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Tuition-free college was probably a pipe dream even if Bernie Sanders was going to be the next president, but it’s definitely off the table now. Here’s what hasn’t changed: the ever-escalating cost of higher education and ballooning student debt. Republicans about to gain full control of the U.S. government know they need to do something about it.

Donald Trump’s team has already floated a surprisingly precise proposal for addressing the $1.3 trillion student debt problem: limit the amount of debt you repay to 12.5% of monthly income and forgive any debt that’s left after 15 years.

Before you get too excited, however, understand that Trump will be the third president to touch this idea. The debt-forgiveness proposal fine-tunes a policy first signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2007 and refined by President Barack Obama in 2010. Obama’s version of the Federal Student Loan Income Based Repayment Program limits debt repayment to only 10% of monthly income (from 15% under Bush), but it doesn’t forgive what’s left until after 20 years (10 years if you’re in a public service job. The Trump tweak seems intended to be budget neutral, since it requires you to pay more upfront even if it gets you off the hook earlier, but it doesn’t solve the policy’s unintended problem. The issue is that it skews benefits to higher-income graduate and professional students, says Jason Delisle, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank.

Here’s why: The policy gives everyone the same repayment terms no matter how much they borrowed, Delisle says. Graduate students are the big winners because they borrow more (a median of $36,000 in the most recent Federal Reserve survey), but they don’t have to pay any more than an undergraduate student (with a median $19,162 in debt).

A proposal Delisle advanced via Jeb Bush’s thwarted presidential campaign would require you to pay 1% of your income in federal taxes each year for every $10,000 you borrowed in federal dollars for 25 years up to a maximum of 5% of income for $50,000 in loans. Delisle is hopeful this idea will be reprised given that Trump seems inclined to revise current policy and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, has praised it in the past.

The problem any proposal will face is cost. And this goes back to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, which forgives outstanding student debt for borrowers who go into public service work after 10 years of monthly payments. “It’s a looming cost that we all knew would start to come in next year, and that could create some real tensions with Trump, if he wants to say ‘we should do more of this’, it will still cost a lot of money,” says Lanae Erickson Hatalsky, vice president for the social policy and politics program at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank. Trump hasn’t mentioned the program, although the Obama administration has proposed changes to rein in costs.

Student loan debt refinancing is another expensive idea Erickson Hatalsky doesn’t expect will resurface with a Republican administration, even though the idea got on Trump’s radar screen after he was told the government was making money off the student loan program – a notion Delisle says is false. Besides, the cost of refinancing proposals that have been put forward, both he and Erickson Hatalsky say, would be far more than justified by the tiny savings borrowers would realize. “On the long list of real problems that deserve real money in this country, lowering graduate school loan payments by $50 a month isn’t a huge priority,” Delisle says.

As for addressing the skyrocketing cost of college, Trump’s plans are vague. In an October speech he blasted administrative “bloat” and said he would require universities with large endowments to tap those funds to lower tuition. University endowments, unlike other foundations and endowments, don’t pay taxes, so Erickson Hatalsky says it’s possible a change in tax policy will be proposed. But given many large endowments are at big public universities – not just elite Ivy League schools – any effort to force their hand is likely to be resisted. “Are Republican senators from Texas going to allow new taxes on the University of Texas? I doubt it,” she says.

Republican lawmakers may be more inclined to look for ways to strengthen links between business and universities, so-called private/public partnerships that have had some success in states like Kentucky and Tennessee. These programs are smart, Erickson Hatalsky says. “But they don’t address the larger public anxiety.”

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