Over the past few weeks, four candidates have officially announced that they’re running for president. Reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education. The Republican field includes three U.S. senators: Florida’s Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants who is pitching himself as the fresh face of the GOP; Texas’ Ted Cruz, a conservative Christian and Tea Party hero; and Kentucky’s Rand Paul, a libertarian who is positioning himself as the candidate for young people. The Democratic field has just one contender so far: Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former first lady, senator, secretary of state, and household name.
Here’s where they stand on one issue that matter to colleges: affordability.
College Affordability. Before she became secretary of state, in 2009, Ms. Clinton spent eight years on the Senate education committee, focusing on nontraditional students and borrower rights. While few of her higher-education bills cleared Congress, portions of her Borrower Bill of Rights made it into law, as did pieces of her Nontraditional Student Success Act.
During her first run for president, in 2008, Ms. Clinton pledged to increase the maximum Pell Grant, double the main education tax credit, and create new grants for colleges and job-training programs. She called for a “cost calculator” similar to the one that the Education Department has since created, and promised more information about college costs and graduation rates. Her higher-ed platform for 2016 is likely to hit many of the same themes.
On Tuesday, in a roundtable discussion at a campus of Kirkwood Community College, in Iowa, she endorsed President Obama’s plan to make community college free and said college should be “affordable and open for everybody willing to work for it.” She spoke about the value of income-based student-loan repayment — a priority of the Obama administration — and took aim at for-profit colleges that “take all this money and put all these young people and families into debt.”
College Affordability. Senator Rubio doesn’t serve on the education committee, but he has led efforts to provide prospective students with more information about college costs and graduation outcomes, and to simplify student-loan repayment. He supports the creation of a “unit record” database — a position that puts him in conflict with privacy-minded Republicans — and he has signed onto bipartisan legislation that would create online college-savings accounts that would track students across schools and colleges. He has offered legislation that would promote income-share agreements as an alternative to traditional loans, and has joined with Democrats on bills that would require colleges to use standardized student-aid award letters, and that would streamline income-based repayment.
Like Mr. Obama, Mr. Rubio has called for updating the federal student-aid system to allow more money to flow to competency-based courses (an effort now under way at the Education Department), saying in a speech in 2013 that “it’s not just about spending more money on these programs; it’s also about strengthening and modernizing them.”
Student debt is a personal issue for Mr. Rubio, who owed more than $100,000 when he graduated from law school, in the mid-1990s. In a speech declaring his candidacy on Monday, he said that student debt was standing in the way of the American dream, evoking “young Americans, unable to start a career, a business, or a family because they owe thousands in student loans for degrees that did not lead to jobs.”
College Affordability. Kicking off his presidential campaign at Liberty University last month, Senator Cruz used student debt as a way to connect with the audience. Mr. Cruz, who graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, told the crowd that he “took over $100,000 in school loans, loans I suspect a lot of y’all can relate to, loans that I’ll point out I paid off a few years ago.”
The anecdote was part of a broader narrative about the American Dream, and the candidates’ part in it. But Mr. Cruz made no mention of steps he might take to lower the cost of college, or make student debt more manageable.
During his 2012 campaign for the U.S. Senate, Mr. Cruz called for abolishing the U.S. Department of Education, a move his opponent said would endanger federal student aid. At the time, Mr. Cruz responded that he supported student aid, but believed the money should be given directly to the states to dole out as they see fit.
College Affordability. Like Mr. Cruz, Senator Paul has called for eliminating the Education Department as a way to shrink the federal government. On his Senate website, he argues that “more money, more bureaucracy, and more government intervention are eroding this nation’s educational standards”.
As the chair of the Senate subcommittee on children and families, Mr. Paul has focused more on elementary and secondary education than on higher education. He made no mention of college in a speech announcing his candidacy, apart from praising his sons for working minimum-wage jobs while they attend college.
Still, Mr. Paul occasionally weighs in on issues affecting colleges, as he did last week in a speech at the University of Iowa that took a swipe at Mr. Obama’s plan to make community college free, and offered another option: making college tuition fully tax deductible.