The Student’s Candidate

As university students, we have a multitude of concerns; the
cost of college, healthcare, housing afforda-bility and fair employment, both
before and after graduation to name a few. According to the Student Monitor,
which sampled 1,020 students, while 67% of students believe their GPA is a
cause of daily stress, 48% of students consider the “biggest problem on campus”
to be the cost of education. As we ap-proach graduation, our academic anxiety
is then overshadowed by an economic one. What can help us? Who can help us? Who
is at the forefront proposing College for All, Medicare for All, Housing for
All and Jobs for All? Let me introduce you to senator and Democratic
presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

College for All is a comprehensive higher education proposal
that includes, among other things, making public colleges, universities and
trade schools tuition-and-fee-free via the College for All Act, ensuring a
debt-free college degree for low-income students via an expansion of Pell
Grants, tripling funding for the Work-Study Program to reach more than 2.1
million students and cancelling all student loan debt. All $1.6 trillion
dollars and counting of student loans canceled, no questions asked. All of this
will cost ap-proximately $2.2 trillion, and will be funded through a Wall
Street tax on stock, bond and derivative trades, same as a sales tax when we
make daily purchases. This tax would raise $2.4 trillion in the first 10 years.

Though I consider Bernie’s solution to be the best, he isn’t
the only candidate offering proposals on reduc-ing the cost of a college
education. To be fair to the other candidates, we should examine the higher
edu-cation plans of the other candidates, such as Sander’s supposed political
twins, Elizabeth Warren and Ka-mala Harris, who I would offer is an example of
how not to do a student loan forgiveness program.

Senator Elizabeth Warren proposes the Affordable Higher
Education for All plan. Like Bernie, Warren is committed to eliminating the
cost of tuition and fees at every public two-year and four-year college as well
as expanding the Pell Grant. However, her student debt relief program isn’t a
comprehensive as Sen-ator Sanders’. She promises the cancellation up to the
first $50,000 in student loan debt, cancelling debt for more than 75% of
student debtors. However, the remaining 25% of student debtors are then placed
on a scale with higher household incomes receiving less loan cancellation that
stops after $250,000. Ber-nie’s College for All plan would relieve the 25% of
student debtors that Warren’s plan would either par-tially or not at all
relieve. Senator Kamala Harris’ higher education plan shares some of the
complexity of Warren’s and none of the comprehensiveness of Bernie’s. As part
of a larger plan called “Reducing the Opportunity Gap,” one of Harris’ loan
relief initiatives was mocked on Twitter when it was discovered that
participants could have up to $20,000 of their loan debt forgiven, but only if
they were “Pell grant recipients who start a business that operates for three
years in disadvantaged communities.” To add the cherry on top, if participants
qualified they could “defer all of their student loans, interest-free, during a
business-formation period that can last for as many as three years.” Talk about
complex! It looks as if it’s designed to not work for anyone. A minority of the
minority of students would benefit from Harris’ plan. Bernie’s plan is
superior, no contest.

After viewing the two other most talked about higher
education plans, it is clear Bernie’s College for All plan best addresses
students’ primary challenge: the cost of higher education. Yet major concerns
are raised, such as paying for College for All, maintaining its funding and
ensuring student completion rates. Alongside the cancellation of $1.6 trillion
in student debt, the College for All Act will provide at least $48 billion
annually to eliminate tuition and fees at “four-year public colleges and
universities, tribal colleges, community colleges, trade schools and
apprenticeship programs.” According to Prof. James Felkerson, a visiting
instructor in economics at Bard College, in Working Paper No. 698, the
2007-2009 Federal Re-serve bailout was calculated to have cost in excess of $29
trillion. Remember that when anyone says “we can’t afford it.” If the College
for All budget was allocated half the amount as the 2007-2009 Fed bailout of
Wall Street, we would not only afford the initial down payment on College for
All of $2.2 trillion, but also continue its funding for about 279 years, and
that’s ignoring that College for All will be covered by the Wall Street Tax.
Finally, in a 2011 paper by Syracuse University sociology Prof. Vincent Tinto,
student completion hinges more on “classroom experience” even as institutional
enrollments, which at the time swelled by 11 million more students, and
expenditures in improvement programs increase. Neither ex-pansion translated to
increased completion rates. So, if student completion relies more on classroom
ex-periences and 48% of students consider the cost of education to be one of
the biggest problems on cam-pus, then implementing free higher education would
have a negligible to beneficial effect on students.

Although Bernie is not alone in ensuring
tuition-and-fee-free public higher education, he is unmatched with respect to
student debt relief. There is a difference between entirely bailing out debt
and progres-sively reducing debt. Yet we must also be cognizant of the fact
that Bernie Sanders isn’t the end-all-be-all for the future of this country; he
is not the end, but instead the means. Bernie continuously and consist-ently
reminds us that he is building a movement rooting itself in Democratic
Socialism best captured by his slogan, “Not me. Us!”

If you want to learn more about the Bernie Sanders campaign
and Democratic Socialism, you can visit his campaign website at
BernieSanders.com, as well as the Democratic Socialists of America website at
dsausa.org. Finally, don’t forget to register to vote for the Democratic
primary by February 3, 2020. And when you vote, consider how Bernie Sanders and
our burgeoning democratic socialist movement is the start of our society
becoming truly democratic.