A Radically Simple Plan to Fix Higher Education

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Of all the broken promises haunting American society, affordable college is high on the list. The Baby Boomers emerged from adolescence into a newly built system of low-price public universities. Instead of spiffing up the place for the next generation, they left behind a garbage pile of tax revolts and fiscal neglect. Cash-starved colleges jacked up tuition and saddled the following generations with more than a trillion dollars in student loans.  

The system got by for a while on macroeconomic good fortune—the collapse of the blue-collar manufacturing economy meant people who wanted a decent job had little choice but to borrow whatever colleges decided to charge, and the forces of globalization that shuttered midwestern factories also brought a wave of foreign students to American campuses. But the post-Great Recession demographic reality of declining birthrates is an existential threat to hundreds of venerable colleges. Others have used public budget cuts as an excuse to shift away from their historic mission to serve all students and instead compete in the lucrative winner-takes-all private market for helping the ruling class pass social capital and financial opportunity along to their kids.  

The post-Obama years were a lost decade for fixing this problem. The first Trump administration mostly ignored higher learning, except for the part where they stuffed the U.S. Department of Education full of people who had spent their careers leading or lobbying for shady for-profit colleges. Joe Biden put forth a worthy plan for free community college that was shanked by moderate Democrats in the Senate. He spent the rest of his presidency pushing an ambitious and catastrophically extralegal loan forgiveness agenda that was reduced to rubble by the Supreme Court. Trump II launched a scorched-earth campaign against research universities, and research generally, as a barely disguised front in the larger culture war. Meanwhile, a whole new generation of ordinary students are paying too much money to attend colleges that often don’t provide the education they need.

The time has come for something new. The next president has an opportunity to put the best system of colleges and universities in the world back onto a solid foundation of shared purpose and public support. The way to do that is surprisingly uncomplicated. We don’t need to invent any elaborate new mechanisms or schemes. We just have to take a tried-and-true idea that already worked once to build the American middle class, and retool it for the modern age. 

THE PLAN

Most students attend public colleges and universities that get some of their revenue from state and local governments. The rest of the revenue comes from tuition, often subsidized by federal grants and loans. At private schools, tuition is the whole game. 

There are two big problems with this arrangement. First, states have proved to be unreliable supporters of their own public colleges. When budgets get tight, they often yank money out of the university system because they know tuition can fill the gap. Second, the mammoth federal aid system, which tops $150 billion annually when veterans’ benefits and tax credits are factored in, comes with almost no strings attached. Colleges are free to charge what they please and there is very little accountability for how much students actually learn.  

The system needs a third, stabilizing leg, in the form of direct federal subsidies to colleges and universities that agree to adopt transparent, affordable prices. Here’s how it would work: Congress would offer a fixed amount of money—say, $10,000—for every student who enrolls at any accredited college, public or private nonprofit, that agrees to the following: 

1. Adopt a uniform tuition schedule where college is free for students from families that earn at or below the median household income—currently about $80,000—and relatively inexpensive for everyone else. Tuition would start low and gradually increase to $10,000 for the wealthiest families, which is still less than the average public university charges today, and far below what elite private schools cost. In-state and out-of-state students would pay the same price. Everybody would benefit. 
2. Students also need to pay for books, room, and board. Lower-income students could cover these costs with federal Pell Grants. Others might need scholarships or small loans. Participating colleges would use a standardized form to provide financial aid award letters, in the same way that car dealers all use the same, federally mandated sticker to display prices. 
3. Every college that participates in the system would agree to accept all transfer credits from every other college that participates in the system. The majority of four-year graduates today earn credits from more than one college, but transfer credits are often lost and discounted along the way, a kind of hidden tax on the time and money of students who have little of either to spare. 
4. The government spends pennies on education research for every dollar spent studying health care. The lack of enough research on best practices is one reason so many students enroll in college but don’t succeed there—more than 37 million working-age people are currently labeled by the census as having “some college, no credential.” In addition to direct college subsidies, Congress would provide new research money to the federal Institute of Education Sciences, which was recently vandalized by DOGE. Crucially, participating colleges would be required to open their books and classrooms for research.  

That’s it. That’s the plan. If it seems too short and simple, your brain may have been pickled by decades of exposure to needlessly complex neoliberal market-based schemes and various “submerged state” enterprises whose fiendishly complicated mechanisms rob them of efficacy and political support. This is just a federally financed version of the world-renowned public higher education system that we already created and that we already know works. Here’s some money; now serve the public, do a good job, and keep prices low.  

Still, it’s worth addressing some questions that naturally arise.  

Wouldn’t this effectively be a federal takeover of American higher education? 

Not at all. First, it would be completely voluntary. Individual colleges and universities would choose whether to join the network, and could leave at any time. Second, aside from requiring colleges to accept transfer credits from other participating institutions, Washington would have no say over colleges’ governance or curriculum. Those decisions would remain with faculty, leadership, trustees, and state lawmakers, as they are today.  

Why not just make college free for everyone? 

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are among those who have proposed universal free college legislation. They proceed from the same spirit as this plan but run aground on several major unaddressed realities about the way American higher education actually works.  

To start, they only make public colleges and universities free. America has a large and diverse ecosystem of private nonprofit colleges, most of which enroll primarily middle- and working-class undergraduates. They’re not rich, and neither are their students. Many have anchored their local communities for more than a century and have deep roots in religious practice and social justice, including about half of historically Black institutions. Today, economic and demographic pressures are driving a growing number of private colleges into bankruptcy. This plan would help them, too.  

The only way to instantly make every college free without hurting their capacity to educate is to give them an amount of money equal to what they’re currently raising in tuition. The problem is that individual states vary widely in how much they subsidize colleges and, therefore, how much colleges charge. Tuition is much higher in stingy states. A simple tuition-replacement scheme would effectively reward states that have skimped on supporting higher education and penalize states that have done the right thing by keeping costs low. That would be morally terrible and a nonstarter in Congress.

There is also a class of elite public universities that does not want to be free. They don’t even want to be affordable. They’re easy to identify—just turn on your television on a Saturday between August and December. The major-conference football heavyweights, particularly the goliath Big Ten and SEC, are basically private already. They charge market-rate prices to out-of-state students (the University of Michigan is now over $60,000 per year), who often compose the majority of the student body. A $10,000 federal subsidy wouldn’t come close to making up the revenue these universities would lose, and it’s a waste of public resources to subsidize the tuition of, say, wealthy Texans who spend untold sums on their outfits for ’Bama rush.  

That’s why participation in the plan is voluntary. Individual colleges decide for themselves whether to sign up. This also helps avoid the “Obamacare problem”—despite huge federal subsidies, 10 states still haven’t expanded Medicaid under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, and the Supreme Court says they can’t be compelled to do so. Keeping the decision local lowers the political temperature and allows states to keep control over their public systems. 

What about student loan forgiveness? 

There remains a strong ethical and policy case for helping former students who were victimized by the aforementioned Boomer abandonment of affordable higher education. It’s hard enough to start a family and a career in an era of spiraling housing and child care costs; unaffordable loans can make the difficult impossible. There is a subset of debtors who have decades-old balances or small loans from predatory for-profit schools. Normal lenders would have written off those debts a long time ago and the federal government should, too.  

The problem with the Biden-era approach to loan forgiveness was that (in addition to being illegal according to the six Republican members of the Supreme Court) it metastasized into an all-encompassing plan for higher education affordability itself. The details are too byzantine and bizarre to summarize here, but suffice it to say that by the final, waning days of the Biden presidency, a set of proposed regulations largely driven by left-wing advocacy groups had become so outlandishly complicated and eye-poppingly expensive that they chaotically self-organized into something very simple: We would make higher education affordable by allowing colleges to charge whatever prices they liked, giving students large federal loans to pay those prices, and then, subject to a great deal of paperwork, not making them pay the loans back. This is truly deranged public policy—substitute “health care” and “hospitals” into that sentence and see how you feel. Giving indiscriminate six-figure grants to graduate students might also not be the optimal strategy for expanding the Democratic political coalition.  

How much would it cost? 

It depends on how many colleges sign up. Presumably, anyone currently pulling in less than the equivalent of $10,000 per student in tuition revenue would have a strong incentive to participate, which includes pretty much all community colleges and a significant number of regional public four-year universities that have a similar mission to educate students who mostly live nearby.  

The fact that this would represent a net increase in revenue for such colleges is one of the best things about the plan. While the challenge of higher education has been relentlessly framed in terms of affordability, the real problem for many colleges is capacity. Community colleges are already cheap for most students and free for many. What they lack are facilities, equipment, fairly paid faculty, and the kind of research-proven support services that help students thrive and earn degrees. Free college isn’t worth much if the education isn’t any good. This plan will give institutions with the hardest job in higher education more money to succeed.  

The price tag surely runs into the tens of billions of dollars per year. But keep in mind that without the plan, the student loan system will continue to run on autopilot, issuing bad debt that the taxpayers will never recover. The choice isn’t whether to pay—it’s whether to pay in a way that’s smart and targeted or haphazard and dumb. 

What are some other reasons why this is a good idea? 

Trump’s jihad against the Ivy League had little to do with higher education and everything to do with the cultural resentments that animate the MAGA coalition. The “compact” the administration offered colleges in 2025 had no takers because it was a hodgepodge of self-contradictory free speech limitations and anti-diversity provisions masterminded by some guy from a Jeffrey Epstein–tainted private equity fund. But some kind of new bargain between the federal government and higher education is a good idea. While industries gravitate toward all-money/no-accountability policies, they are better served in the long run by durable arrangements that truly serve the public interest and thus bolster public support.  

If enough colleges join the network, they will become more than the sum of their parts. Students will have access to a huge array of in-person and online classes offered by hundreds of public and nonprofit institutions—effectively, a “public option” for an online ecosystem that has been dominated by for-profit colleges of dubious quality and ruinous price. Education researchers will have enough information to drive lasting improvements across the system.  

This plan would also shift the weight of public resources and attention away from the elite private colleges and sports powerhouses that are doing just fine on their own and concentrate on the institutions that actually educate the large majority of all American students. They are located in nearly every congressional district, in red states and blue. They are very normal and local and filled with people doing ordinary and necessary things like training the teachers who educate your children and the nurses who care for your mom. If you saw a clip on social media of someone saying something particularly irksome or enraging on a college campus, it probably didn’t happen at one of those places.  

If they are neglected and abandoned, they won’t be replaced by anything nearly as good. The plan to help them isn’t complicated, because needless complexity is the devil’s way of fooling you into believing you can’t have the world you deserve. We can do better, and we can do it now.