Elizabeth Warren's latest proposal: cancel student debt, make college free
Elizabeth Warren has proposed a $1.25 trillion plan to forgive student debts and make all public college and university undergraduate education free, as well as earmarking $50B for historically Black colleges, and expanding federal grants to help pay for all students' non-tuition expenses.
The plan will be funded through Warren's proposed annual wealth tax on family fortunes over $50M (this will also fund expanded public housing and universal child care). The plan joins her other progressive policies, including lowering drug prices by producing pharmaceuticals under compulsory licenses; an antitrust breakup of Big Tech; abolishing the Electoral College; and a slate of farm reforms including a national Right to Repair rule for agricultural equipment.
Warren was also the first 2020 candidate to call for Trump's impeachment.
(I am a donor to both Warren and Sanders's 2020 campaigns)
Under the debt relief program, each person in a household earning less than $100,000 would be eligible to have $50,000 in debt forgiven; higher income families would have smaller amounts of debt forgiven.
We must do more to correct these historical injustices and to ensure that opportunities are fairly available to everyone. My plan will:
* Create a fund for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs). The fund will have a minimum of $50 billion, but the Secretary of Education will have the authority to increase the amount of money in the fund as needed to ensure that spending per-student at those schools is comparable to colleges in the area.
* Make additional federal funding available to states that demonstrate substantial improvement in enrollment and graduation rates for lower-income students and students of color.
* After an appropriate transition period, ban for-profit colleges from receiving any federal dollars (including military benefits and federal student loans), so they can no longer use taxpayer dollars to enrich themselves while targeting lower-income students, servicemembers, and students of color and leaving them saddled with debt.
* Require public colleges to complete an annual audit that identifies issues creating shortfalls in enrollment and graduation rates for lower-income students and students of color and that proposes steps to improve those rates.
* Prohibit public colleges from considering citizenship status or criminal history in admissions decisions.
I'm calling for something truly transformational: Universal free public college and cancellation of" [Elizabeth Warren/Medium]
Elizabeth Warren's Higher Education Plan: Cancel Student Debt and Eliminate Tuition [Astead W. Herndon/New York Times]
(via Late Stage Capitalism)
(Image: Tim Pierce, CC-BY)