Clinton to propose $350 billion college affordability plan

More than half of the sum would go toward new grants to states and colleges to incentivize tuition plans that would eliminate student borrowing for four-year public universities, while eliminating tuition altogether for two-year community college programs.

Private universities with “modest endowments” that serve a higher percentage of low-income students, including historically black colleges, would also receive federal funds to help lower the costs of attendance and improve graduation rates.

Clinton’s plan would also expand income-based repayment programs, allowing every student borrower to enroll in a plan that would cap their payments at 10 percent of their income with remaining debt forgiven after 20 years.

Clinton’s ambitious proposal to revamp the murky and expensive world of higher education attacks almost everyone associated with it: Colleges that cheat students or fail to control costs; states that reduce funding for public colleges and force students to make up the difference and dodgy student loan companies that collect borrowers’ monthly payments or attempt to recoup their defaulted debt.

Clinton’s proposal is $400billion cheaper than the plan released by Vermont Sent. The video highlights a number of students have been saddled with up to $200,000 in student debt. Demos Action and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee scheduled a media call for Monday to “share thoughts on Clinton’s proposal and discuss how the proposal could benefit millions of Americans”. A bipartisan pair of Senators introduced a bill to that effect last week. https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/08/06/bill-would-replace-us-loan-default-rates-repayment-metric In addition, Clinton’s campaign materials outline plans to continue the Obama Administration’s efforts to crack down on for-profit colleges. “Graduates of community college, career training, certificate programs and coding boot camps also earn more”.

The second part of Clinton’s college affordability plan is directed to college graduates who are now repaying loans and would allow them to refinance their outstanding debt at lower rates. In return, states would have to spend more on higher education and slow the growth of tuition increases. Sanders’ proposal, which would roughly cost $70 billion, would be financed by taxing hedge funds, investment firms and other Wall Street entities.

“There’s something wrong when students and their families have to go deeply into debt to be able to get the education and skills they need in order to make the best of their own lives”, she told students and teachers at Kirkland Community College in Monticello, Iowa, in April, shortly after announcing her campaign.

Sanders has pitched the plan as something other countries have done, including Germany, Denmark and Finland. On Monday, she will headline a town hall in Exeter and a grassroots organizing party in Manchester.

Groups on the left were already lining up Sunday night to praise the Clinton proposal and take credit for their role pushing Democratic candidates to address the issue.