What if We Went to College for Free?

When it comes to politics, college students are mostly aloof. This isn't a personal opinion, but a fact, proven by poll statistics which show that voter turnout of 18-29 year olds has decreased by approximately 25% since 2012.

According to a Washington Post article called "Where are all the young voters?", in 2015 younger voters feel like nominees do not cater to them as an audience, therefore they feel left out. College-age people are usually buried under ridiculous amounts of debt, work, and pressure to succeed with many factors going against them. As someone who is going through something similar at the moment, the most important issue, personally, is expensive college education and job opportunities for teens.

On average, it takes at least 10 years for students to pay off their college debts according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Countries like Finland and Sweden that provide free college education eliminate this problem entirely, guaranteeing college-level education for most of its citizens, which in turn allows for a much more literate population. To put this simply and give a better a example, imagine a low-income family with two kids. In the circumstances present today, those kids might end up going to a community college for a year then dropping out, or not being able to afford attending a university, or not even being able to go to college at all and end up with minimum wage jobs for the rest of their lives.This holds them back reaching their true potential. However, if college education was free, and a requirement like high school education, those kids would be able to attend college and be given the same opportunity as everyone else. They learn, grow up, graduate, get jobs, create something, provide jobs for other people, make money, GDP increases, and so on.
This is just hypothesis of what might happen, but isn't the reward worth exploring the idea and taking a risk?

Another factor to consider here is what happens after students graduate college. A Huffington Post article titled "Half Of Recent College Grads Work Jobs That Don’t Require A Degree" states that "the number of college grads will grow by 19 million between 2010 and 2020, while the number of jobs requiring that education is expected to grow by less than 7 million." Which, put simply, means that students do not have the opportunity to reach their potential after 4+ years of hard work and could stuck earning a lot less money than they would have, were they given jobs that match their degrees. Nicholas Parco writes about the difficulties of acquiring a job as a recent college graduate in another Huntington post article that he titled "The Harsh Reality of Being an Unemployed College Graduate" . Parco says "the truth is that my student loans are not going to pay themselves, nor do I expect the government to pay for them or my health care. Here’s to hoping I can get hired somewhere soon so maybe I can pay off the student loans before my hair begins to gray."

Society cannot expect college students to succeed without giving them an opportunity to do so, or adding even more obstacles for them to overcome. It's just not possible. If a candidate wants to grab the attention of young voters, all she/he has to do is listen. Whether they agree with him or they don't, Bernie Sanders has been listening, and the other candidates might want to take a page out of his book.

Sanders' website lists a detailed description of his plans to make college tuition free, and debt free. Some of his plans include making public universities tuition free, substantially decreasing student loan interest rates, and stopping the government for benefiting from those student loans. Sanders plans to achieve that by increasing taxes on the richest people in the United States (the one-percent argument), thus increasing the money supply which would allow for more funding for schools. He also proposes raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 which would double the wages of working students, allowing them to have more money to spend on seeking higher education.
While these all might look like unachievable goals, which they very well could be, Bernie Sanders is doing more than just appealing to young voters by setting forth plans that would greatly enhance their standard of living, he is also giving them hope. Hope for a better and brighter future tomorrow.