Matt Yglesias had an interesting piece in Vox on Thursday outlining how Sen. Bernie Sanders has won him over with his plan for free tuition at public colleges and universities. The thrust of the piece is that public college is a public service, analogous to public K-12 education (or fire departments for that matter) and thus should be freely available to everyone regardless of income.

On the flip side, the plan put forth by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may be more "fiscally progressive" or wonky, but its complexity may be preventing the type of excitement that Sanders' plan has garnered on the campaign trail.

This is compelling, all the more so when one considers employment and wage outcomes for college graduates are far higher than those for high school graduates. We have a national interest in increasing college attainment, particularly among those for whom it is unaffordable now. Free tuition is easy to internalize, whereas a progressive system of subsidies that prevent borrowing is, well, less so.

But while this critique isn't wrong, per se, it is incomplete. The first thing to note about the plans outlined by both Sanders and Clinton is that, for students who want to attend community college, there is virtually no difference between them. Sanders's plan would include community colleges in the institutions that must guarantee free tuition. Clinton's plan also wipes out tuition at community colleges, and by all accounts is the same plan President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats put forward in early 2015 – that is, a first-dollar program that allows grant aid to be entirely used for living expenses, transportation and other costs of attendance. Community college students make up 38 percent of all undergraduates.

For the other 38 percent of undergraduates that attend public four-year colleges, there are meaningful differences, but not as many as people like Yglesias seem to think (a lot of which may have to do with how the plans are messaged by the campaigns themselves). Sanders, as mentioned, takes tuition off the table regardless of a student's income or ability to contribute.

Clinton's distinction is that no student will need to borrow for tuition, fees or books. This leaves open the potential for wealthy families to contribute to their kids' college, but it also ensures that for low-income students, the results are effectively the same as Sanders' plan. In other words, if students do not have the means to contribute to tuition bills, they will not have to borrow, and their entire tuition bill will be subsidized. For "Donald Trump's kids," to use the former secretary of state's preferred example, public college would be guaranteed to be affordable, just as it is for them right now. By definition, this is a more progressive way to subsidize higher education, but it is indeed a bit less sound-byte-able.

Why does this matter? Because while college is often the only sure path to upward mobility, our system of higher education is just as often a contributor to inequality and the wealth gap. For example, while proposals to eliminate all student debt would explode an already large racial wealth gap, eliminating student debt (or the need to borrow for college) in a progressive way would do a lot to narrow the wealth disparities by race. The mechanism for eliminating wealth differences can change (through higher taxes or making wealthy families contribute to college tuition), but it's important to remember how far ahead wealthy, and white, families are at building assets already – and whether a particular plan runs the risk of exacerbating the problem.

And at the end of the day, neither Sanders nor Clinton include the total price of attendance in their plans for free, or debt-free, tuition. Doing so would allow students to feel safe about affording the 60 percent of non-tuition costs at public 4-year colleges and the 80 percent at public 2-year colleges. Both would allow grant aid, or Federal Work Study, to be used to subsidize these expenses, but as Demos has shown in "The Case for Debt-Free Public College," there's little good reason to address tuition without addressing the indirect costs of college as well. Those are the costs for which many students borrow or work long hours, and the reason that the total price of attendance at community colleges averages nearly $17,000.