re: #212 sagehen

My parents got free college; and it wasn’t just them, it was their whole generation. If you were one of the 15% smartest high school grads your year, the taxpayers would pick up the tab for your undergrad degree.

That’s how they ended up with the sorts of jobs that had them paying income tax at a 70% marginal rate for decades. Overall, I feel like the taxpayers got a pretty good return on their investment.

If you were in the 70-85% range for smarts, the taxpayers covered a 2-year AA degree. If your smarts were in the 45-70% range, unions and factories were happy to provide a year’s free vocational training.

CAVEAT: All of the above, only applies to white people. Once the civil rights acts said it had to be for everyone… taxpayers/voters had a sudden epiphany that everybody should take out loans and pay their own way, nobody should ever get anything provided to them by the federal government, the states, the counties, or unions or industry.

make college cheap and widely available, have a well educated and prosperous population. allow college to be too expensive for most people, have a poorly educated, not very well off native born population, and lots of immigration from places where it’s cheap and easy to get educated