A college education used to be affordable in this country, especially at public colleges and universities. That's because states kept tuition low by providing a lot of the funding to those institutions -- and the federal government provided grants and low interest loans for students needing it.
That is no longer true. In many states, the Republicans removed the caps on tuition and cut the funding for colleges and universities. This forced colleges to raise tuition to cover those cuts, and that tuition has kept rising. They also freed banks to charge high interest rates for college loans, and made sure the grants (like Pell Grants) did not keep up with the rising costs.
This has had a very negative result on the affordability of a college education. It has gotten so bad that only two groups can easily afford college -- the children of upper middle class parents, and the children of rich parents. All others now have a very difficult (if not impossible) time trying to afford to go to college -- and many students now finish college with a huge amount of debt (that forces them to put off staring a family, buying a home, etc.).
This is not only bad for those students, but it is also bad for our economy -- because they are able to buy things to boost the economy or pay higher taxes thanks to their education, because they must spend a lot of their income trying to pay back the exorbitant loans.
Other countries are smarter than our government when it comes to helping students get a college education. They provide free tuition to students. They know that is cost-effective, because when those students graduate they will make higher wages and pay higher taxes -- and the government will get back more in higher taxes than it spent to help educate those students. The American government is not smart enough to see that. They want to make going to college a business where profits are made -- and that makes college unaffordable to many students (and puts others in deep debt).
Both of the leading Democratic presidential candidates understand this -- and both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have plans to help reduce the cost of a college education. And it looks like the American people might also be finally understanding that college is costing too much, and that hurts the country. Note the charts above.
Those charts were made from a recent YouGov Poll -- done on August 11th and 12th of a random national sample of 1,000 adults, and has a 4.1 point margin of error. It shows that most people don't think students (or their families) should have to borrow to pay college tuition. They also don't think either the state or the federal government does enough to help make college affordable. And perhaps most important, they think tuition at public colleges and universities should be free.
The Democrats are on the right side of this issue.