Never before in American history has it been so expensive and difficult to get a college education, with the average annual tuition at a four-year school topping $36,000.
The intent is to make higher education in America once again something that only the financially well off can even consider. Although it’s not widely known, numerous universities and colleges offered free tuition prior to 1973, among them Cooper Union and The City College of New York.
Ironically, America, which led the way for the world in the field of mass public education, is tightening and withdrawing access to higher education at a time when other nations are making it more available than ever. U.S. college tuition costs have surged 1,120 percent the past 30 years, according to Affordable Schools.
Sadly, the plutocracy of the 1 percent is using the powerful and pervasive myths of “rugged individualism” and “pulling oneself up by the boot straps” as wedges to deter working Americans from supporting their own interests. Namely a national educational policy that would benefit them, their children, and America at large.
How America plans to continue to compete and keep up with the rest of the world economically is, sadly, an open question most Americans are unaware of. Much less a question they have given serious thought to.
A relatively ignorant and uneducated America is much easier to sway and control. Keeping the masses in the dark allows the plutocracy of the 1 percent to continue their drive to dismantle, liquidate, and abscond with the Great American Economic Patrimony (GAEP) unimpeded.
The GAEP is the accumulated wealth and resources created by our ancestors and bequeathed, always enlarged and enriched, by each generation of Americans to the next generation. It’s being stolen now by the plutocracy of the 1 percent right before our eyes.
The once vaunted American middle class is shrinking and disappearing into the ranks of the poor, working or not. And those already poor are sinking into destitution.
Meanwhile our children are graduating from college with suffocating student debt loads. The average Millennial has $30,000 in student loans and a median net worth of just $10,400, according to College Investor. The term refers to the 75 million Americans between the ages of 19 and 36 and is now our nation’s largest age cohort.
The great mass of the American people are slowly, but surely, being robbed of their hopes and dreams. A society without hope cannot survive.
