On October 10, The University of Alabama School of Law, Protect Borrowers, and the Equity Research Cooperative partnered to host the Rebuilding Free College Roundtable to begin to address the increasing cost of college education in the United States—and who gets left behind as a result.
Leaders from several organizations—EdTrust, Debt Collective, the American Association of University Professors, the Century Foundation, the NAACP, the Hope Center for Student Basic Needs at Temple University, and the Jain Family Institute—met to discuss the failures of past efforts, the current politics and policy of higher education, and what policies need to be implemented to work toward the promise of providing universal access to higher education in the U.S.
Professor Luke Herrine served as a co-organizer for the roundtable. He is a nationally-recognized expert in student loan law and was recently named a Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation for his work conceptualizing a legal framework for mass student debt cancellation. Additionally, Professor Herrine’s research on the history and theory of consumer protection at the federal level informed policies at the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau during the Biden Administration.
“We are in urgent need of new and ambitious thinking about higher education policy,” said Professor Herrine. “It was an exhilarating honor to bring together folks who are doing that thinking and to begin to build shared frameworks.”