Notices by David Benfell, Ph.D. (benfell@hcommons.social)

Work https://disunitedstates.com/24679-2

@jeff

Who made higher education (meaning college and university) mandatory when?

@jeff

1/2 Well, that's a little short of 'mandatory,' and it's also older than the early 2000s.

There was a time in the 1950s and 1960s when the U.S. got worried about competing with the Soviet Union and we really started encouraging kids to go to school. This was a recognition of education as a public rather than a private benefit.

As the Soviet threat receded, and as neoliberalism took hold, we decided education was an individual benefit, and we started financing education with student loans, allowing college costs to skyrocket and saddling students with ludicrous amounts of debt. That the government guaranteed the loans and kept interest rates relatively low for unsecured debt was the sole remaining concession to the notion of a public benefit.

Anti-intellectualism, always a major force in the U.S., has been on the rise ever since.