But like the quest for expanded health care, debt-free college can come in many forms, with some permutations considered more liberal than others. Former Secretary of State Clinton’s plan would allow borrowers to refinance their debt, a component that’s also included in Sanders’s proposal and in the plan of Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland. The Sanders’s higher-education overhaul would grant free tuition at any public college or university irrespective of the student’s income; Clinton’s plan would effectively charge students based on what they can pay.

While proponents of the senator’s proposal credit him for creating a simple formula, some see an irony to Sanders’s higher-education overhaul. “He wants to pay for his plan by taxing carried interest [a tax benefit wealthy Americans enjoy],” said Hartle. “So he would tax hedge fund managers to pay for his plan, but then he’d give their kids free college.”

All three candidates have policies in place to encourage states to hold the line on rising tuition by offering them incentives like federal cash. O’Malley would like to cap tuition to no more than 10 percent of the state’s median income for four-year public schools and five percent for two-year colleges. The other proposals over the duration of their plans would pour hundreds of billions of dollars into state coffers with a combination of carrots and sticks.

Some ideas appear contradictory to analysts. Sanders would mandate that all public colleges and universities maintain at least 75 percent of their teachers as tenured faculty. That adds thousands of dollars per instructor in wage costs at the same time that colleges would be tasked with reducing the expenses. The move would, however, be a boon to low-paid instructors at colleges, like adjuncts, who typically earn $20,000 to $25,000 a year. Still, recent studies show that state disinvestment in higher education, not building or staff expenses, accounted for the lion’s share of recent increases in college cost for students.

Perhaps what’s remarkable about these competing proposals, though, is that they exist at all. When scrimping for change to fund major government programs and final-hour congressional scrambling to avoid government shutdowns have become common, floating federal legislation that would set the treasury back $350 billion to $700 billion—depending on the debt-free plan—is astonishing.

According to Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, the push for debt-free college aligns with the Democratic party’s game plan to win over voters. After the 2014 midterm elections, Green says Democratic strategists argued the party’s huge losses were the result of a poor get-out-the vote campaign. “Our main point was, ‘no,’” Green said. “Democrats lost because the Democratic party brand was not associated with big, bold economic populist ideas that would be game-changing in the lives of millions of Americans.”