Free college cheaper than paying student financial aid - US

Certainly very relevant to Australia at the moment. I don't know how this would translate into the present Australian system. I suspect some serious number crunching might need to be done here to find out. But it's certainly food for thought with the prospect of $100,000 degrees looming under the Lieberals.

With all the money that the US spends on financial aid to help students get through college over there, a study has been done that shows it would actually be cheaper for the gov to scrap all the financial aid and simply offer completely free education.

  According to new Department of Education data, that's how much tuition public colleges collected from undergraduates in 2012 across the entire United States. And I'm not being facetious with the word mere, either. The New America Foundation says that the federal government spent a whole $69 billion in 2013 on its hodgepodge of financial aid programs, such as Pell Grants for low-income students, tax breaks, work study funding. And that doesn't even include loans. more