Bernie Sanders: We Must Make Public Colleges and Universities Tuition Free

This is an opinion piece by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont.

Oct 9 2017, 11:00am

Excerpts:

Our nation needs the best-educated workforce in the world to succeed in the ever more competitive global economy. Sadly, we are moving further and further away from that goal. As recently as 1995, the United States led the world in college graduation rates, but today we have fallen to 11th place. We are now behind such countries as Japan, South Korea, Canada, England, Ireland, Australia, and Switzerland. Eleventh place is not the place for a great nation like the United States.

Why is this so important? Because fifty years ago, if you had a high school degree, odds were that you could get a decent-job and make it into the middle class. But that is no longer the case. While not all middle-class jobs in today's economy require post-secondary education, an increasing number do. By 2020, two-thirds of all jobs in the United States will require some education beyond high school.

In the richest country in the history of the world, everyone who has the desire and the ability should be able to get a college education regardless of their background and ability to pay. That's why I introduced the College for All Act, to make public colleges and universities in America tuition-free for families earning $125,000 per year or less—which covers 86 percent of our population.

It wasn't that long ago that our own government understood the value of investing in higher education. In 1944, Congress passed the GI Bill, which provided a free college education to millions of World War II veterans. This was one of the most successful pieces of legislation in modern history, laying the groundwork for the extraordinary post-war economic boom and an unprecedented expansion of the middle class.



https://impact.vice.com/en_us/article/9k3j87/bernie-sanders-we-must-make-public-colleges-and-universities-tuition-free