Fast Fact

At least two-thirds of college students graduate with some debt and the average debt among graduates exceeds $19,000.

Bush promoted and McCain supported the largest cut to federal student aid in history. During "the raid on student aid," the last Republican Congress slashed $12.7 billion from student loan programs. Aid was restored and enhanced only after Democrats took over Congress in 2007.

While Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress, federal funding for Pell Grants and Direct Student Loans remained flat, while federal work study funds and Byrd Honors Scholarships declined. Conversely, funding for the Family Education Loan Program, a program which subsidizes private student loan companies, more than doubled from $25 billion in 2001 to $51 billion in 2007.

The average debt among college graduates exceeds $19,000. One-fourth of all students borrow $25,000 or more. These statistics were last published by the U.S. Department of Education in 2004, so they understate current student debt.

Tuition and fees at a public four-year college have increased from $3,500 to nearly $6,200 since Bush took office—an increase of 46 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. Tuition at private colleges also became more expensive, increasing on average from $16,000 in 2000-01 to $23,700 in 2007-08.

Tuition and fees at public four-year colleges are up 46 percent since 2001.

In South Korea and Germany, starting salaries for teachers are about 141% of per capita GDP, while the figure for the United States is only 81%; in fact, all countries in this sample pay their teachers a significantly higher relative wage as a starting salary compared to the United States.

With one day of Iraq War funding we could have hired 6,921 new public school teachers for a year.

With one day of Iraq War funding we could have sent 6,883 high school graduates to four fully funded years at
public universities.

The Bush tax cuts for households with annual incomes above $1 million will cost more than the federal government spent last year on K-12 and vocational education. The cuts will exceed the combined budgets of the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency.