You don't even need it to be free if you fix the loans. In my country student loans are interest free but indexed with CPI and compulsory repayments are only taken from your tax once your income is above about 42k USD. Even then, the compulsory repayment amount is based on how much you're above the threshold. No-one really even notices that they're repaying their loans.

But if they're interest free then you can't bundle them and sell them to investors (Student Loan Asset Backed Securities). The whole point of rising tuition and private student loans seems to be to transfer wealth to endowments and investors.

Real estate prices aren't rising everywhere. The problem is that our economy is increasingly based on knowledge workers, who benefit from clustering together in densely-populated areas with certain cultural amenities, jobs, and opportunities to meet people and share knowledge. That drives a great disparity in both housing costs and opportunities by region.

Are there any recent studies that crunch the numbers on how much that would cost? Because as a debt free college grad earning ~16000 pre tax I'm still willing to commit a fair amount, call it 500 a year? but I have no idea if that's even close to enough if we assume it's progressive at the same rate as income tax.

Most of the time people calculate it as if all the current cost were just transferred to the state.

But of course in reality, when universities were free in the past they weren't allowed to just raise their prices to whatever they felt like charging, as they basically do now.

I'd be interested in that too. There are countries which implement it effectively.

It depends on how many people you let go to college.

it may cost more than just dollars and cents. I worry that the adage of "you get what you pay for" may start to apply.

I don't know if there are many countries with fully subsidized college but there are at least a few who don't seem to see any worse outcomes than the US's existing partial subsidization by loans and grants.

those countries typically also have entrance requirements to college that would not sit well with the US, which values the perception of egalitarianism.

Many students aren't getting what they pay for now. Better to be debt free.

We just need price controls. School expenses are insanely out of control. Handing them a blank check is folly.

How would free college affect rent prices?

Because instead of people being debt-slaves their whole lives they'd have that money to pay rent.

wouldnt people be paying higher taxes in order to pay for others to go to college?

That won't be as high as their debts.

seems pretty easy. Why not make rent free too? And put price controls on food? seems like that would make everything a lot easier.