This Fresh Air podcast describes some ways in which college education/tuition policies can go wrong https://www.npr.org/2017/03/27/521371034/how-for-profit-colleges-sell-risky-education-to-the-most-vulnerable. It refers back partly to the notion that the availability of government aid is a factor leading to increasing tuitions, which I think is at best a superficial analysis. A "for profit" college model sounds vaguely free marketishy so is an easy sell to some folks, but I think all this shows is how bad policy leads to bad results.
The so-called free market does a fantastic job delivering fresh fruit and consumer electronics but it's not clear that it can solve all problems, especially in its unregulated flavour. The "all government is bad" chant is silly dogma and it's getting old.
I tend to agree that there's certainly a place for state endeavour but, as always, exactly where that starts and ends is open to debate.
I would think that education is one such, and could easily be given freely to children. Further education should then depend, as it always did seem to depend in my day, on how well the pupil performed in school. If family money is to be the key to further education, then much potential will be smothered at birth. Grants were what opened the door to university for many of my generation. A problem, of course, is the one of quality, not just of teaching in the public sector - it can't be greater than the quality of pupil allows - but of the domestic time and care given to the education of children after school hours. Again, that inevitably brings me back to the traditional idea of mothers being at home and not in some effin' office instead. The basic problem is simple: nobody can have it both ways and not, then, affect the offspring. I know, first-hand, about this one. We resolved it amicably.
In the case of my own brood, my granddaughters were both sent to private schools because the parents, both teachers, were only too aware of the environmental damage to eductional prospects that the state school environment can threaten. When so many kids come from a home where nobody gives a damn, what chance the kids behaving themselves and not disrupting classes to the cost of the few interested in learning?
The reality of life appears to remain fairly constant: social mobility, both in terms of learning and earning, is a tough nut to crack, if it can be cracked at all.
Some do cross over, against all the odds stacked against them, but those are exceptionally strong-minded individuals. And all kudos to them.
Rob
