Higher Education for All? This Bill Could Make It Happen
Is the path to the good life through higher education? A recent Bloomberg report revealed that the average oldest millennial is more than $20,000 poorer in net worth than the oldest baby boomers were at the same age. One of the biggest contributing factors to this generational wealth gap is student debt, which has skyrocketed over the last two decades and looks set to continue growing. Even as college has become more expensive, its effect on the standard of living has increased: as Bloomberg reports, college-educated millennials now earn 113% more than their non-college-educated peers, while the earnings gap between college-educated and non-college-educated baby boomers was only 57%.
Statistics like this reflect that college is one of the main drivers of inequality in America today: A college education remains expensive enough that student debt can impoverish borrowers decades after graduation. But it is still valuable enough that many people choose to attend despite the financial burden. The unaffordable cost of a college education harms students and it also hurts teachers. As graduate student workers and union leaders, we have observed the troubling state of American higher education firsthand. Our union’s members, Ph.D. students at Brown University, teach many students who either pay or borrow enormous sums to attend an elite, private, four-year institution, while many of us will ourselves be paying off loans from our bachelor’s degrees for the foreseeable future. Even as the price tag for a college diploma has gotten heftier, careers in higher education have become less likely to lead to a living wage, let alone to paying off debt or saving money. According to a 2018 analysis, only one out of every four college instructors is tenured or on the tenure track. The rest are short-term, casual labor or graduate students like us.
Recognizing that college has become a driver of inequality means confronting three related social crises: College is too expensive, student debt prevents college graduates from eventually attaining economic security, and academic labor conditions are bad and getting worse. President Joe Biden has rightly made expanding access to college a priority, but his current proposal under the American Families Plan to make community college free for two years nationwide, increase federal aid for low-income students, and expand support for HBCUs, Tribal Colleges, and other Minority-Serving Institutions addresses just the first of these issues and does so incompletely. Meanwhile, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Pramila Jayapal have introduced legislation called the College for All Act that would comprehensively transform higher education.
The bill proposes making college affordable for everyone by entirely eliminating tuition and fees at four-year public colleges and universities for households with an annual income of $125,000 or less and would make community college tuition-free. Unlike Biden’s plan, which focuses primarily on two-year institutions, the College for All Act promises to reshape the entire higher education landscape by investing massively in public universities across the country. This piece of legislation tackles these compounded costs of attending college by doubling maximum Pell Grant amounts and allowing students to use Pell Grants to cover living expenses, like room and board. This measure addresses the root causes of new student debt by not only eliminating tuition costs but also containing added expenses that make college unaffordable and force students to take on heavier debt loads. Biden’s bill would make attending college an easier accomplishment for some, but the Sanders and Jayapal proposal would, as its name promises, enshrine postsecondary education as a fundamental right for all.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/higher-education-fundamental-right
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