Back in the late 1950s when I was getting ready for college there was no way my parents could pay and in addition I had no reference of college educated family members. The main option was the Draft and Viet Nam had not yet fully blossomed.
College was cheap. MIT I think was still less than $1000 per years plus room and board. However one could exist in a student hovel, an apartment with multiple room mates at $40 per month each plus food. Food could be purchased at $5 per week if one was cautious. Thus having a summer job as a lifeguard, at $70 per week, less $20 for Fed and NY Tax and SSI, one had $50 per week then subtract transportation, $0.15 bus each way. No cell phone, no laptop, no Netflix, no lunch, one pair of shoes.
Now how to come up with the tuition? The only real solution was a scholarship. By 1960 there were multiple science and engineering scholarships from NASA, to DoD, to even NY State. I got a NY State Science and Engineering one which covered tuition. I was home free along as I continued to perform. Four years later, degree in hand, debt free, and quite slim from my low calorie diet, I was in grad school. Again fellowships and after some six years on multiple degrees I was out in 1971, debt free.
However in 1971, thanks to Viet Nam and Nixon, there were no jobs, not a single one. My only choice was to work for my father who had started his electrical company on Staten Island as an electrician. After-all MIT had awarded me a PhD in EECS so I must be able to do something. My job, connecting methane release systems on the Staten Island Dump! Nothing like the State Island Dump in July! Thanks President Nixon!
The lesson however is twofold. The Government provide scholarships, tuition support, for those who performed and who were seeking to be employed in key areas. Second, the tuition was modest because the overhead at MIT and other schools was low. They were academic institutions not proto-Marxist training and indoctrination camps filled with Commissars paid exorbitant salaries.
Thus when the NY Times writes that:
Those are worries of an out-of-touch chattering class. No one drank enough beer in college for the last 30 years to deserve a student loan balance that increases even as the debtor attempts to pay down the principal. The message that some people don’t deserve debt relief is a politics of grievance. If you cannot craft a political message that acknowledges that we turned the greatest vehicle of social mobility into a debt machine, then you are not good at messaging. This is the right message: We messed up. Our bad. Make it right. Cancel the debt.
In reality the right approach is based upon the euphemism, "prior planning prevents poor performance". College is only a stepping stone if the the steps leads to a productive person. Namely science and engineering, medicine, etc. The extreme Liberal Arts areas are laudable for those who can afford limited opportunities. To say that anyone who goes to college to study anything should be funded by the taxpayer is outright balderdash. (I always wanted to use that word).
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