This meme is a screenshot of a tweet from a Twitter user named @schadenfreude, which reads: "As Biden cancels student loans, remember why the student loan debt crisis started in the first place: because of a 1970s law that let colleges get rich off student loans, not tuition. That's why the student loan debt crisis started in the first place." The tweet is accompanied by a screenshot of a 1970s-era law that allowed colleges to get rich off student loans, not tuition.
2023-05-10T21:03:42+00:00
4 * Jon “& Schwarz S @ " @schwarz As Biden cancels (some) student debt, remember why the debt exists. A key Reagan advisor warned in 1970 that free college was producing the dangerously explosive "dynamite" of an "educated proletariat," and "we have to be selective on who we allow to go through higher education": Later in 1970, Roger Freeman —a key educational adviser to Nixon then working for the reelection of California governor Ronald Rea- gan —spelled out quite precisely what the conservative counterattack was aimed at preventing: “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. If not, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people.”* The two most menacing institutional sources of the danger described by Freeman were obvi- ously those two great public university systems charging no tuition: the University of California and the City University of New York. Governor Reagan was able to wipe out free tuition at the University of California 3:25 PM - 8/24/22 - Twitter Web App