In a special town hall on The Kelly File Wednesday night, Marco Rubio pitched the public on his higher education plan, but couldn’t move beyond loan reforms.
With Jeb Bush out of the race, Rubio is the only Republican candidate to offer a higher education plan for young voters. When asked by a student on what he’d do to make college more affordable and help students with debt, he cited his own college history.
“Four years ago, when I became a U.S. senator, until 2012, I still had over $100,000 in student loan debt,” Rubio said. He accumulated the debt through law school at the University of Miami.
“We’re going to provide students more information. Before you take out a loan, when I’m president, you’re going to know how much people make when they graduate from the school you’re going to with the degree you’re seeking,” he said.
Students, however, already have access to that information through the Department of Education’s College Scorecard. The data, however, have some problems and might not give an accurate impression for salary earnings after graduation, not to mention privacy issues for students and whether colleges add the value reflected in future salaries. Rubio will have to confront those problems, and how his plan to provide more information differs from the status quo.
The part of his plan that diverges from the Department of Education, and his rival candidates, is in non-traditional education.
“We’re going to provide alternative ways to pick up college credit without having to pay for sitting in a classroom,” Rubio said, citing Coursera and Udacity, two online providers of colleges classes, as well as other unnamed “accredited means.”
That could take shape as competency-based credits for older students that gain skills while working, or other methods that go beyond the classroom. For that to be taken seriously, however, he’ll need to provide a detailed plan.
The third plank of his higher education plan is another expansion of an existing program.
“We would make income-based repayment the automatic method of repayment. I’d much rather collect $20 a month from someone than to have them default,” Rubio said.
An IBR expansion would tie payments to income levels, which allows borrowers to avoid default. With IBR, however, the lower monthly payments and expanded payment window (2o or 25 years, depending on the plan) means that interest payments are higher over the duration of the loan.
For students who want to avoid student loans altogether, Rubio has proposed a different scheme.
“Provide an alternative to student loans. It’s called the student investment plan and it would allow students, especially grad students, to go to a private investment group and get them to pay for your tuition instead of a loan … it’s better than a loan because it doesn’t sit on your credit report and all the risk is on the investment group,” he said.
The income-sharing plan isn’t unheard of. Australia has experimented with it, as has Oregon. Rather than borrowing funds, students find investors to fund their education, then pay a portion of their income to the investors after graduation.
However, Rubio didn’t address the question of young Americans with student loan debt now. The Rubio approach would allow current borrowers to refinance their loans into income-based repayment plans, but otherwise, he focuses on future reforms. Nor did he speak on how to lower college costs. For that, Rubio might gain by scavenging Jeb Bush’s higher education plan.
