The Nation: Opinion: Katrina Vanden Heuvel: An Oregon Trail to End Student Debt

The Nation: Opinion: Katrina Vanden Heuvel: An Oregon Trail to End Student Debt

Under the Oregon college affordability plan at least according to Katrina Vanden Heuvel, students in Oregon do not pay for any of their college education while in college. But pay three percent of their working income for the next twenty years after they graduate from college. So lets say someone averages seventy-thousand dollars more for the less for the first twenty years, after leaving college, which is not unrealistic, in other words one million four thousand dollars over a twenty year period, that comes out to them paying forty-two thousand dollars. The average cost of a college education right now is over hundred-thousand dollars. So that would leave colleges with a sixty-thousand dollar hole per college graduate. They simply can’t afford that. What we need to do instead is find a way to pay for that entire college education in an affordable way that makes higher education universal for all Americans.

What I’m in favor of is creating Universal College Savings Accounts or UCSA. Something I’ve already proposed on this blog. Which is for each kid that is born their parents would be able to set up an account for each student tax-free. That would be matched by their employer and perhaps even the Federal Government, or we could allow the states to set up their own systems and parents would have eighteen years to come up with the hundred-thousand dollars they would need to send each kid to college. Low-income parents, would get their contributions tax-free, but also would get that money back in a tax credit.

As well as expanding the Federal Government college academies like with the Armed Forces. And have an academy that covers Justice, Homeland Security, Foreign Affairs to use as examples. That graduates of these academies would have to serve in these services after graduating like with the military. The fact is and I know Social Democrats hate hearing this, but there’s no such thing as a free education anywhere in the world. And not even in the most socialist of countries. We have to pay for our education one way or the other and have to do it in a way that is fiscally responsible. In a way that those bills get paid, but also so everyone has access to higher education. Like we have access to K-12.