Education
A debt-free, honestly priced path into a good career — however you get there.
Ending the Student Debt Spiral
America now owes nearly $1.9 trillion in student debt, a debt that didn't finance mansions or business plans, but classrooms. More than forty-two million Americans carry it, and for a growing share of them, the monthly bill arrived before the career that was supposed to make it worthwhile did. That's not a personal failing; it's a system that let tuition triple over a generation while giving students almost no real information about what a given degree, from a given school, is actually likely to earn them.
We propose putting real teeth behind two ideas nearly everyone already agrees with. First, before a single dollar is borrowed, schools should be required to disclose the typical starting salary, debt load, and repayment outcomes for every program they offer, the same kind of plain, comparable disclosure we already require for mortgages and credit cards. Second, we should simplify the tangle of competing repayment and forgiveness programs into one clear, income-driven track, with faster forgiveness for graduates who take the lowest-paying, highest-need jobs first: teachers, nurses, and first responders in the communities that need them most.
None of this is about pretending college is free or that debt doesn't matter. It's about making sure a decision made by an eighteen-year-old doesn't quietly become the defining financial fact of their thirties.
The Trade School Renaissance
For thirty years, American high schools quietly treated the four-year degree as the only respectable outcome, and an entire category of honest, essential, well-paid work — welding, HVAC, electrical, diesel mechanics — got treated as the backup plan. That message was wrong, and young people are figuring it out faster than the institutions built to guide them: a skilled electrician or plumber can out-earn plenty of white-collar degree holders within a few years of finishing training, debt-free instead of debt-loaded.
We propose funding parity: every dollar of state and federal aid available to a student walking into a four-year university should be equally available to a student walking into an accredited trade or technical program. That means expanding Pell-style grants to cover certificate and trade programs, funding modern equipment and instructors at technical high schools and community colleges the way we fund lecture halls, and ending the quiet stigma in school guidance offices that treats the trades as a lesser choice instead of a different one.
A generation raised to believe a four-year degree was the only ticket to a stable life deserves to know there's another one, and that it might get them there faster, cheaper, and with a set of skills the rest of us depend on every day.
An Apprenticeship Moonshot: One Million a Year
Right now, roughly 680,000 Americans are enrolled in a registered apprenticeship, earning a wage while they learn a skilled trade, with no tuition bill waiting at the end. That number has grown fast over the past decade, but it's still less than half of one percent of the workforce, a fraction of what countries like Germany and Switzerland achieve with apprenticeship systems tightly woven into their schools. There's already bipartisan appetite to fix this; the federal government has set a goal of reaching one million new apprentices a year, but a goal without a plan is just a press release.
We should treat that million-a-year target the way we treat any serious national goal: with real funding for the intermediaries who connect employers to apprentices, faster and simpler registration for the small and mid-sized businesses that want to sponsor a program, and a guarantee that every apprenticeship completion carries a portable, nationally recognized credential, not just a certificate that only means something to the one employer who issued it.
An apprenticeship is the oldest job-training model there is, because it's the one that actually works: you learn by doing, you get paid while you learn, and you finish with both a skill and a paycheck instead of a diploma and a bill.
Free Community College, Guaranteed Transfer
Community college is already the cheapest, most flexible on-ramp to a four-year degree or a career credential that America has, and for millions of families, "cheap" is still too expensive to risk. We propose making the first two years of community college tuition-free for any student willing to enroll and make real academic progress, paired with a guarantee that credits transfer automatically and fully to the state's public four-year universities, so no student who does everything right loses a semester of work to a paperwork fight between two schools.
Funding should follow the student, not the institution, so schools compete on outcomes instead of enrollment numbers alone. Done well, this turns community college from a fallback option into what it should have been from the start: the smartest financial decision available to a working or middle-class eighteen-year-old, and to the thirty-five-year-old going back to finish what they started.
Any program like this has to be built with real safeguards against fraud from day one, verifying that enrolled students are real and making genuine academic progress, so the funding goes where it's supposed to and the program stays sustainable for the students who actually need it.
Financial Literacy From Day One
We ask eighteen-year-olds to sign loan documents for tens of thousands of dollars, open their first credit card, and start making retirement decisions, and we send most of them into that world having never once been taught how compound interest, a credit score, or a monthly budget actually works. That gap isn't an accident; the curriculum simply never caught up to it.
We propose making personal finance a required course for high school graduation nationwide: budgeting, credit, taxes, interest, and the basic mechanics of student loans and retirement saving, taught before decisions about all four are made, not after. Several states have already proven this works and isn't controversial; it's time to make it universal instead of a matter of geographic luck.
Every young person is going to make financial decisions that shape the rest of their life. The only question is whether they walk into that moment with any preparation at all.You didn’t come this far to stop
Pathways to Debt-Free Learning
We are building a future where every child can access high-quality education without the burden of student loans. Join our community to help make this vision a reality.