More
robust estate taxes could cover the cost of making public colleges and
universities tuition-free.
By Josh Hoxie
You might not have noticed it yet, but student protests are
undergoing something of a renaissance. They’re rising to levels unseen in
decades.
In California, students are stripping half
naked to oppose tuition hikes and shutting down
highways to draw attention to crushing student debt. In Wisconsin,
they’re rising up to resist massive cuts to education proposed by Governor
Scott Walker.
And on Capitol Hill last month, 300 college students from across
the country rallied to demand that Congress cancel a proposed
$150-billion cut to student aid in the recently passed
Republican budget.
The action was organized by the United States Student Association, the nation’s oldest, largest, and most diverse student-led group. They’ve been demanding free and universal access to higher education since their founding in 1947 — and the idea is catching on again.
“We need a revolution in
the way that the United States funds higher education,” said Senator
Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who spoke at the rally. “You are leading
that revolution.”
Yet the idea that students should be able to attend college in
this country without taking on mountainous levels of debt or bankrupting their
families is far from revolutionary.
It wasn’t that long ago that Senator
Claiborne Pell, the namesake of Pell grants, was calling for
subsidies to cover the full cost of college for all students. Or when over 2 million Americans
earned a free degree as a result of the GI Bill after World War II.
In fact, millions of Americans received a debt-free higher
education before tuition
skyrocketed 500 percent since 1985. Worse still, the Department
of Education decided to turn education financing into a $50-billion-per-year profit
center, extracting huge sums from student loan repayments.
Now, total student debt tops $1 trillion,
and the average 2014 graduate left college indebted over $30,000. “If we really
want to promote more equal opportunity,” famed Capital in the Twenty-First
Century author Thomas Piketty recently pointed
out, “we should do something about student debt.”
The cost of covering tuition for all students at public colleges
and universities nationwide is surprisingly low.
If the government cut subsidies to the predatory and often
nefarious for-profit college industry and re-arranged the current labyrinth of
education spending, the bill would total just $15 billion per year.
That’s less than what the federal estate tax, a levy on the
wealth multimillionaires leave to their heirs, raises. A more robust estate
tax, like we had before the second Bush administration, could easily cover the
cost of free and universal higher education. It would also rein in or roll back
the rising concentration of wealth.
Fortunately, supporters of universal education don’t have to
wait for Congress. The same mechanism can work — and has worked — at the state
level.
In 19 states,
state-wide estate taxes raise significant revenues from the wealthiest
households while protecting families of low and moderate wealth through
generous exemption levels.
Washington State, for example, instituted a state estate tax in
2005 and used the revenue to fund education. When the tax came under attack at
the ballot a year later,over 60 percent voted
to keep both the funding and the estate tax that made it possible.
While governors and lawmakers call for cuts to education,
students are plotting a different future. Their demands are legitimate, and the
means to achieve them are well within reach.
OtherWords
columnist Josh Hoxie is the director of the Project on Opportunity and Taxation
at the Institute for Policy Studies. OtherWords.org.