Higher Education for All? This Bill Could Make It Happen

Is higher education the way to a good life? A recent Bloomberg report found that the average oldest millennial is more than $ 20,000 poorer than the oldest baby boomers of the same age. One of the biggest contributors to this intergenerational wealth gap is student debt, which has skyrocketed over the past two decades and will continue to grow. Although college has become more expensive, its impact on the standard of living has increased: as Bloomberg reports, college-graded millennials now earn 113% more than their non-college counterparts, while the income gap between college and non-baby Boomers with higher education was only 57%.

Statistics like this show that college is one of the main causes of inequality in America today: college education remains so expensive that student debt can impoverish borrowers decades after graduation. But it is still valuable enough that many people choose to participate despite the financial burden. The prohibitive cost of higher education harms both students and teachers. As graduate working students and union leaders, we have seen firsthand the worrying state of American higher education. The members of our union, Ph.D. Students at Brown University teach many students who pay or borrow huge sums to attend an elite, private, four-year institution, while many of us will be paying off loans from our undergraduate degrees ourselves for the foreseeable future. While the price of a college degree has gone up, a career in higher education is less likely to result in a living wage, let alone pay off debts or save money. According to an analysis from 2018, only every fourth university professor is employed or on the tenure track. The rest are short-term workers, casual workers or doctoral students like us.

Realizing that college has become a driver of inequality means facing three related social crises: college is too expensive, student debt prevents college graduates from eventually gaining economic security, and academic working conditions are bad and keep getting worse. President Joe Biden rightly made expanding college access a priority, but his current proposal under the American Families Plan to make community college free nationwide for two years, increase federal aid for low-income students, and support for HBCUs, tribal colleges, and other minority service institutions address and incompletely address the first of these issues. Meanwhile, Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal have introduced a law called the College for All Act, which would change higher education profoundly.

The bill proposes making college affordable for all by completely abolishing tuition and fees at public four-year colleges and universities for households with an annual income of $ 125,000 or less. Contrary to Biden’s plan, which mainly focuses on two-year institutions, the College for All Act promises to reshape the entire higher education landscape by investing heavily in public universities across the country. This bill combats these increased college costs by doubling the maximum Pell scholarship amounts and allowing students to use Pell scholarships to cover living expenses such as room and board. This move addresses the root causes of new student debt by not only eliminating tuition costs, but also by curbing additional expenses that make college unaffordable and forcing students to take on higher debts. Biden’s bill would make college easier for some, but Sanders and Jayapal’s proposal, as the name suggests, would make post-secondary education a fundamental right for all.

The College for All Act is revolutionary in its recognition that the working conditions of college teachers are the learning conditions of college students. The Sanders and Jayapal Bill mandates that any college or university receiving federal funding must deliver 75% of its courses to permanent or permanent teachers within five years. This massive investment in secure jobs for university teachers would significantly reduce temporary academic employment and bring many university teachers into the middle class. It would also create a stable base of teaching and research staff for students entering college, a support system students need to learn and thrive.

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