Bernie Sanders Quotes

In the economy today, everybody understands that we need a well educated workforce. This is 2016. When we talk about public education, it can no longer be K through 12th grade. I do believe that public colleges and universities should be tuition free.

I want to make college tuition-free for the middle class and debt-free for everyone else.

One of the issues I'm really happy about is that recently, Secretary Clinton and I worked out an agreement on higher education, making public colleges and universities tuition free for every family in America earning less than 125,000 bucks. Didn't go as far as I wanted. But that's 83 percent of the population in this country.

We are moving in exactly the wrong direction in higher education. Forty years ago, tuition in some of the great American public universities and colleges was virtually free. Today, the cost is unaffordable for many working class families. Higher education must be a right for all - not just wealthy families.

Put simply, what I'd like to do is to see the first two years of community college free for everybody's who is willing to work for it.

If you look at virtually all of the issues of importance to the people of America - issues like making public colleges and universities tuition-free - Hillary Clinton is now on record for doing that for people making $125,000 a year or less. You know what? That is pretty revolutionary. That will transform the lives of millions of families in this country. That's what Clinton stands for.

So I think there's a potential to make tuition free at public universities as part as young people doing national service. I think that is the most realistic option.

I would certainly look at a proposal for tuition-free community college for two years if the students kept a certain high grade-point average.

I believe in affordable college, but I don't believe in free college, because every expert that I have talked to says, look, how will you ever control the costs.

We can have paid family and medical leave. We can make public colleges and universities tuition-free. These are not revolutionary, radical ideas. They're kind of common sense.

I want to make college debt-free and for families making less than $125,000, you will not get a tuition bill from a public college or university if the plan that I worked on with Bernie Sanders is enacted.

Education should be a right, not a privilege. We need a revolution in the way that the United States funds higher education.

What I want to do is make sure middle class kids, not Donald Trump's kids, get to be able to afford college.

We need a movement that says in a highly competitive global economy all of our kids who have the ability, the qualifications and the desire, will be able to get a college education regardless of income because we will make public colleges and universities tuition free.

I'm not going to let the government make a profit out of lending money for people to go to college. So we're going to really change this. I see it as an investment, not an expense, and I'm going to treat it that way.

Making college affordable is a really important goal, and my plan will work better than Senator [Bernie] Sanders' plan by everybody who has looked at it.

I have a plan to make tuition debt-free for public colleges and universities.

How can the United States be competitive globally if higher education is unaffordable? Germany, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Scotland and Sweden have no tuition for college. Other countries have low tuition. We need the best educated workforce in the world. Instead of spending endless amounts on the military, we need to invest in our young people.

I'm going to try to get everybody who makes less than $125,000 in their family, which is the vast majority of people, to be able to go to a public college or university totally tuition-free. And if you make more than that, debt-free.

We all have a role to play - the President, Congress, parents, students and schools - in making college affordable and keeping the middle class dream alive.

Our obsessive focus on college schooling has blinded us to basic truths. College is a place, not a magic formula. It matters what subjects students study, and subsidies should focus on the subjects that matter the most - not to the students, but to everyone else.

I am here to give the American people some straight talk about higher education. Some have said we might have cut financial aid for college students. The truth is we have expanded access to college for our neediest students through the record growth of the Pell grant program.

The whole student loan thing drives me completely nuts. If it wasn't possible for 18-year-olds to sign themselves up for tens of thousands of dollars in debt in order to pay their college bills, the state governments wouldn't have found it so politically easy to cut taxpayer support for public colleges and universities.

It’s absolutely the case that the low cost college tuition that I was able to enjoy and the financial aid that I was able to receive made my education possible.

Clinton understands that in a competitive global economy we need the best-educated workforce in the world. She and I worked together on a proposal that will revolutionize higher education in America.