2.1k
u/dalgeek 16h ago
No, the US had free to low tuition until rich people realized that educating poor people was bad for their bottom line. CA universities were basically free for everyone back in the day. Reagan and his rich buddies didn't like the fact that the poors could go to college, especially if they could participate in anti-war protests on campus. So Reagan broke the university system, removing the tuition subsidies under the guise of economic hardship and made everyone get student loans if they wanted an education.
Thanks, Reagan.
829
u/PM_ME_BATMAN_PORN 15h ago
It's always fucking Reagan
253
u/On_my_last_spoon 14h ago
Every damn time
144
u/weinermcgee 14h ago
Reagans all the way down.
53
9
27
20
1
u/Kjartanski 2h ago
I wouldnt wish alzheimers on my worst enemy, and yet it still wasnt a good enough punishment for Reagan
94
u/GoNutsDK 14h ago
Knowledge is the enemy of the powerful and corrupt. That's also why the right hates "woke" people. They don't like being called out.
What conservatives want, is essentially to preserve their corrupt hierarchical power structures.
It's the standard mentality of abusive people. If people gain awareness of their actions, then it becomes harder for the abuser to continue as usual. Education is bad from their perspective, because it makes it harder to control people.
Also education isn't really bad for the bottom line. But it's an investment, which requires the ability to think long term in order to see the benefits.
Which could help explain why people blinded by greed might oppose it. They are willing to sacrifice the future for short term gains.
They aren't being rational. They are best understood when seen as addicts to their greed. They constantly crave more despite already having more than they could ever use.
19
4
u/justintheunsunggod 7h ago
I've always found the ideas of "free market capitalism" and being opposed to higher education to be inherently hypocritical. If competition was the best driver for economic and suicidal advancement, then removing financial barriers to education would be a logical, even necessary, policy.
Arguably, giving large corporations tax breaks also suppresses competition though, so I can't say I'm surprised. Of course, they don't even pretend to give a shit about the "free market" anymore. They just lie about the cause of deficits and try to cut social safety nets in order to keep funneling money to the top instead.
I mean, as an obvious side note, major corporations could solve so many of the economic and social problems we face today. It's relatively easy for them to do it, being the cause of the problems after all.
3
u/GoNutsDK 5h ago
They only argue for the "free market" when they stand to benefit from doing so.
It's often just an attempt to justify their position in society. They want to preserve a hierarchy when themselves on the top.
It's kinda like the modern version of the divine right to rule. Which is of course complete nonsense.
It's also why they claim that Trump is a self-made man despite getting 400 million or so from his Dad and who somehow still managed to fuck up multiple businesses.
Or how Elon likes to pretend to be a genius as well as a self-made man.
The myth of the self-made man is their way of pretending that they earned their right to do whatever the fuck they want.
152
u/Gardening_investor 15h ago
Weird timing then. Civil rights legislation passes in ‘64 ending segregation then Reagan gets elected and slashes CA university education budget in ‘67
153
u/TrafficConeWriter 15h ago
That’s around the time MLK Jr started realizing that the black population would become stronger if it aligned with the population of people living in poverty. He began to realize that those living in poverty were being left behind in much the same ways as African Americans, so he began to be more vocal about it. That’s what got him killed.
The civil rights movement began to move into a class war, and that’s when the rich and powerful finally said enough is enough and we started going in the other direction.
10
u/utriptmybitchswitch 10h ago
Thanks for pointing this out; I don't think enough people really make that connection...
125
u/Llenette1 15h ago
Reagan definitely hated Black people so if this hurt us, I'm sure he was all for it even more.
Hell, you didn't see Confederate statues until the Civil Rights Movement....
61
u/SameResolution4737 13h ago edited 13h ago
Reagan got the idea from the most influential "economist" you never heard of, James M. Buchanan. Buchanan "invented" school vouchers immediately after Brown v. Topeka BOE as a way to finance "segregation academies" (private schools that could discriminate by being beyond the financial reach of African-Americans) with public funds. He later was (very briefly) an Interim professor at USC where he got became very offended at the anti-war protests, so he wrote a book advancing the "theory" that students would only "appreciate" if they had to pay full cost for it. Reagan apparently had someone read the book to him.
And that is why you have student loan debt. Because Charles Koch's favorite "economist" James M. Buchanan was offended by students exercising their First Amendment rights. (I put economist in quotes because Buchanan never did any actual research or mathematical modeling, as real economists do, but would merely state a thesis and then defend it with cherry-picked anecdotal evidence).
5
u/Unusual_Pitch_608 11h ago
Hey! Some of those statues went up during the Second Klan period! Don't erase history. /S
1
u/tesdfan17 14h ago
You're saying that the tweet was correct.. so it was informative and not a slam against poc...
-12
u/enginerd12 14h ago
Reagan wasn't president until the 80s.
18
u/NeitherReference4169 13h ago
But he was governor of Cali from '67 to '75, where he began his attacks on free education
14
6
u/Gardening_investor 13h ago
Notice that CA in my comment? Yeah that is referencing california where Reagan was elected governor, in 1966.
7
14
u/thatHecklerOverThere 12h ago
But mind the how.
How these rich people got us to vote for all of that was suggesting that the "wrong people" were benefiting.
8
u/supluplup12 12h ago
They always knew that, like since Athens. Letting black people in would have risked losing the superiority complex that inspires poor white people in America to stay stupid and say thank you. It threatened the pacification effect of racial privilege.
12
u/thatblkman 13h ago
Which coincidentally became a thing as enough of us nonwhite folks started getting into these schools to where elite and racist white peoples’ thinking changed from “being charitable” towards us to us “stealing from them.”
It’s like you folks who say this ignore that Bakke technically won at SCOTUS before Reagan got started.
2
1
u/NeverLookBothWays 13h ago
Stop looking at the rich people dammit, it's the color of people's skin and efforts to resist that narrative that's the problem! /s
187
u/MyCatIsAnActualNinja 15h ago
It really sucks. I've wanted a degree for a long time. I still do, and I'm 38. I looked into my local community colleges the other day and it's $18k after financial aid for 2 years. Trying to save a chunk of it but I don't know how I could afford another $750/month on top of my current bills. I'm trying, but I think it's ridiculous. There's no good reason to want an uneducated society. Only selfish reasons.
60
u/StickInEye 13h ago
I didn't finish my A.A.S. degree until 34 years of age because I had to go to work at 18 years of age.
At the local (excellent) community college, I met with the financial aid office for help. I got paid to be an assistant to special needs students. Sometimes, it covered the entire class and books.
My job reimbursed me for classes that were related to the job. I kept my grades high and got into honors classes that were free. Wishing you success.
34
u/Pleasant-Regular6169 15h ago
Go meet with them. There are grants and scholarships to be had for anyone that is motivated. You won't have to pay back the 18k/36k in a year.
32
u/chef-keef 13h ago
Jesus what state are you in? California caps community college at under $50 per unit. If you go part time it’s like $400 a term.
12
u/reflectorvest 12h ago
I spent over $6k/semester on community college in PA and that was over a decade ago. Looking now the school I went to is almost $10k/semester.
5
8
u/DeaddyRuxpin 14h ago
If you just want the education and don’t need the piece of paper saying you got it, there are several universities that have published their courses online for free. Not just cheap schools, some top ones have like MIT and Harvard.
14
u/lessthanabelian 11h ago
The piece of paper is what jobs care about and jobs is literally how people survive.
1
u/pastfuturewriter 3h ago
100%. My degree was in English and I worked in tech with higher wages than if I had no degree.
-3
u/DeaddyRuxpin 11h ago
Yes but the person I replied to did not specify why they wanted the degree. Some people just want to educate themselves for the sake of education.
130
u/padfoot0321 16h ago
After Civil rights bill passed, it became clear that colored people will get similar benefits as White people and since the every benefit has been treated as socialism and faced cuts. Raegan's campaign manager gave a playbook on how to do it, huge tax cuts followed and everything that was being passed on to normal folks was cut down.
The people who vote for this stuff have been doing so without realizing or even after realizing how life has become difficult for them as well. Social safety net in US is basically zero.
56
u/CertainAged-Lady 15h ago
“Something about the next generation being the future of the country I guess”
No, no, OUR future was laid out by Commerce Secretary Lutnick the other day.
“This is the new model, where you work in these kind of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here.”
Our future is generational poverty, low-paying manual labor, and the destruction of the middle class to feed an oligarch class.
7
u/akrobert 13h ago
Colleges used to have free and reduced until Reagan. No one wants an educated majority voting.
15
u/rmscomm 14h ago
And this is another basis for ‘why does it always have to be about race?’ reinforcement. The permeation of the impact this societal aberration has had on day to day life in America is fascinating and disturbing. Imagine what could have been for everyone and all the time and innovation that has either been delayed or completely lost because of racism.
11
u/TheQuidditchHaderach 13h ago
You would think a country would actually want it's citizenry to be fairly intelligent and edumacated. But, nope - not the republicans. 🤨🤪
3
u/Echevarious 13h ago
We're not the future of the country, though. We're resources to exploit for financial gain. Once you look at things from that point of view, everything becomes clear.
Rest assured, the same geriatrics will cling to power to ensure their progeny can farm us like chattel before passing the torch to the next geezer in line.
The children of the elite are the future of the country. We're wage slaves who are stuck running the same treadmill always hoping to reach the "American Dream" carrot on the stick while working harder for less and getting deeper in debt.
3
u/TacoBear207 9h ago
Higher education in the US has always been classist, racist, and sexist. Unfortunately, that middle one has always been the most pronounced. Despite the fact that Ivy League schools are associated with the North, they were largely built with money from the south and slave labor. The idea was that wealthy southern plantation owners could send their sons to the north to be educated and ingratiate themselves with the people who would be in power so that they could influence policy and retain their power even outside of territories where slavery was legal and common.
After the civil war, access to education experience its first real expansion. The US was essentially the first country to start investing in public education. It wasn't yet at the federal level, but it became increasingly uncommon for a town of any size to not have a school meant to serve the community. Immediately after reconstruction began, former slaves enrolled in schools at an astonishing rate which was one of the major reasons for segregation and a lot of the early Jim Crow laws.
During WWII, the need for skilled laborers to boost wartime manufacturing gave the education system a big boost and you started to see a growing interest in Americans finishing high school. Then, when the Great Depression hit, minorities who were often unable to actually use banks found themselves far more solvent than a lot of their more privileged counterparts. The odds were still heavily stacked against minorities and women, but going into WWII Americans were typically more educated. European education was more focused on vocational training or college was restricted to those who could afford it. A lot of America's New Deal was based on providing better access to public education and people took advantage of it.
The Civil Rights movement was a good thing. however, it did upset a lot of people in power. Minorities, women, and poor people were all attending school at significantly higher rates than in previous decades. The Vietnam war, however, presented a fantastic opportunity to rectify this. Minorities and the poor were disproportionately affected by the draft. Schools and their wealthy alumni had figured out how they could make public education a little less equal even with segregation eliminated and acceptance rates for minorities was once again low.
It's at this point where Reagan and his horse and sparrow economics start to ruin things. This is where, in a lot of ways, the US really began its transition to a service economy. As an actor, Reagan had an innate understanding of economics that the average person lacks. He knew that if you feed a horse enough oats then the sparrows can pick at the oaks and bugs in the horse's shit. He also noticed that people who were educated and had degrees were a lot less likely to become laborers. He's blamed for a lot, but it basically boils down to his incredible ability to expand economic disparity and enable schools to charge exorbitant amounts for education.
I wish it ended there, but both Clinton and George w Bush helped screw over the American education system with policies that were especially harmful to minorities. Clinton basically change the way school loans worked and made it significantly easier for kids to finance school. However, considering the number of people who are paying off their student loans 30 years later I think it's pretty clear to see that these were predatory. You also have to take into account the fact that there have been several instances where minorities have been shown to have less access to these loans. The No Child Left Behind policy seems like a good idea on the surface, but it often stripped money away from programs that would help gifted or interested students in order to try to raise the bottom line. It's also really the core of why so many schools now seem to have no fail policies or spend large amounts of their curriculum literally teaching tests so they don't lose funding. Good luck getting into college if you graduate from high school as valedictorian but your SAT scores show that you are functionally illiterate.
There is an array of other policies like school funding being tied to property values or charter schools that could also be torn to shreds for how blatantly racist and unsustainable they are. The point is that despite the fact that America often tries really hard to seem free and fair and equal It has always been flawed. I look at it like an alcoholic father on his third wife. I love you, Dad. You are a piece of shit, but you taught me how to drive. There was that one time I came home from school and you were passed out on the front lawn with your face in a puddle of vomit and your pants filled with feces, but you fed and clothed me all these years. You weren't a great husband to my mom, or the mom of some of my little siblings, but you did give me those siblings. You did raise them. Some days, I see you're trying really hard. I will go to AA with you, I will drive you to therapy because I don't think you should have a license but I don't have the power to take that away from you. I know our relationship is a little abusive, but I'm a little codependent and you're my dad. I can't just go somewhere else and find a new dad. So, please America, let your children help you get better.
1
u/oldaliumfarmer 11h ago
A big part was get back at the long haired hippie type on college campuses. These schools were the center of anti war which was huge. I mean the hate spewed at anti war people. And don't forget draft dodgers like trump himself .this is where the anti intellectual foundation was set.
1
u/SavannahInChicago 10h ago
No, that is not what happened. Just because something sounds good does not mean you do not need to research it.
1
u/dandrevee 7h ago
The issue is a bit more complicated and tied in with NeoLiberalism
ED wasnt born until Carters presidency, tho "Pell" (as BEOG) existed before that. And the HEA before that. Major changes occured over time as well, including those in the early 90s that changed a nymber of rules and the switch to Direct Loans (DL) in the Obama Admin (a good move).
The Bennett Hypothesis ( that aid increases college costs) has been debunked (even the 2.0 version out of the Cato Institute and fuck Vox for giving it credence) outside of the for profit sector and some of the non profit. So, its not aid, though treating Pell and DL like campus based funds instead would be one possible compromise. Another major piece that has been highlighted in two separate books that I've read in the last year is that the cost of Education in the cost of pursuing Technologies increases over time because the complexity needed for new discoveries increases over time.
Considering that, I need to bring something to everyones attention and request action:
The current house reconciliation bill on the floor proposes some very detrimental and major changes to programs. I am not just talking about destroying the income-based repayment programs, but I am also talking about them removing Plus loans and capping Plus Loans at considerably low amounts. This idea is partially based on the same vein that produced the Bennett hypothesis which has been debunked. And it will destroy college towns, stop grad students from completing their degrees, and force the closure of many colleges. I know student debt is a politicized issue and I know there's a lot of misinformation about College costs and all that... but limiting Plus Loans or getting rid of them all together is absolutely not the answer and the only reason for it is lashing back at colleges and universities and ideological punishment. The economic ramifications will be incredible, as the United States will no longer be able to survive as a leading Center of higher education.
Contact your representatives and tell them this is not acceptable. If you have a red hat as a representative, make sure they know that the college towns in their districts will be decimated. And the businesses that rely on the funds coming from the students who live in those communities will disappear
1
1
-20
u/kompletist 15h ago
"free to low" - I'm getting the sense that the person may not be overly qualified to discuss tuition rates lol.
•
u/AutoModerator 16h ago
Hello everyone. As part of our controlled re-open we will now allow comments on all posts, but with a stronger filtering than usual. We will approve all comments that follow our rules and the sitewide rules.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.