There are so many things wrong with the way this plan is being presented.

First of all, it isn’t free. Students would pay for their education out of their future job earnings for years.

Second, this plan assumes a 100% employment rate for graduates. Have the authors looked at the unemployment rates for recent college grads?

David Jesse of the Detroit Free Press reports.

Pay it forward: Plan would allow Michigan students to attend college for ‘free’

The latest, greatest idea for making a college education affordable sounds simple enough: Students can attend school for free.

But there’s a catch.

In return for free tuition, students have to agree to pay a fixed percentage of their future income for a specified number of years to a special fund that would pay other students’ college bills.

A version of the pay-it-forward tuition plan was introduced recently in the Michigan Legislature and is awaiting action. More than 20 states are looking at some version of the plan, although most are simply looking at studying it, while the Michigan bill would set up a pilot program.

Michigan’s plan would require students to agree to pay a fixed percentage of their post-collegiate income — 2% for community college students and 4% for university students — to the fund for five years for each year they attended school under the program. So, a student who went to the University of Michigan and graduated in four years would have to pay 4% of their income back every year for the first 20 years after college.

“The goal is to remove every financial barrier to high education,” said state Rep. David Knezek, D-Dearborn Heights. “We’ve increasingly placed the financial burden of college on the backs of the students. This is a no-interest plan that allows you to pay back as you go and as you can afford it. It takes the monkey off the student’s back.”