On November 11, Republican Presidential candidate Ben Carson took a swipe at Senator Bernie Sanders and his followers during a speech at Liberty University.

"If they don't really understand the financial situation of the country and somebody comes along and says, 'free college for everybody,' they'll say, 'oh, what a wonderful person,'" the retired neurosurgeon said. "They have no idea that all you are about is hastening the destruction of the nation."

Ben Carson's outlandish argument against proposals for free college tuition, such as a bill introduced in May 2015 by Senator Bernie Sanders which would provide $70 billion in college subsidies paid through taxes on Wall Street, is indicative of the tactics his campaign employs to generate a supporter base off of the fears from people, members of the middle class and upper class, that if they support progressive reforms or the expansion of social benefit programs, it will be at their expense. The pejorative term, 'hand-out' is frequently used to dismiss such proposals.

Carson failed to get into the specifics of how and what would be so destructive about free college tuition, because it wouldn't be, based on Senator Sanders proposal. He also failed to acknowledge there were any problems in higher education in terms of student debt and affordability.

The problem with the rising costs of college tuition aren't that it makes higher education unattainable, it's that the loans and debt a student must take on in order to afford a college education in conjunction with the job prospects a college degree provides to a student makes a college education less of an incentive. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found 57 percent of Americans don't believe college education is worth the monetary value, and 75 percent deemed it as too expensive for most Americans afford. These sentiments reflect the 7 million student loan borrowers in 2015 who are currently in default, correlating to 17 percent of all borrowers of federal student loans in delinquency. These numbers are rising, and with it the insurmountable debt one must invoke in order to have a chance to aspire to be a member of the middle class. The average cost of tuition for a private non-profit in the 2015-16 school year is nearly $33,000 a year; public tuition at over $9,000. With 65 percent of all job openings through 2020 projected to require some form of higher education, according to a report by the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University, making college education more affordable would insure the U.S. has a highly educated workforce necessary to compete in global markets and meet the demand of our labor market. Currently, based on U.S. Census data from 2014, only 38 percent of Americans have at least an Associate's Degree.