Altidude is ToddZ

Whereas the average state tuition in the early 1980s ran around $8k (in 2008 dollars) for four years, most Millennials are forced into the mid-five-figures range for a second rate public university education. (Pell Grants—when the Boomers were attending college—covered 77% of the cost for a four-year public university. For us, the figure is 35%.) And it’s a servitude from which we can never escape. Forget bankruptcy. Default on a student loan and the government will garnish your wages until they get it all back, plus interest. They can even go after your social security money, off limits for all other debts.

The actual cost of universal free higher education is negligible—estimated somewhere between $15 and $30 billion. That’s a relatively tiny pinprick from the federal budget that could transform higher education overnight into a truly public good. And yet the US government is already spending roughly that very amount on higher education. But they’re not using it to pay our tuition. They’re using it just to prop up our heinous student loan system—through tax deductions and credits. They’re bending over backwards just to fuck us and collect.

This is a situation that seems vastly underappreciated by the greying generations who got college educations with the money from newspaper routes and assume nothing has changed.

(Source: azspot)