Every Road Open: Education After High School

A proposed Core Issue plank for TIP. Last updated October 4, 2026. Dollar amounts, ratios and dates are marked TBA until they are scored.

The short version

College is not the only road to a stable life, and no road should start with a mountain of debt. A young person might go to community college, a four-year school, a paid apprenticeship, the military, a fire or police academy, or a national corps. We will fund all of them. Free community college and paid apprenticeships are the default on-ramp. Four-year students get grants weighted by need, not loans. No teenager borrows tens of thousands of dollars to start adult life. Service is an option with extra rewards, never the only way a poor kid can afford to learn. And every school that takes public money shows what its graduates earn, so families know what they are buying.

Related plank: Education for All, which covers K-12 funding, reading, counselors and school meals.

Is college the pathway? What the evidence says

The honest answer is that it depends on finishing, cost and field. That is why the plank funds every road and does not declare a winner.

Does a degree pay on average? The New York Fed estimates a 12.5% annual return for the median bachelor's graduate in 2024, steady at 12 to 13% for three decades. Median pay is about $80,000 for graduates against $47,000 for high school graduates. The total cost of four years is about $180,000, of which about $150,000 is wages not earned while studying. This covers graduates only.
Does it pay for everyone? The same researchers find a degree did not pay off for at least a quarter of graduates in recent decades. The bottom quarter's return was 2.6%. Taking five years instead of four cuts the return to about 9%, and six years to about 7%. Education, fine arts, liberal arts and hospitality majors return least; engineering, computing, business and health return most. People who start and do not finish pay costs and get far fewer benefits. Averages hide wide differences.
Does free community college work? A May 2026 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research on Tennessee Promise found college enrollment up 5.4 points, associate degrees up 15%, transfers to four-year programs up 24%, and early-20s earnings up 6 to 8%. Net cost to the state was under $1,000 per student per year, because most students already had Pell Grants and the program paid only the remaining gap. This is one state and a working paper, and the program included mentoring, so the money alone may not explain the results.
Do apprenticeships finish? About 519,000 people were active apprentices in 2023. Of roughly 167,000 who started in 2017, about 46.8% completed within six years, according to a report from the nonprofit Social Finance. Reasons for leaving include child care, transportation, financial hardship and poor job fit. The cost of leaving is the point.
Is there a new federal short-term option? Workforce Pell began July 1, 2026 for eligible short-term, career-focused programs. It counts against lifetime Pell eligibility and cannot be held together with regular Pell, according to financial aid office summaries.

Who owes now: a decision at 17 can last a lifetime

TIP's argument is that a borrowing decision made at 17 or 18 can follow a person for decades. The figures below fit that argument, but they do not prove it on their own: they show who owes now, not when each person borrowed. They are approximate, cover federal loans only, and the age groups overlap.

Under 30. About 14.0 million borrowers, the largest group by count, with the lowest average balance, about $23,830.
35 to 49. About 15.0 million borrowers (March 2026), with an average balance of about $45,673.
50 to 61. About 6.4 million borrowers, with the highest average balance, about $48,875.
62 and older. About 3.1 to 3.2 million borrowers. Some went back to school late, and some took Parent PLUS loans for children or grandchildren.

By rough arithmetic, well over half of federal borrowers are 35 or older. That is the case for ending teenage borrowing, and for asking what TIP says, separately, about the people who owe now.

The plan: stops on the itinerary

Every amount, ratio and date below is TBA unless noted, as with the other planks. Each stop names the fixed destination and the flexible route.

Stop 1: Every road is funded

The destination. College, trade school, apprenticeship, military, police and fire service, and the Climate and Tourism Corps are equal, funded pathways. No one has to borrow to begin any of them.
The route (flexible). Which programs qualify, and how each is paid for.
Who pays. A dedicated funding source, not counted twice against 2KUSA, Medicare for All, housing or the Education plank. Cost unscored.
Target date. TBA.

Stop 2: No teenage borrowing

The destination. No federal student loan goes to anyone under an age set in law, and first-year undergraduates get grants, not loans. Today a dependent undergraduate can borrow up to $5,500 in the first year and $31,000 in total; this plank replaces that for young students.
The route (flexible). The age (21 is under consideration), how far grants replace undergraduate loans, and what happens to graduate and existing debt (not decided here).
Who pays. Grants cost more than loans. Offset TBA.
Target date. TBA.

Stop 3: Free community college

The destination. Tuition and fees are free at public community colleges for everyone who enrolls, paid by a federal-state partnership that covers the gap after Pell and other aid.
The route (flexible). Federal share versus state share; whether it is "last-dollar" like Tennessee (cheaper) or "first-dollar" (costlier but simpler); mentoring and advising requirements.
Who pays. Tennessee's last-dollar model cost under $1,000 per student a year. First-dollar costs more, and there is no estimate yet.
Target date. TBA.

Stop 4: Paid apprenticeships

The destination. Every apprentice earns a wage from day one and gets support that keeps people in: child care, transportation, and tools or gear. Employers and unions who train share the cost.
The route (flexible). Which trades and industries; the employer share; how many slots.
Who pays. Public funding for support services and pre-apprenticeship, with employers paying wages. Cost TBA.
Target date. TBA.

Stop 5: Four-year grants

The destination. Students at public four-year schools get need-weighted grants that cover tuition and living costs for low-income students, with a cap on what the school may charge.
The route (flexible). The income scale; the tuition cap; whether private schools can take part and on what terms.
Who pays. Cost TBA. This is a major new commitment and needs its own funding source.
Target date. TBA.

Stop 6: Service with a reward

The destination. Military, police and fire, and the Corps offer education benefits and other rewards in exchange for a service commitment. The benefit sits on top of the funded floor. It is never the only affordable road.
The route (flexible). Benefit size; length of service; whether police and fire benefits are tied to community-policing and use-of-force standards.
Who pays. The service agencies pay. Cost TBA.
Target date. TBA.

Stop 7: Schools answer for results

The destination. Every college and training program taking public money publishes completion rates, time to finish, cost, and what graduates earn. Programs that repeatedly leave students worse off lose federal funds.
The route (flexible). The measures, the cutoff, and a phase-in. Counsel will check this against current federal rules.
Who pays. Low cost. A condition on federal funds.
Target date. TBA.

Stop 8: Show every senior every road

The destination. Every high school senior sees, with a counselor, all of the roads: two- and four-year college, trades, service, the Corps. Counselors connect to the Education plank's ratios.
The route (flexible). Format and timing; whether it starts in 11th grade.
Who pays. Part of the counselor funding in the Education plank.
Target date. TBA.

The poverty draft: a real problem, a measured claim

A plank that pays for college only if a poor kid enlists would push the poor toward the risk. The fix is built into the plan: the funded floor comes first, and service rewards come on top.

What the evidence says. A Heritage Foundation analysis of 1999 and 2003 recruits found they came from neighborhoods with household incomes close to the national median (mean $41,141 and $42,822 against a median of $41,994 in 1999 dollars), with fewer from the poorest fifth of neighborhoods (18.0% in 1999, 14.6% in 2003). Heritage is a conservative think tank, and its authors note a limit: they used the median income of each recruit's home ZIP code, not each family's income, so it cannot show whether recruits came from the poorer households within their neighborhoods.
What is not known. There is no current, individual-level figure on recruits' family income or on how many say college money was the reason they joined, so TIP publishes the design rule, not a number.
Police and fire. TIP's plan cuts police in schools and ties neighborhood policing to accountability. Any benefit for police service should require community-policing and use-of-force standards, so that the plank does not recruit young people into the practices it criticizes.

Hard questions

"Is this just free college for everyone?" No. It is free community college and paid apprenticeships as the default on-ramp, grants for need at four-year schools, and accountability for results.
"Won't free college raise prices?" A real risk. Colleges can raise prices when aid rises, which is why the plan caps what a school may charge and ties funds to published outcomes.
"What about people who already owe?" Not decided in this plank. That is a separate decision and a separate cost.
"Isn't it wrong to steer kids away from college?" The plan does not steer. The New York Fed's figures show a degree pays for most graduates, and the plan funds it. It also stops treating trade school, service and the Corps as the lesser road.
"Won't the 2KUSA dividend make young people skip school or training?" 2KUSA starts at 18, after the usual graduation age, so no one gains by leaving high school early. The dividend has no school requirement, so a floor stays under everyone, and a separate completion bonus (amount TBA, set in the 2KUSA plank) rewards finishing high school or a GED. The pathways in this plan are funded by their own source, not by the dividend. How a dividend of this size changes choices about college, training or work has not been tested. Still in draft: TIP has not yet studied this, and the completion bonus still needs its own funding source and legal review.
"Who pays?" A dedicated source not yet chosen. Until it is scored, there is no dollar figure.

Still to be set (TBA)

The age limit on loans. The federal-state split. First-dollar versus last-dollar. Four-year grant scale and tuition cap. The apprenticeship employer share. Service benefit size and terms. Outcome measures and cutoffs. Treatment of graduate and existing debt. The 2KUSA completion bonus. The funding source. All target dates. TIP will publish the scoring when it exists.

Sources

New York Fed Liberty Street Economics: Is College Still Worth It? and When College Might Not Be Worth It, April 2025 (libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org)
Inside Higher Ed and Higher Ed Dive on the May 2026 NBER Tennessee Promise working paper (insidehighered.com; highereddive.com)
Social Finance: apprenticeship retention (socialfinance.org)
Harvard Student Financial Services and NASFAA summaries of the 2025 federal aid law changes (sfs.harvard.edu; nasfaa.org)
Edvisors: 2026 undergraduate loan limits (edvisors.com)
Education Data Initiative, IndexBox (September 2026) and Yahoo Finance: student loan borrowers by age (educationdata.org; indexbox.io; finance.yahoo.com)
Heritage Foundation: Who Bears the Burden? Demographic Characteristics of U.S. Military Recruits Before and After 9/11 (heritage.org)