[hospes]

Just to put things into perspective, if pentagon optimizes it's spending and saves $125 Billion, all public colleges can be tuition free and government will still have ~$62 Billion left. [1]

Side note: Public colleges can also be made tuition free if government scraps financial aid programs that it has (~$69 Billion) and directly pays for all students that go to public colleges. [1]

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/heres-e...

[celdon25]

Does that include the cost of retrofitting the colleges to handle the increased demand?

[hospes]

There certainly will be some increased demand, but it can be easily controlled by just simply taking top X% of performers, where X% makes as many students as particular university is capable of handling.

Even now, when public colleges are not tuition free, any decent university still has limited capacity. You need to have certain level of performance to be accepted, not just money.

[cfadvan]

In theory, but in practice that money would never be used that way in the US of course.

[Spooky23]

The public college thing will never happen -- no state will ever shut off a faucet for federal funds.

[munificent]

The point is to give you an understanding of the scale of the money we're talking about, not necessarily as a concrete policy proposal.