The Trouble With Hillary Clinton’s Free Tuition Plan – The New York Times

This month, Hillary Clinton announced a plan to make public colleges free  for the children of any family earning less than $125,000 a year. The move was widely seen as an appeal to supporters of her primary opponent Bernie Sanders, who made free college a pillar of his insurgent campaign.

(Article by Kevin Carey)

Binyamin Appelbaum of The New York Times wrote Saturday that the plan could have the perverse effect of driving tuition higher. As is often the case with campaign promises, the details are fuzzy. And probably for good reason. A look at how states finance higher education shows that the more Mrs. Clinton tries to make good on her free college promises, the more problematic the policies needed to get there become.

It’s easy to devise a straightforward way to meet Mrs. Clinton’s goals: Students at public colleges and universities simply forward their tuition bills to the federal Department of Education, which pays them. Congress could write such a law on a single piece of paper and still have time for golf in the afternoon.

Read more at: nytimes.com