In other countries that have free education, students get very involved with politics whenever the government tries to do that.

The very best thing to create an engaged electorate is to make policies that affect the people you want voting. This is why Democrats are pushing for these changes (and Republicans resist). It's also why even though Republicans will cut the budget, and cut social programs, they always promise (not necessarily promises they intend to keep) to leave Medicare alone (old people vote, and are more Republican than young people).

In the current context, the government is spending $X for education. We can say $X = $X_students + $X_schools + $X_lenders, where the subscripted variables represent the portion of the benefit each of the groups captures.

I don't necessarily want to change the level of $X. I just want to raise $X_students at the expense of the other two.