3. Free tuition doesn’t reduce the cost of college.

Perhaps the biggest problem with state scholarship programs is that they didn’t put a lid on tuition. The cost of college continued to rise; someone else just footed the bill, mostly those who played the lottery.

In some states with the scholarships, the legislature sets tuition. To rein in the increasing cost of the awards, lawmakers in some states agreed to cap tuition. That led colleges in those states to look elsewhere for revenue from students, so they increased fees and other charges that the scholarships didn’t cover. There is nothing in the Sanders plan to stop institutions from following the same pricing strategy.

In other states where colleges controlled tuition rates, the cost of the scholarships became unsustainable over time as tuition prices continued to rise and lottery revenues didn’t keep pace. So states started to trim the program’s benefits — paying for partial tuition, limiting the number of semesters students could get the awards, or shifting the grade requirements needed to keep the scholarship.