Dear Senators Feinstein, Harris, and Beall; Congresswoman Eshoo; and Assemblyman Low,

I am a Sophomore in high school in the Bay Area. I am writing this letter because many of my friends and several members of my extended family have exited college with mountains of debt. I ask you to propose legislation that would help lower and middle class students pay for state college, and ensure that they don’t leave college with debt.

Currently, there are $1.45 trillion in U.S. student loan debt spread across 44.2 million Americans who, on average, each pay $351 towards their loans every month (“A Look”). This makes it extremely difficult for students, fresh out of college, to begin their lives in the ‘real world.’ This affects underprivileged graduates especially, as they need to take out the largest loans and don’t have a monetary safety net provided by their parents. These underprivileged students are inexperienced, unprotected, and are often the first in their family to graduate from college. Upon exiting college, they are clapped with an average of $37,172 in debt (“A Look”). It is extremely difficult for these students to pay off this much debt, and they often enter into a cycle of debt: taking out loans to cover the interest on other loans. This debt makes a college degree a burden, rather than a gift, to many graduates.

Eliminating college debt would also have substantial positive economic repercussions. If students leaving college don’t carry debt, they are able to save money more quickly, land better paying jobs, and pay more in taxes back to the government. Additionally, production would increase because educated people would be better utilized in the workplace, and not relegated to menial, monotonous jobs.

For a nationwide policy, with the burden of supporting students split between the state and federal governments, it has been estimated that the program would cost about $74.5 billion. That sounds like a lot of money, and it is. But, if you take into account the return on that investment in the form of more tax revenue and lower social services costs, the federal government would receive about $82 billion. That is a return on your investment of about 10%! How do the states fair in this? Over an average lifetime, state income taxes would increase by about $52,500 per four-year-equivalent (FYE) degree, meaning that for every FYE degree that the government funds, the government will make about $52,500 in tax revenue (“The Fiscal”).

It would be immoral to disregard the massive socioeconomic benefits of debt-free college. It would be self-defeating to disregard the fact that “public financial support of college education pays for itself many times over” (“[The Fiscal]”). It would be unwise not to consider publically-funded, debt-free college as a legislative possibility. If you decide to pursue this course of action, you will be recognized as a hero to all of the college graduates who would have carried debt with them for the rest of their lives. Instead of being trapped in a cycle of debt, they will be free to prosper, all the while making more money for the government in the form of taxes.

Sincerely,

Liam Strand