Free College for the Working Class
This article is from a cover package of essays entitled Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself. Find the full series here.
In late 2023, then candidate Donald Trump released a series of internet videos outlining his agenda for education. Mixed into his typical stew of bald-faced lies and racial denialism, alongside plans to abolish the U.S. Department of Education and privatize public schools, was something that, coming from Trump, should be cause for genuine surprise: a sensible policy idea.
Trump proposed creating a new, free, online university called the American Academy, which would offer high-quality courses in an array of subjects ranging from ancient history to accounting to training in the skilled trades. The American Academy would accept transfer credits from other colleges and universities and offer the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree, increasing access to higher education and creating new price competition in the college market to help tamp down rising tuition prices and spiraling student debt.
Information technology really does hold the potential to make college more affordable and accessible—so much so that I devoted a whole book to the subject in 2015. As I wrote for CNN that year, George Washington himself called for creating a “National University” in his final annual address to Congress. He even left money to build it in his last will and testament. Technology creates the opportunity to realize Washington’s dream at a national scale.
We shouldn’t have much faith that the onetime proprietor of the fraudulent Trump University will do a good job getting this new university built, if he builds it at all. But the idea is a step toward solving the crisis of affordability and access that plagues higher education—a problem that Democrats have been unable to systematically address. President Joe Biden spent most of his four years in office focused on lifting the burden of student debt, a worthy goal but only a treatment of symptoms, not the underlying problem.
Many undergraduates, particularly first-generation and academically underprepared students, need the personal touch that brick-and-mortar colleges provide. They also need that education to be affordable and of high quality, a promise on which our dysfunctional and inequitable system often doesn’t deliver. Today, top-tier colleges are swimming in money while the lesser-known institutions most students attend are starved for funds. Credits often don’t transfer, good teaching isn’t rewarded, and students are recruited with deceptive prices that often leave them with unmanageable debt.
What’s needed, in short, is transformational reform. In the summer of 2020, I proposed such a plan in these pages—a plan that would rework the federal government’s financing of higher education from top to bottom. Key aspects of it were reflected in the Biden administration’s proposal to make community college free. But that same summer, other forces were at work, and would turn the administration’s focus in a different direction.
Over the past decade, college affordability has moved to the forefront of the Democratic domestic policy agenda, mostly through the combination of expansive “free college” and mass student loan forgiveness policies championed by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other members of the progressive left. When Biden won the Democratic nomination in 2020, he consolidated party support by signing on to a version of the loan forgiveness plan. He also included a robust free community college plan in his “Build Back Better” agenda, along with expanded child care, family leave, and much else. Unfortunately, only half of that platform survived.
Thanks to changing economic circumstances and the whims of a couple of centrist Democrats in the Senate, Biden was forced to abandon the community college plan. Instead of addressing the root causes of unaffordable tuition and high debt, Biden was left to try fixing the problem after the fact by using a 2003 federal law that gives broad authority to “waive or modify” student loan provisions in a time of national emergency, which the COVID-19 pandemic definitely was. Biden’s plan was to forgive $10,000 from nearly all federal loans, and $20,000 for loans held by low-income students. But the Supreme Court abandoned its textualist pretenses and struck down the program based on the “major questions doctrine,” an alleged legal principle that the Court’s six-member Republican majority made up out of whole cloth the year before.
This is where things started going off the rails.
The Supreme Court has dealt a series of major blows to progressive causes in the past five years, on issues including abortion, affirmative action, environmental protection, and more. Activists have responded in a variety of ways, including grassroots organizing, political action, and calls to reform and expand the Court.
What they haven’t done is send the same exact issues right back to the same six justices who just a minute ago created damaging legal precedent that could rule American law for decades to come. But this is what happened with student loans—the Biden administration doubled and tripled down, devoting its energy to a cause it knew was headed nowhere in hopes voters would see and reward the effort.
On cue, the Department of Education dared the federal courts to stop them by vastly expanding the generosity of an existing student loan forgiveness program, and then used the federal rulemaking process to conjure up a bunch of new ones out of thin air—even though, in its decision, the Supreme Court explicitly told the department it has no authority to do so. Even the SAVE loan forgiveness plan, which the Education Department based on existing statutory authority, was blocked by Republican state attorneys general filing lawsuits with federal judges eager to implement the Court’s radical new anti-regulatory doctrines.
Reworking the higher education system would restore the promise of the 1960s and ’70s, when working- and middle-class Americans could attend state or regional college and receive a quality education at low cost.
By this point, it was more and more difficult for borrowers to understand how to pay back their loans, or which among the alphabet soup of forgiveness programs were real, tied up in court, or might never be implemented at all—especially since this was all happening at the same time that the pandemic pause on loan payments was winding down in its own complicated way.
Yet this was the moment when the administration decided to release yet another forgiveness program, one that was more legally tenuous and logically indefensible than any that had come before. The new regulations were conveniently released just two weeks before this year’s presidential election, and were designed to forgive the student loans of anyone experiencing financial “hardship.” To determine whether someone qualifies, the Department of Education would predict ahead of time who is likely to someday default on their loan, based on 17 different factors, one of which is whether people are making regular payments on the debt. In other words, if you don’t want to pay your loan back, all you have to do is not pay your loan back.
This is a kind of Alice in Wonderland version of loan policy. A private bank evaluates an application and doesn’t lend to people it thinks will default, or charges them a higher interest rate. The Education Department proposed a system where everyone gets a loan, no questions asked, at the same interest rate, and then the people who it thinks might default don’t have to pay their loans back at all. It would create huge incentives for people to make their credit worse.
Because this system was apparently not weird and complicated enough, the department also proposed that borrowers whose loans are not automatically pre-forgiven could also receive a “holistic” review of their hardship, based on “circumstances.” How the department would manage to spend hundreds of millions of dollars it doesn’t have to hire vast legions of currently nonexistent “holistic” evaluators was left wholly unexplained.
The hardship regulations are truly a descent into public policy madness. They represent the final logical collapse of a loan forgiveness movement that began with good intentions but wandered step by step into an ever-more-confusing thicket of policy ideas that amount to making higher education affordable by allowing colleges to charge whatever they want, loaning students vast amounts of taxpayer money to pay those prices, and then forgiving the loans in the most diabolically complicated way possible. The Trump administration is going to do the next Democratic president a favor by ripping out the hardship regulations, root and branch. The party should take the opportunity to return to sane ideas that address the underlying causes of college unaffordability.
Trump’s American Academy is a good idea if done well. Democrats should support the plan if it’s implemented in good faith, but oppose anything that hints of propagandizing or for-profit exploitation. And even the best possible version of a national online university is no substitute for doing a much better job of supporting and regulating the public universities we already have.
The bones of a better system are in the Biden free community college plan. As I argued in the Monthly four years ago, the plan should be expanded to include four-year public and private universities that have a mission of providing access to large numbers of first-generation and Pell Grant–eligible students. All of these institutions would be given the option of receiving direct federal subsidies in exchange for adopting a simple, transparent price schedule that charges zero tuition for low-to-moderate-income families and modest tuition to everyone else. The policy that many public universities used to have, in other words, before losing their way.
Colleges and universities that voluntarily choose to join this network would agree to meet basic standards of ensuring that students are able to succeed in their careers. They would also accept the credits of other institutions in the network, so students would be able to transfer or attend multiple institutions without wasting valuable money and time. If the federal subsidy were large enough—say, $10,000 per student—most of the participating institutions would have enough money to meet the tuition requirements and invest in raising faculty salaries, reducing class sizes, hiring more tenured professors, improving buildings and equipment, and providing students with the academic and social support services they need.
This plan is sweeping, but it’s not entirely new. American higher education worked like this back in the 1960s and ’70s, before some states began cutting funding and many public universities chose to hike tuition in pursuit of prestige. Reworking the system would restore the promise of that era, where working- and middle-class Americans could attend state or regional college and receive a quality education at low cost. Those kinds of institutions would likely see increased funding under this program, but not at the expense of elite schools, which could simply choose not to participate. Harvard would remain Harvard, a hotbed of research, innovation, and ruling-class acculturation. Meanwhile, we would rebuild the pathway to opportunity whose state of disrepair has bred such resentment among the voters without a college education who supported Trump.
Even in a time when political party identification is increasingly tied to college diplomas, reports of declining confidence in higher education are greatly exaggerated. Americans of all political stripes continue to place a high value on affordable colleges. Democrats need to learn from their student loan forgiveness misadventure and return to policies that work.
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