Wallace Baine, Baine Street: Do we really value higher education? - Santa Cruz Sentinel:
"The really painful part of the current crisis is that a UC education used to be free, or at least nominally so. Fees weren't imposed on students until the mid-1950s and then the system was careful not to call such fees 'tuition.' In 1956, those fees were about $42 a semester. And this was for a world-class education, the envy of the world, a beacon to bright young people from all over the planet to come to California to study and eventually to work and live.
That sounds like some silly Disneyland fantasy now. Today, a college education has become a commodity like everything else. What's worse, it's become another wedge in the culture wars, a target for self-defeating class resentments and bogus beefs about elitism. The far right will argue campuses are cesspools of Marxist indoctrination. The far left says that colleges are only interested in producing armies of tame little consumers. And meanwhile, students are exploited for their revenue potential, saddled with crippling loans and pushed into high-paying fields like finance to pay off those loans. Our culture becomes the loser in that deal."
"The really painful part of the current crisis is that a UC education used to be free, or at least nominally so. Fees weren't imposed on students until the mid-1950s and then the system was careful not to call such fees 'tuition.' In 1956, those fees were about $42 a semester. And this was for a world-class education, the envy of the world, a beacon to bright young people from all over the planet to come to California to study and eventually to work and live.
That sounds like some silly Disneyland fantasy now. Today, a college education has become a commodity like everything else. What's worse, it's become another wedge in the culture wars, a target for self-defeating class resentments and bogus beefs about elitism. The far right will argue campuses are cesspools of Marxist indoctrination. The far left says that colleges are only interested in producing armies of tame little consumers. And meanwhile, students are exploited for their revenue potential, saddled with crippling loans and pushed into high-paying fields like finance to pay off those loans. Our culture becomes the loser in that deal."