According to a study made by The Alliance of Excellent Education, if California's male graduation rate increased by only 5 percent, the state would save up to 2.4 billion in crime costs (2013). 2.4 billion dollars would be saved just by raising the graduation rate of male students in California. Imagine increasing the graduation rate for men and women all around the nation. This would save the government billions of dollars in crime costs that would be put towards making public universities tuition free. There is a big difference between the cost of educating a student as to housing an inmate for one year. According to the previous article mentioned by Isabelle Dills it costs $50,572 dollars to educate one college student for four years while it costs $113,292 to house an inmate for four years. (2013). Imagine millions of prisoners that could’ve been college students getting prepared and starting their future instead of being stuck in prisons for their crimes. Making public universities tuition free would not just save the nation a massive amount of money, but it would give millions of college ready young adults a brighter and safer …show more content…
America does indeed have the funds to pay for this. A large amount of the money that citizens pay in taxes have gone to waste by our own government. Michael Snyder reveals that, the federal government spends over 25 billion dollars each year on maintaining federal buildings that have never been put to use and quite frankly, never will be. In addition to this, The federal government once spent 30 million dollars on a program that was designed to help Pakistani farmers produce more mangos. That alone added up is $25 billion and 30 million more that did not help improve America one bit. There are tons of situations where the government has wasted money. Not only does the government have the money, but as I previously mentioned making college tuition free would drop crime rates, saving the government even more money that could be put towards the cost of tuition free college. A government official, Bernie Sanders adds that this plan could also be possible if we were to turn to the wealthy, Wall street, and Corporate America for funding. An article written by Tami Luhby explains Sanders’ plan “Sanders would impose a 0.5% fee on stock trades, 0.1% fee on bonds and a 0.005% fee on derivatives. This would raise up to $300 billion a year” (2015). In conclusion, we see that America does indeed have the necessary funds to make public universities