You're advocating free tuition? Yup, I'm 100% on board. [1] However. This episode is about the current proposals for patching up our current system. This foll

You're advocating free tuition? Yup, I'm 100% on board. [1] However. This episode is about the current proposals for patching up our current system. This following summary is so over generalized as to certainly be mostly wrong; so please just read it as indicative of the policy challenges: Currently, each state runs their own higher education institutions (university, community colleges, voc tech, etc). The feds currently handle the student loans. (States and institutions also receive grants, research monies, etc. YMMV.) In our future perfect free school system, feds would give money to the states to spend. Since the feds can't just tell states what to do, there may be some kind of carrot & stick arrangement, like how the highway funds were dispersed. But that's no guarantee that state's will sign up or play nicely. For example, look at the spotty adoption of Medicare expansion. Some states declined FREE MONEY, which had very few strings, because of REASONS. Which leads us back to today's Gordian knot. How do the feds design and implement a fair system which is strenuously opposed by some states and a lobby of the most powerful universities? The feds don't want to enable dysfunctional states who are screwing over their own students. The feds also want to avoid rewarding bad behavior, eg giving bad states the same deal as good states. So right now it seems the best leverage the feds have is thru student loans. Hopefully our nation progresses to something more reasonable. [1] I have no idea what free higher education would look like. I was pretty happy with my state's pre-Reagan funding model; not quite free, but still very generous. I do accept that students have to have some "skin in the game". Civil or military service leading to free education is great. And I also accept that just giving institutions money, no strings attached, leads to bad outcomes. So maybe a hybrid system; 50% state funded directly, 25% student funded (self or loans), and 25% vouchers (like charter schools). But I'm open to any reasonable, pragmatic system.