Meh, I think he's right. If our nation actually prioritized education, we could make a college education free for every single student in the country. Per this article, it could be done for between $40 and $63 billion.
I'm not sure if the author, who appears to be about 23 years old, and recently graduated from blogger to full time employment status as a writer, is mathematically challenged, intentionally deceptive, or both. His claim is patently ridiculous to anyone who reads the first paragraph of that article and has even a modicum of ability to conduct critical analysis.
He claim is based on the $62.6 Billion is how much PUBLIC colleges (and only 4-year public colleges) collected from undergraduates in 2012.
To claim that that number is "how much government would have to spend to make Public college tuition free" is, simply, moronic.
First off, this does not include the hundreds of billions that Federal, State, and Local governments already spend to subsidize Public colleges. From the same source that the mathematically challenged author used, I was able to see that the expenses for Public colleges back in 2012 were actually about THREE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS! That alone is about 5-times the misleading claim made by the author.
And remember, that's only the cost for public universities. You make "State U" free for everyone, and a TON of students who are currently going to private schools will be bellying up to the troth for their "free" education, too. You toss in the cost of private schools, and the total is about another $192,000,000,000.
So we could be looking at about $492,000,000,000 (that's $492 BILLION per year). And that's based on 2012 data, the costs today are likely well in excess of $500 BILLION per year.
But the nitwit/deceptive author didn't include what may be the biggest cost of them all. You open up a "government freebie" and tons of people who are not currently in college will be lining up to take advantage- that would likely cost hundreds of billions more per year. Hell, I'd probably belly up for the freebie, and I'm over 50.
By the time you are done, it's not unreasonable to assume that the "mere $62.6 Billion per year" will end up costing closer to ONE TRILLION dollars per year.
A hundred billion here and a hundred billion there, and pretty soon, you are starting to talk about real money...
If we were to provide free college in the USA, we couldn't possibly afford to do it for every person with a pulse and nothing better to do than spend time "finding himself" while earning a BS (and I don't mean Baccalaureate of Science) degree in Early Uzbek Interpretive Dance.
We'd have to do it like other countries do- make it highly selective and highly competitive. This is something that most of the "we want free public college education" crowd rarely mentions- the percentage of people going to college in Germany, China, Japan, and other nations that do this is MUCH MUCH MUCH lower than in the USA. They give free college educations, but ONLY to the academic elite, not every "C" student who can fog a mirror. That means that a lot of the kids currently using government loans/grants would be left out in the cold, while the bright kids got all the money. Do you think that would fly?