The 1944 G.I. Bill signed by Franklin Roosevelt included a free college benefit almost as an afterthought, since academic and political leaders thought that most returning troops wouldn’t be “college material,” in an era when only 5% of Americans earned bachelor’s degrees and a majority didn’t finish high school. Instead, the mostly working-class G.I. Bill recipients stunned the nation both in their large numbers and their devotion to taking classes. [...]
Top officials seemed less worried about the uproar at elite campuses like Columbia and more concerned about radicalism at the massive state universities —Berkeley or New York State’s university at Buffalo — that had exploded with working-class kids taking advantage of low (or free) tuition. They also nervously eyed rising enrollment and protests at HBCUs like Mississippi’s Jackson State University, where cops would murder two Black students on May 15, 1970.
Kent State skyrocketed from 5,000 students in 1954 to 21,000 by 1966, many of them kids of factory workers whose idealism had been forged in the New Deal-era union activism. By 1970, students exhausted by watching their neighbors return from Vietnam in body bags gravitated toward radical groups like Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS. The final trigger was then-President Nixon sending U.S. troops into Cambodia, which led to Kent State protesters burning down the ROTC building, which caused Ohio’s governor to call up the National Guard.
Today, polls show most people who know about the May 4 shooting consider it an abuse of government power, but it didn’t look that way to Middle America in 1970. An instant Gallup Poll showed 58% of Americans blamed the students for the bloodshed, with only 11% blaming the Guard. At a memorial service in Kent, locals disrupted the event chanting “Kent State Four! Should have studied more!” [...]
That year, a Hoover Institution economist who advised both Nixon and Reagan named Roger Freeman said the quiet part out loud when he told the San Francisco Chronicle, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go through higher education.” [...]
After Reagan was elected president in 1980, he slashed direct federal aid to college students and accelerated the shift to a model based around student loans. Meanwhile, the state legislatures that had spent generously on new dorms in the 1960s now put higher education on the chopping block. In Pennsylvania, taxpayers who paid 75% of the cost of public universities in the late 20th century now pay 25%. That gap is filled in by the state’s working families paying more tuition, which invariably means taking out student loans.
