CHICAGO – Senator Marco Rubio, laying out an economic blueprint that will be central to his campaign for president, called Tuesday for dismantling the “cartel of existing colleges and universities” that he said left too many students without viable career paths and burdened by tens of thousands of dollars in debt.  In a speech that was part history lesson, part policy prescription, and punctuated with barbs at Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Rubio spoke to a crowd of several dozen people at a technology center and put forward his vision for the American economy if it is to thrive into the next century. He also took some veiled swipes at the Bush family.  Mr. Rubio, a Florida Republican, dismissed the idea of a minimum-wage increase as “thinking small.” He said that big government had rigged taxes and regulations in favor of powerful interests. And he proposed an overhaul of higher education that would change the way colleges are accredited and student loans are repaid.  “We do not need timid tweaks to the old system; we need a holistic overhaul,” Mr. Rubio said. “We need to change how we provide degrees, how those degrees are accessed, how much that access costs, how those costs are paid and even how those payments are determined.”  As part of his higher education plan, Mr. Rubio has proposed two innovations that are aimed at making student loans more affordable. First, he said, he would put into effect an income-based payment system to allow graduates earning lower salaries to repay creditors on a timetable that he said would cause “less strain.” Those who earned more would have to repay their loans at a faster rate.  A form of income-based repayment plans for student loans already exists.  Mr. Rubio would also allow students to team with investors who would cover the students’ tuition in exchange for a percentage of their earnings for a few years after graduation.  The speech mostly contained ideas that he had put forward before. But it was a return to the campaign trail after almost two full months in which he was on a coast-to-coast fund-raising tour.  He used his time here to take jabs at his opponents, some overt and others more subtle. He referred three times to Mrs. Clinton, who is running her second campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. “The race for the future will never be won by going backward,” he said. “It will never be won by hopping in Hillary Clinton’s time machine to yesterday.”  Other slights appeared aimed just as much at some of Mr. Rubio’s Republican opponents, like former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida. Mr. Rubio said the ideas offered by Mrs. Clinton “and other outdated leaders are narrow and shortsighted.”  “We have learned, painfully, that the old ways no longer work,” he said, “that Washington cannot pretend the world is the same as it was in the ’80s, it cannot raise taxes like it did in the ’90s, and it cannot grow government like it did in the 2000s.”  Those last two references — to raising taxes in the 1990s and expanding government in the 2000s — were not coincidental. Mr. Bush’s father, President George Bush, approved a tax increase in 1990 after promising to block any. And his older brother, President George W. Bush, oversaw a significant expansion of the federal government after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The Florida senator proposed allowing low-income college graduates to repay their student loans more slowly, and letting investors pay students’ tuition in return for a percentage of their postgraduate earnings.