By Chase Wheaton

Higher education should be one of the key pathways to increased access and opportunity for every American. It should provide people with the prospect of increased knowledge, training, and expertise so they can pursue their passions and positively contribute to their communities without limitation. It should, at the end of the day, be a gateway to a more equitable and just society. Unfortunately, in the United States, higher education has been a gatekeeper for all of those things, and it is past time for that to change.

More often than not, the extraordinarily high cost of a college education in the United States, especially compared with much of the rest of the world, serves to prevent an otherwise qualified person from accessing higher education, or it becomes a massive burden for the person to carry after graduation. In 2017, the U.S. Federal Reserve estimated that the average debt from college is $32,731 per graduate. Couple that tremendous debt with the high interest rates many students are forced to pay on loans from private lenders that can easily double the cost of a college education, and you have many graduates paying off loans well into their 30s, 40s, even 50s.

That seems more than the lack of access and opportunity to me. It’s an explicit barrier that only the wealthy and privileged can possibly overcome. This barrier only serves to increase the divide in the quality of life that exists between different populations in the United States. Aside from the vast majority of jobs in the U.S. that require some level of education beyond high school, even employers who don’t require college are much more likely to hire someone with a bachelor’s degree than someone without. There are all kinds of studies showing how lucrative a college degree can be, often higher earnings of $1 million or more over a lifetime.

From this disparity, the cycle repeats itself, and those with the ability to pay for higher education continue to earn higher wages and have better access to higher-paying jobs, which in turn makes them more financially stable over the course of their lifetime, which then allows them to send their children to a college or university, and on and on through the generations.

I think the solution is incredibly simple: Cut military spending. Take a small portion of the $733 billion annual Defense Department budget and re-allocate it to the U.S. Department of Education. Time and time again, the federal government has defunded the Education Department to help pay for more defense spending, so why not flip that script? The College for All Act of 2017 introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-WA, estimated that the cost of free college to the federal government would be $47 billion a year. That’s just 6.5% of the entire Defense budget.

Budgets and federal spending reveal the priorities and values of an entity or institution, and right now, the federal government is telling us it cares more about the idea of complete global military domination than it does about providing all its citizens with programs and services that would vastly improve the quality of life for millions of people. As long as the federal government can continue to afford to give $733 billion to our military every year, you won’t be able to convince me that they shouldn’t be able to do one-fifteenth of that to guarantee every American access to higher education.