One of Raygun's Legacies--Mountain of Debt for college students

[kairos12]

http://www.salon.com/2014/07/05/ronald_reagan_stuck_it_to_millennials_a_college_debt_history_lesson_no_one_tells/

snip:

The students Reagan loathed were the beneficiaries of a consensus that paired the GI Bill with the post-Sputnik explosion of higher education to offer no- to low-cost access to public institutions, and aid to those who needed it to make private college possible. Students were not expected to shoulder the burden of their educations alone, and this freed them to explore who they wanted to be and the kind of America in which they wanted to live. There were many adults, of course, who despised them for just this freedom, and powerful forces terrified of the changes they saw coming.

By the time Reagan was elected to the nation’s highest office a decade and a half later, these powers had devised perfect tools to make sure the spirit of 1960s protest would never again erupt on campus. During Reagan’s two terms as president, dedicated funding for outright grants-in-aid decreased, federal guidelines pushed individual loans, and private bill collectors were brought in to ensure that hardest kind of debt to escape was whatever you took on for your education. Even more important was the shift in tone and expectation. Public goods became private services, and by the end of the 1980s, the anti-tax, infra-structure-starving, neo-liberal Weltanschauung meant that as states cut their budgets, support for higher education was thrown into a cage match with every other necessary public good.

Students reduced to paupers leaves little time to protest. Diabolical.

[TeamPooka]

1. K&R!

[blkmusclmachine]

2. "Mourning in America."

[cerveza_gratis]

3. double whammy

I think in-state tuition my last semester was about $800, and an ok salary after graduation was $20,000. Today tuition is about 10 times as high. Starting salaries are reportedly around $40,000, but from what I hear even that is quite on the high side for most students.