Yearly "Fuck The Economic's Nobel" article has arrived.

Hold up, though. A household that makes ~75k a year will pay just short of 2k/year extra in Bernie's plan. That's...about an eighth of what my tuition cost, yearly, after the government gave me extra money via Vocational Rehab Services. If I hadn't been lucky enough to be a little disabled, my parents would have paid for two of me to go to college under Bernie's plan.

A single parent who makes way less--say, 20k/yr--will pay a whopping five hundred dollars extra. Anecdotally, I know someone who comes from a family that fits that bill pretty well. Her parents were also undocumented immigrants from Mexico, and she did fairly well in high school: 32 ACT, summa cum laude, extremely involved in speech and show choir.

Her tuition was ~3k--at a different institution in the same state-- after the scholarships she qualified for on the basis of her race/class/gender. If it weren't for the scholarships she received for her academics and extracurriculars--which more than made up for the remainder of her tuition, but did very little for her room and board--a four year college might have not been an option for her.

In other words, if she wasn't lucky enough to grow up in a place with really good k-12 education--Iowa--or wasn't a woman in STEM, she'd be stuck at community college. Her tuition would have been ~7k without those.

This isn't even taking into account that wealthy people several times more likely to send their kids to private schools than families like hers, and would receive absolutely no benefit from the plan.

/r/badeconomics Thread Parent Link - theatlantic.com