Back in the bad old days, it was commonly agreed that education was a good thing. That an educated citizenry moved a country forward and that it behooved a government to make this possible.
Then the sixties backlash hit and Ronald Reagan was elected president.
Like all candidates, he made a lot of tough-sounding campaign promises. He was going to eradicate crime, play hardball with the Soviet Union, eliminate wasteful spending and streamline the federal government so that it would operate with the seamless efficiency of your favorite small business.
(This isn't to overlook the promise that he was going to bomb Iran into the Stone Age after bringing home the hostages held within the American embassy.)
To be sure, Reagan benefited enormously from the presidency of Jimmy Carter and his struggle with the Iran hostage crisis. But that crisis also seemed to coalesce conservative frustration with the liberalism that had taken root throughout the seventies and Reagan's landslide victory was the proof.
After his election America went into two recessions that the manufacturing-centric Rust Belt still hasn't recovered from. And that wasteful government spending? It wasn't eliminated, it was re-arranged.
I'm sure most of your remember your mom re-arranging the living room or another room in the house. Or maybe you altered the layout of your bedroom. The dimensions of the room remained the same as was the furniture within. But the room was...different.
Ditto our fortieth president. In his view, he did eliminate wasteful spending by cutting federal aid to education. After all, what point was there in having the government subsidize the liberalizing of American students by aiding their access to higher education?
(Further illustrating the depths of his anti-education stance—and one could add anti-poor--was his deft manipulation of school menus. He was the man behind having ketchup declared as a vegetable in order to cut costs on school lunches—not to mention having them appear more nutritious than they actually were.)
Needless to say, the savings weren't passed on to your folks or mine.
As he so often did, Reagan had a better idea. He would re-appropriate the newly freed-up cash to the Pentagon and its motley collection of defense contractors. Always eager for another handout, those contractors would transform that money into a shiny new thing that would bamboozle our elected representation until they were eager as hell to shell out whatever was necessary for research, development, manufacture and implementation.
(Anyone from that era will recall the ultimate hustle of the defense contractor era, the Star Wars project. It cost approximately thirty-billion dollars (in nineteen-eighties money) and did absolutely nothing. It was scrapped by President Clinton in 1993.)
So. After tripling the nation's debt and quadrupling the defense budget, at least an ever-increasing number of students could be shut-out of higher education.
According to the Education Data Initiative website, college tuition has increased 130% since 1990. (And that's adjusted for inflation.) Off the top of my head, I'm thinking the only things that can compare are the salaries of professional athletes and the cost of healthcare.
Professor's salaries haven't exploded in a similar fashion, nor are schools assuming a student's room and board. Is Chateaubriand (accompanied by a pleasing—but never intrusive—Chateau Lafite '59) adorning dining hall tables these days?
Or is all this money going to Alabama football coach Nick Saban?
Maybe it's the byproduct of the dire warnings we hear to the effect that without a college degree, you're nothing. Pair this with the news of the ever-worsening outlook for low and mid-income families and we have a driver for our nation's fanatical pursuit of higher education.
And yet, what is an enhanced education worth when students are graduating with a debt load that will take decades to pay off? Do the conservatives who endorse this see the long-term effects of shutting out would-be consumers from the economy?
And those are the students fortunate-enough to see graduation day. Many more abandon their education because there simply isn't money available. And that's just the biggest factor which can influence a decision like this.
Since President Biden's announcement that he was enabling eligible students to receive ten-thousand dollars in loan forgiveness, outrage has erupted. Students with six-figure debt say it doesn't go far enough. Conservatives say it's not fair and are challenging its legality.
I am compelled to ask: not fair to whom?
It should be obvious that to the owners of the financial institutions that make these loans, this is a pay cut. This is government interference in what they consider to be sacrosanct domain—their businesses.
Never mind that the United States in the only first-world nation that places access to higher education on such a lofty shelf. Never mind the hypocrisy of placing students into decades-long debt merely for the chance to earn a living wage. Never mind the social stratification these incessant tuition hikes engender.
These aspects constitute a conservative wet dream. But how do they further the ambitions and abilities of the United States? How is a nation denying so much of its citizenry access to higher education advancing itself? How does this line-up with the ideals espoused by the founding fathers?
If you ain't got it now you ain't never gonna get it?
As the citizens of so many big cities see on a daily basis, hope is a critical element in a functional society. Hope is what keeps us moving forward, stretching ourselves to grasp the next branch on the tree. Hope is what keeps us engaged.
Without it, we are a dispirited population with no skin in the game. People who, incorrectly or not, feel that if they have nothing to live for, you don't either. While an admittedly extreme example, I see it in the seventeen-year olds armed with automatic weapons, killing, raping and carjacking; utterly unconcerned with your life or their own.
We can change this. But first we have to want to.
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