Written by Allison Toliver

Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Kenya, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Morocco, Norway, Panama, Poland, Scotland, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, and Uruguay are countries that provide a free college education to their citizens. Brazil, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Kenya, Luxembourg, Norway, Panama, Slovenia, and Sweden are countries that provide free tuition to international students. 

            Students in the United States spend thousands of dollars every year to attend colleges and universities in hopes of getting a good education. Most of these students don’t receive help through scholarships and grants and are paying out of pocket. This leads to some having to drop out of school because their families cannot continue to pay for their education. A lot of people don’t get the resources and skills they need to find good jobs and have nice careers because they weren’t lucky or fortunate enough to get a college education. This isn’t saying that you have to attend college to be successful because you don’t, but there are so many people who want to be doctors and lawyers who can’t afford it. Many jobs now require you to have graduated from college, making employment opportunities harder to find. 

           The US Government will lose close to nothing if they chose to make all higher education free. They actually would save more money than they currently spend on funding public and private education. The average student debt per person is about $30,000 and the total student in the US is up $1.6 trillion in 2019. The time it usually takes to completely pay off loan debts ranges from 10 to 30 years. Student debt has risen to be the second largest debt category in the United States right behind paying for your house mortgage. 

Tuition is also rising, making it more than twice the price it was when our parents went to college. It’s now almost impossible for students to pay for college without having debt unless your parents happen to be Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Michael Jordan, or Michelle Obama. Student debt has the ability to drastically affect your life after school, making it harder to buy a home, keeping a steady income to live happily, making important decisions for your career, and not being able to have a nice amount of retirement money. Senator Bernie Sanders and others who sit in on the House of Representatives have a plan which talks about canceling student debt for over 40 million people and to make higher education free for all. If he is chosen as the president for the 2020 election, this will be one his main goals. 

Robert F. Smith, the commencement speaker for Morehouse’s Class of 2019, pledged to pay off their student loans. The graduating class of 400 accumulated a debt of around $40 million, which Smith plans to eliminate with a grant. This is amazing considering most of these students would have had a difficult time paying their loans off like many others. Smith has greatly increased the chances of generational wealth for these young men and gave them an opportunity to live stress-free after college. A choice most of the student population don’t have but absolutely should.