Bernie Sanders's plan for free public universities

[BlueCheese]

I know a big part of Sanders's platform is making tuition for public universities free for in-state residents. I was curious as to how his proposal works, since those are the kinds of details that don't usually make it through in news articles or interviews. Overall, I think it's quite well thought out, and an interesting idea. I have a few quibbles or questions, but these are about minor issues, and not the main part of the bill.

Details of the bill are here:
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/s1373

I thought I'd summarize the details here, in case anyone else is interested.

The main idea, as I gather, is to eliminate tuition altogether for in-state students, as opposed to the usual approach of giving money to students, who then pay their tuition with it. Essentially, each state will look up how much money it received in tuition in fiscal year 2016. This seems to establish a baseline.

From 2017-2019, the federal government will give the state 67% of this baseline amount, as long as the state furnishes the remaining 33% itself and does not charge tuition. If the state decides to pay more than this amount, it will receive additional federal matching funds at a 1:1 ratio. In 2020, the federal government will determine the median cost per student across all of the states, and then incrementally reduce the payouts to the higher-spending states so that by 2025, no state will be receiving more than this amount per student.

(Side note: This part is interesting to me, because (if I understand it correctly) it fixes the amount a state can receive for three years, and then limits the cost per student to be the national median after that. It looks as if the goal here is to control how much colleges cost to run. So this is a college inflation-control bill as well as a free tuition bill.)

There are a number of common-sense rules that states have to meet to get the federal money, besides meeting their own funding requirements. Most of these involve maintaining per-student spending and financial aid at a minimum of 2015 levels, but states must also promise to have at least 75% of instruction be provided by tenured or tenure-track faculty. Somewhat interestingly, no federal money can be used for merit (as opposed to need-based) scholarships, non-academic buildings (including stadiums but also student centers), or administrator salaries or benefits.

Sanders estimates that the federal government will be pay around $47 billion per year on this program. This seems like a reasonable amount. Surely we spend at least as much money on less useful things.

There are two other major sections of the bill: one deals with student loans, and the other lays out the financial transactions tax that is meant to pay for this.

[mythology]

1. That bit about reducing the amount given to the national median is really dumb

It's dumb because costs aren't the same across the board. If a professor can make the same amount of money at say UCLA or Nebraska, which has the lower cost of living? At best, you will force even more of the best professors to private schools who could pay more.

But also it punishes states who want to fund education for when states like Kansas elect Sam Brownback who then promptly slashes state funding of education.

I can see giving a block grant, tied to cost of living to each state per student, but not balanced across the entire country.

[TexasTowelie]

2. It will never occur in Texas.

Republicans will be yelling about unfunded federal mandates and won't put up the matching funds. If this state won't provide Medicaid that is funded at a 90% level then why would they fund a program that is far less essential at a 67% level of federal support.

[liberal_at_heart]

4. Republicans in Texas want to secede from the country. There's not much you can do with a state

that wants to secede from the country, but the good news is Texas is becoming a purple state. So as long as we can get Democrats on board which sometimes seems almost as difficult as getting Republicans on board then eventually they too will participate in Medicaid and tuition free college.

[liberal_at_heart]

3. This sounds to me like how it used to be. Decades ago universities were

beacons of research and development, and the reason for that was a sufficient amount of funding from both federal and state government. These days most research and development is done by corporations and we can't really trust the results, and the reason for this is because of a lack of funding from the federal and state governments. This would not only help our students. It would help bring back reliable research.