you put a lot of effort into making this really smug and unnecessarily hostile post that really does nothing to refute my sentiment: that efforts to make post-secondary education more affordable and attainable are good, and that appealing to how many people go to college is definitely not an argument against doing so lol.
Essential where motherfucker? What country are you in and how many people do it there? Show me some data.
country with highest post-secondary attainment rate in the OECD with a little over sixty percent of people ages 25 to 30-something having a tertiary certification.
Germany has a third of America's college attendance. Is the country in shambles technologically and economically?
germany afaik also has eliminated tuition for public universities so i have faith that people there who want to pursue that are able to do so and will not be racked by debt.
That is neither self evident nor is it guaranteed that more of the currently disadvantaged would go.
agree-to-disagree... you are capable of pointing out real systemic barriers for disadvantaged people to go to college, but it is still self-evident to me that eliminating one of these barriers (prohibitive cost and lack of accessibility) would encourage more of them to pursue it.
it is not like you either have to focus your efforts on either k-12 or college. should increasing the quality of lower-tier education be a priority? yeah sure, that doesn't preclude smugly dismissing anyone who wants to advocate for increased accessibility to post-secondary education (not just college, it's not like bernie or AOC are out there telling people that going to college is literally the only valid option) as people who want to help the 'kids of millionaires and billionaires' lol.
i also want to be clear that i don't even like Bernie or AOC, think the 'left' is utterly impotent and impractical, and have zero opinion on the viability of their plans, which i know nothing about and have no interest in knowing about. i am playing devil's advocate because i can still recognize that buttigieg is nonsensical.
Society would absolutely benefit ...
glad we can agree on that point at least. in my humble opinion education is a social good and the ideal situation is one where it is accessible to everyone.