Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) suggested “tuition-free public colleges and universities” as part of an effort to “rein in” the increased costs at private institutions.
While speaking at a “Students vs. Billionaires Town Hall” event on Sunday, hosted by the More Perfect Union, Ocasio-Cortez was asked what her team and the Democratic Party are “doing to ensure that middle and low-income families can continue to afford a quality, higher education.” The question came as Cornell University “recently broke $100,000 a year for tuition.”
Ocasio-Cortez responded by expressing shock at the tuition number, stating that it was “far more than what many households make in a year in this country.”
The congresswoman explained that what a lot of colleges and universities “do with their funds is more of a real estate investment strategy, than an educational strategy.” Ocasio-Cortez continued to state that colleges and universities put a lot of the funds toward “new buildings, and facilities that are often marketed as luxury,” while the adjunct faculty is “barely paid a living wage” and the quality of education is going downhill.
“What we need to do is increase accountability, because a lot of these schools receive federal funds. Sometimes, what they do is that they’ll charge you $100,000 so that you can get a lot of that financial aid to increase the number of financial aid that someone may get to attend that institution. That money needs to be tied to investments in education, not investments in people’s bottom lines. Especially your tax dollars,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “The best thing that we can do to rein in runaway cost at private institutions is by having fixed, affordable, high-quality services of public institutions. Which means, tuition-free public colleges and universities across the United States of America.”
“For anyone who wants to say that that’s pie in the sky and unrealistic and just another expensive, progressive wish list, this is literally what baby boomers gave themselves,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “Public colleges in America were tuition free, they were tuition free in the sixties and in the seventies. And, just like many things, like public housing and public education, you know when they started to get defunded? They got defunded when they started to get integrated, racially integrated.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s comments come as she has previously defended the idea of “free college for all children in the United States, even for wealthy families.”
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