2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Ticked off millennials are taking on the Democrats [View all]Waiting For Everyman
(9,385 posts)I know, because I went then, all it required was a "B" average and state residency. Were we so rich then, and so poor now?
Instead of making you guess, I'll tell you, three key things were different: one, most state universities were state-owned and therefore held all college costs down competitively, since then most have been privatized; two, we had a very high top tier tax rate, like 80% and that's why there weren't ridiculously high salaries then, creating needless billionaires, and instead we had a very large, very strong middle class; and three, we were in a space-race with the Russians, and the PTB figured they (temporarily) needed to develop all the talent we had. Those with grades in the top 3% of the graduating class were courted and recruited like sports stars are now, I'm now even kidding.
Funny, what can be done when there's a desire to do it.
Because going to college wasn't dependent on MONEY, those who were there really belonged there, and you didn't have wealthy dipshits from all over the world taking up the openings, buying their way through and driving up the cost for everyone else to be paying off for a decade or two.
I won't even go into the over-blown administrators' salaries today and the price of sports facilities for teams to cater to the betting public driving up tuition for no reason.
This college mess today is nothing but another malignant bubble which needs to pop. Young people today deserve free college as we had before, and those already in debt from it need some major government-funded relief. Most of all it should be super easy and cheap for anyone who has some college to finish their degree.
Today, most of those people are blocked from continuing, by the debt they acquired while getting some of the needed credits, without having the higher paying job a degree would give them, to pay it off. It's not a bit fair. And just wrong. Banks are keeping peoples' lives on hold for years and years, for no good reason. It's like indentured servitude today. It's total bullshit.
I'm 66, and I'm sick and tired of watching the useless money machine devouring everything and everyone else. It's time to knock these overbearing "giants" back down to size, and there are techniques which have worked in the past for doing just that. We don't even need to reinvent the wheel, all we need is the will. Bernie is the focal point of that will. His ideas would give us a much better quality of life, and they are not bullshit they are real and doable.