The price of college tuition has risen more than 1,100 percent over the past 35 years.
Back in 1980, the average cost for a year of college was $8,756, and much of that was paid for by a wide variety of government supports and scholarships. As of 2010, the average cost of a year of college was over $21,000, and most of that support has dried up.
And as college tuition costs have skyrocketed, more and more American students have found themselves having to take out student loans to pay for a college education.
In fact, since the 1990s, when Reaganomics was really picking up steam, cumulative student loan growth, or the number of students taking out student loans, is up over 511 percent.
And it really hit the full-blown "cancer stage" in the 2000's, thanks to George W. Bush, who put Reaganomics on steroids.
This is a problem that is almost uniquely American, because the soaring costs of college and growing mountains of student loan debt aren't even an issue in most developed countries.
According to the 2010 Global Higher Education Ranking by Higher Education Strategy Associates, the average total cost of a year of college in Norway (factoring in education and living expenses) was just over $8,000. Same with France and Mexico.
And in Germany and Latvia, the average total cost of a year of college was just over $6,000.
A college education in America used to be that affordable, but Reaganomics changed everything.
It's time for a college education to be affordable again.
That starts with a national debt jubilee, with the government paying off all outstanding student loan debt in America.
At just over $1 trillion, the government could easily find savings in other areas to pay for it; it's less than we're paying for either of George W. Bush's illegal wars! And a clean slate would do wonders for our economy.
But more importantly, let's get back to the ideals of Jefferson and Lincoln, who both worked to make a college education free for anyone who's worthy of it.
Jefferson started America's first totally free college, the University of Virginia, and Lincoln started the Land Grant Colleges by giving enough land to colleges all across the nation that they could use the income from that land to give students free or nearly-free tuition.
In a letter to James Madison, Jefferson once wrote that, "Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty."
And while we're at it, let's ban for-profit schools from getting any kind of government aid whatsoever. That's a type of government welfare that our society really can't afford, and today it reaches into the billions of dollars every year.
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