Bernie's free college idea has convinced Matt Yglesias on the merits , but as he argues later , it's not that practical. Universities are run by states, and so Bernie's plan relies on matching funds at a 2-1 level. Total tuition at all public colleges and universities is only $70 billion, so the feds would pick up 2/3rds if states would pick up the other third. Probably a lot of blue states would jump at this idea (the University of California alone contains 238,000 students ), but as Yglesias notes red states assuredly would not. There's only so much leverage the feds have over states, and it's pretty tough to convince states that are dead convinced on pummeling their own citizenry. And that's fair enough, policy design does matter. However, as with the single-payer scuffle and the ensuing extremely irritating debate about whether Bernie was being sufficiently deferential to the WONKS, I think much of unpolished policy can be chalked up to him being a