Middle Class Students

One of the things I’ve learned this quarter is fewer students in the middle classes are attending the University of California now. Rich students can afford to pay the new high tuition. Working class students are eligible for need-based scholarships. Of course, many middle-class parents like me couldn’t afford UC tuition.

Our Assembly Speaker is proposing a specific scholarship for middle class students, in part to make up for the cuts to our CalGrant program, which is increasingly unable to close the gap (especially when they try to cut CalGrant every year).

Protecting the middle class is important, since it’s endangered. (To see what will eventually happen to it, click here: http://www.theonion.com/articles/national-museum-of-the-middle-class-opens-in-schau,1244/).

However, I think it’s time to consider a more radical solution, one that many first world countries (and a few 2nd and 3rd world countries) have found: free higher education.

We live in a world where a Bachelor’s grants you the same opportunities a high school diploma offered half a century ago. It’s a basic requirement for a decent job. We tell our children that they must get a BA if they want to survive. If they want to succeed, they have to do even more.

Shouldn’t that education be available in the same way that high school has always been? I’m not saying that we educate everyone–schools can still have admission standards (in fact, we could raise them, taking only the actual brightest). There can still be tiers (universities, community colleges, vocational schools), but students will not start their adult lives in debt (and then be blamed by politicians for not being able to do better financially than parents and grandparents who didn’t have the same financial handicap). Those awful for-profit diploma mills will be put out of business–since we are investigating them for fraud, it’s unlikely we would use tax dollars to have students matriculate there.

I know that there would have to be trade-offs. Perhaps we would have to require a year of service from our students. We would certainly have to cut the budget in other places. We would still have a country where more well-off people were in college (due to the current inequality in school funding), but we can’t fix everything with one solution.

If we really believe that our citizens need to be educated, for themselves, for our economy, for our national competitive edge, then we need to do something. Sometimes I doubt we really believe this, though. We sure don’t behave as if we do.