Citing Soaring Student Debt, Sanders to Pitch Tuition-Free Higher Education

With student debt figures continuing to climb, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) plans to unveil legislation this week to provide tuition-free higher education for students at 4-year colleges and universities in the United States. 

The proposal, which Sanders plans to introduce on Tuesday, would eliminate undergraduate tuition at public colleges and universities and expand work-study programs. 

“Countries like Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and many more are providing free or inexpensive higher education for their young people,” Sanders, who is running for president as a Democrat, said in a news release. “They understand how important it is to be investing in their youth.  We should be doing the same.”

Earlier this year, in a speech at Johnson State College in Vermont, Sanders called for a “revolution” in the way higher education is funded in the U.S.

“We must fundamentally restructure our student loan program,” he said at the time, adding: “It makes no sense that students and their parents are forced to pay interest rates for higher education loans that are much higher than they pay for car loans or housing mortgages. We must also end the practice of the government making $127 billion over the next decade in profits from student loans.”

The average class of 2015 borrower will graduate college with just over $35,000 in debt, according to an analysis by Edvisors, a publisher of free websites about planning and paying for college. What’s more, a full 71 percent of this year’s college graduates borrowed money to pay for their undergraduate education. As the Boston Globe put it, the class of 2015 is “the most indebted class in history, graduating with a whopping $56 billion in student loan debt.”