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How Student Debt is Sabotaging America
Ronald Reagan knew that an educated populace was more progressive and more Democratic, and he was determined to stop the explosion of college educated Americans caused by both the 1944 GI Bill and free tuition at the University of California.
Forty years later, student debt has crippled two generations of young Americans: over 44 million people carry the burden, totaling a $1.5 trillion drag on our economy that benefits nobody except the banks earning interest on the debt.
But that doesn’t begin to describe the damage student debt has done to America since Reagan, in his first year as governor of California, ended free tuition at the University of California and cut state aid to that college system by 20 percent across-the-board.
After having destroyed low income Californians’ ability to get an education in the 1970s, he then took his anti-education program national as president in 1980.
When asked why he’d taken a meat-axe to higher education and was pricing college out of the reach of most Americans, he said that college students were “too liberal” and America “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.”
After all, college educated people are more likely to vote for Democrats: Joe Biden, for example, won fully 60 percent of the college educated vote in 2020. In the minds…
