the 15% turned out to be a lowball, it's more like 17% if you use the 2015 numbers from wikipedia[0]. I got the %GDP numbers from wikipedia as well[1].
> Free higher education for everyone would cost $75 billion.
this I find hard to believe. the US government estimated that ~20 million students would be enrolled in college/university in fall 2017. assuming enrollment would not increase if college were free, that $75 billion works out to about $3750 per student. this substantially undercuts even in-state tuition at the average community college, which already receives significant funding from the government.
although I pushed back on that particular claim by Sanders, I still maintain that we have an allocation problem, not a money problem. according to 2012 data[2] the US government spends almost exactly the same percentage of its GDP on education as the UK, and we are in the high range of money spent per student in primary and secondary education[3].
i'm no expert, but this doesn't look like the kind of thing where you can just throw money at it and expect it to work. we should figure out how to use the money we already have to produce more similar outcomes to those in Western Europe.
> Free higher education for everyone would cost $75 billion.
this I find hard to believe. the US government estimated that ~20 million students would be enrolled in college/university in fall 2017. assuming enrollment would not increase if college were free, that $75 billion works out to about $3750 per student. this substantially undercuts even in-state tuition at the average community college, which already receives significant funding from the government.
although I pushed back on that particular claim by Sanders, I still maintain that we have an allocation problem, not a money problem. according to 2012 data[2] the US government spends almost exactly the same percentage of its GDP on education as the UK, and we are in the high range of money spent per student in primary and secondary education[3].
i'm no expert, but this doesn't look like the kind of thing where you can just throw money at it and expect it to work. we should figure out how to use the money we already have to produce more similar outcomes to those in Western Europe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_spending_...
[3] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp