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Free College Tuition Essay

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The words “free college tuition” would spark interest in any college student with accumulating debt. In fact, this topic is so incredibly supported that Bernie Sanders implemented it as a core interest in his 2016 campaign. Once Hillary Clinton became the Democratic nominee, she decided to take it on herself with an extensive plan that guaranteed students free tuition. Unsurprisingly, free tuition resonated extremely well within the student demographic. To forty million Americans, free tuition would eliminate the largest problem for students: debt (Hess, 2017). However, free college tuition generates the inverse of what these low-income and middle-income students believe. In fact, free college cripples them from multiple perspectives; students end up spending more financially, are less likely to graduate with a degree, and are subjected to more inequality and less exposure.

It is important to consider who truly benefits from free college tuition, as it is not low-income students. In fact, free college tuition creates a larger rift between the dollar values low-income students have in comparison to high-income students. According to a study from NPSAS (Chingos, 2012), a government-funded organization, rich students would receive 24% more in dollar value if free college tuition is established. As normal as it seems, free college requires a tradeoff; it would eliminate tuition but out-of-pocket costs for low-income families will increase to $17.8 billion dollars annually that cannot be covered by grants. Rich students would be able to pay off these costs because of that increase in dollar value. Therefore, it is impossible to ignore that low-income students truly would not benefit from free college tuition, as they do not have the same privileges as rich students do.
These analyses are not just hypothetical data, though. A test was conducted in Scotland that proved the gap between low-income students and high-income students (Blackburn, 2014). Scotland has no college tuition, The increase in a number of loans offered inevitably increased debt in a way that the highest amount of debt was given to the lowest-income student. This outcome means that these students have a smaller chance of receiving grants. Since

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