College education has been a bipolar issue on the presidential campaign trail. On the Democratic side, it has been of critical importance, with both Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders producing detailed plans for making college cheaper (or even free). But on the Republican side, plans have been vague, if they exist at all.
Here’s how the five remaining presidential contenders approach the issue of college affordability.
Sen. Ted Cruz — Republican candidate
While Cruz has championed eliminating Common Core and increasing school choice and other K-12 education measures, college is a much smaller part of his platform. College affordability is absent from his campaign website and he’s released no policy paper on it. And other than mentioning his own six-figure student loan debt during his campaign launch at Liberty University, he’s avoided the issue on the campaign trail.
But Cruz has proposed one big shakeup of federal education policy that would affect college: Abolishing the Department of Education. While getting rid of the entire department would primarily influence elementary and secondary education, it would affect college education as well.
Currently, student loans and aid programs like Pell Grants are administered through the Department of Education. Cruz says he wants to transform student aid programs into a series of block grants given to states to use as they see fit, but it’s not clear what he’d do with the federal student loan system.
In 2013, he proposed repealing the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, which was responsible for putting all student loans under federal government control, but he hasn’t made the law’s repeal a part of his presidential plan.
The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is also in charge of enforcing Title IX and other federal regulations governing colleges that receive federal funds. If the department is abolished, it’s not clear how Cruz plans to enforce those rules (or if he even wants to enforce them).
Ohio Gov. John Kasich — Republican candidate
Rather than fielding a specific plan, Kasich has pointed towards his work in Ohio as a guideline for how he’d approach education as president.
As governor, Kasich has pressured Ohio’s public colleges to keep costs under control so they can avoid tuition increases. He’s also touted the state’s unusual approach to public college funding, which ties a large majority of a school’s funding to its success rate at graduating students. The intent is to ensure that most students who take out loans for an education end up completing that education, rather than being stuck deep in debt without a diploma. It’s not clear how he’d transition that policy to the federal level, but it could take the form of revoking student loans from colleges whose students drop out at high rates.
Instead of sweeping plans for lowering the cost of college via government grants, Kasich has emphasized making college cheaper by pressuring colleges to contain costs, while encouraging students to consider non-traditional options that would reduce the expense of college. For instance, he’s said it should be easy for talented high schoolers to earn college credits while in high school, and he said in a recent interview that students should be encouraged to attend community college for a portion of their undergraduate years. But Kasich also rejected President Obama’s proposal that community college be free, on the grounds that with nearly $20 trillion in federal debt, “everything can’t be free.”
Businessman Donald Trump — Republican candidate
While Trump has endured criticism for Trump University (which wasn’t actually a college at all), Trump’s higher education proposals are even more bare-bones than those of Kasich and Cruz. He hasn’t released any official plan, but he has occasionally decried the fact the federal government earns a profit on student loans, indicating he may support changes to make student loans cheaper. Interestingly, this idea is one Trump shares with his Democratic rivals.
Trump has suggested he wants to cut the Department of Education “way, way, way down,” but he’s said that mostly in the context of K-12 education, so it’s not clear what effect if any such a move would have on colleges.
Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders — Democratic candidate
Unsurprisingly, the only socialist in the presidential race has the most ambitious plan for overhauling college. Sanders argues that college is the new high school, and therefore public college should be free, like public high schools are now. Since public universities are run at the state level, Sanders wants to incentivize free tuition by having the federal government cover two-thirds of the $70 billion cost, while states will cover the other third.
Sanders also proposes making it illegal for the federal government to profit on student loans, an idea he shares with Trump, and he wants to expand federal work-study programs so students can find it easier to work part-time as a means of avoiding student loans.
Sanders’ has been forthright that his plan will be expensive (free public college tuition alone will cost nearly $50 billion per year), and to pay for it he plans to levy a tax on Wall Street transactions, ranging from 0.5% on stock trades to 0.0005% on derivatives. This tax, Sanders, claims, could collect over $100 billion a year without substantially burdening the economy, but not everybody agrees. Of course, passing such a tax would require Congressional approval, a dicey proposition even if both chambers have a Democratic majority.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — Democratic candidate
Hillary Clinton’s plan, dubbed the New College Compact, is similar to Sanders’, except less ambitious in almost every way. Instead of pushing for free public college, Clinton has emphasized trying to make public college debt-free, meaning that students will be able to graduate without carrying loans.
As a result, Clinton’s plan will require middle and high-income families to continue paying at least some tuition, though low-income students will be able to graduate debt-free after benefiting from work-study and other programs. Clinton’s plan would also repurpose Pell Grants so they cover the living expenses of low-income students, instead of helping them pay tuition.
Like with Sanders’ plan, Clinton’s proposal would be administered by the states, and she would encourage states to buy in to the program by offering to have federal grants cover most (but not all) of the cost. Much like Obama’s Medicaid expansion, though, Clinton’s plan would require states to ramp up their spending on public education over time.
Clinton has attacked Sanders’ vision of free public college, arguing that it would be wrong for the children of Donald Trump to attend college for free. Despite this, Clinton has also adopted President Obama’s call for community college to be made free.
For students attending non-public universities, Clinton has endorsed the Student Protection and Success Act, a bill proposed by Sens. Orrin Hatch and Jeanne Shaheen that would deny federal student loans to schools whose students have a high rate of loan default. She has also supported a general lowering of interest on student loans, including allowing current graduates to refinance their loans down to lower rates.
Clinton’s plan is cheaper than Sanders’, costing an estimated $35 billion a year over the next decade, with about half consisting of grants to states and another third going towards lower interest on student loans. Clinton plans to pay for her proposals by cutting the number of tax deductions that can be claimed by high-income taxpayers.
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