rate for their education that lasts for decades. In order to execute the plan, the federal government needs to pay $75 billion dollars a year to cover all the costs. With this huge amount of federal budget, Senator Sanders suggests that …show more content…
The situations in the United States differ largely from that in Europe because European countries generally has larger tax rate and lower college enrollment percentage. In 2014, the total tax wedge was 49.3% in Germany, 48.4% in France, 42.5% in Sweden whereas 31.5% in America and in the same year, the tertiary enrollment rate was 62% in Germany, 58% in France, 70% in Sweden whereas 94% in America . It is not hard to see that European countries tend to have more money to pay tuitions for fewer students. Thus, if America wanted to have free public college like Germany, the tax rate would most likely to increase. Paying more taxes is not a heavy burden to those upper class but to middle and lower classes. In this way, the free college policy does not effectively save money for most of the American parents. Some people like Bernie Sanders may suggest that the Wall Street speculators would be another method of supporting the young students for college. However, it is impossible for those speculators to spend their money on profitless projects. Besides, many students are not able to pay the loan back until many years after their graduation so it would be unrealistic to ask Wall Street speculators to support the public education. Thus, the free public college is not absolutely financially …show more content…
If public colleges are free of charge, then the costs of colleges are mainly depend on federal funds. However, there are limited amount of federal funds given by the government to these public institutions, and this will lead to the problem of limited admission in public colleges. Because public colleges can admit less students due to financial reasons, the competition to go to public college will be even more intense. Both lower and upper class students are fighting for a spot in public colleges, while upper class students who have better K-12 education would have a better chance of being admitted. Even if upper class students does not get admit by public colleges, they still have financial support from their families to pay for their private school education. On the other hand, middle or lower class students have nowhere to go except borrowing a student loan with high interest rates in order to get access to higher education. The purpose of the free college plan is to avoid students carrying thousands of dollars loan to go into the society, while this situation is still repeating under the free college plan. The outcome of free college plan is that the public is subsidizing rich people to go to public colleges, while enrollment rate for lower class students are reaching a new

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