Here he is in a tweet on November 19:“I just don’t believe it makes sense to ask working class families to subsidize even the children of billionaires. I think the children of the wealthiest Americans can pay at least a little bit of tuition.”
And in an ad on November 28:“Instead of providing free college tuition for the children of millionaires and billionaires, I will open doors of opportunity for Americans who choose not to go to college with massive investments in apprenticeships, workforce training, and lifelong learning programs."
In another tweet on December 19:“I believe we should move to make college affordable for everybody … There are some voices saying, ‘Well, that doesn’t count unless you go even further — unless it’s even free for the kids of millionaires.’ But I only want to make promises that we can keep.”
And one more tweet on December 26:“I'm not going to ask taxpayers to pay for the tuition of children of millionaires and billionaires because we should spend that money on working families.”
“I'm proposing we make public college tuition-free for 80% of Americans. Instead of spending your mom's tax dollars on tuition for the kids of billionaires, we should spend it on helping middle class and working families.”
Recognizing the limitations on the data from those two sources, we estimate that there are about 800 students of UC’s 222,000 undergraduate students [who] have family incomes in the millions. Those students comprise approximately 0.03 percent of our undergraduates. (Editor's Note: If the figure is indeed 800 students out of 222,000, then the percentage would be 0.36 percent)
Assuming all 800 of those kids are in-state residents paying $14,000 in tuition and fees, the state would have to find $11.2 million a year to make up for lost tution from the millionaires’ kids, or an average of $1.2 million per UC school. Assuming every single one of them was an out-of-state resident paying $43,800 a year—unlikely—the UC system would need to somehow find $35 million, or an average of $3.8 million per UC school.That might sound like a huge amount of money. But it’s really not. For comparison, UC Berkeley’s football coach is set to earn a little over $3 million a year over the next half-decade, and UCLA’s football coach earns a little over $4 million. The schools’ overall annual budgets are $3 billion and $7.5 billion, respectively. Plus, the UC system is a vast and powerful school system, and it’s one of the most likely to have rich kids attending it.So when you hear Buttigieg talk about the injustice of paying for the children of millionaires, think what you want. But remember this number: 0.36 percent. Likely at most.Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.Our data does not allow us enough granularity, however, to estimate the number of families who earn billions.