REPARATIONS AND THE STUDENT DEBT WARS
The public college and university system in California was tuition-free during the sixties and into the seventies when the baby boomers were attending college in record numbers. Favorable budgets helped stoke the demand and new campuses were built to accommodate this explosion, propelled by an inclusive ethos special to this left-liberal era where a different breed of Democrats governed. This trend, also evident nationwide, revived the spirit of the free school movement popular in the early 19th century that encouraged the creation of literate citizens for a more vital democracy.
The pedagogy of education was accordingly different. There was a significant stress on a well-rounded critical and humanistic education for education’s sake. Thanks to a more favorable job market, students could experiment for a while, relatively secure in the belief that education was about more than career-niching. The evaluation process was accordingly experimental and consumer-driven, grading lax if implemented at all in some circles.
This liberal “Enlightenment” ideal succumbed to shifting trends in the 70s. A glut of new grads materialized amid an epidemic of budget deficits in a slumping economy that bred conservative solutions to a host of ills. Milton Friedman’s early-decade market-fundamentalist trounce of Keynesian economics was the authority for dealing with them. Education started to become a privilege. Ronald Reagan, as Governor of California, was an outspoken supporter of these changes. In his run-up to the presidency, however, he vowed to support the plight of grads that for so many years had faced limited job prospects—not unrelated to his enmity toward unions and the working class.
Policies since then have certainly beefed up support for the middle and upper class college grad over and against the working class, whose wages have remained stagnant since the mid-70s, but they’ve also made a college degree extremely expensive. Endless budget cuts to education have forced higher and higher tuition hikes and made CONTINUE READING: Reparations And The Student Debt Wars | PopularResistance.Org
