We Need Robustly Funded State University Systems

I’ve gone back to read David Cannadine’s classic history The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. It’s a marvelous work of scholarship. For the present it was a bracing reminder of how even the highly conservative governments (small-c, inclusive of Conservatives and Liberals) of late 19th century Britain passed laws which simply set aside contracts and market control of prices – something that still seems all but anathema in today’s national politics or has until quite recently. I say this as a way of noting that I agree with the range of proposals to cancel or mitigate the massive amount of post-college indebtedness which was already a problem twenty years ago but has grown massively since the financial crisis and the great recession. But we have a much larger problem with educational funding in this country and one that won’t be solved by one-time debt forgiveness or, as far as I can understand them, most of the proposals for free college.