The United States boasts the best public universities in the world. No young person should be turned away because they were born into a family without enough money for tuition; nor should getting a degree consign a person to decades of crippling debt. For the sake of fairness, class mobility, and the ideal of equality of opportunity, I believe generous financial aid should be available to all needy students for whom a four-year degree is the best way to achieve the American dream.

But I also know America is overwhelmingly led by people with college degrees and white collar backgrounds––people who overvalue their own path to success and rig the system against others who’d thrive under a different approach. To them I say, a four-year degree shouldn’t be the only way for a young person to achieve the American dream.

Our elites are too often blind to the value of education that is received away from college, whether through apprenticeships or vocational schools or on-the-job training. They don’t always understand that there are lots of blue-collar jobs that are more fulfilling, better paying, and more in demand than lots of white-collar jobs. And they are blind to the wisdom in cultural enclaves where a young person is not considered “culturally competent” until knowing how to perform CPR, help a stranger change a flat, or work alongside people from different social classes without taking offense when their etiquette is different than the etiquette at UCLA or Berkeley.

So rather than promising free tuition, like Bernie Sanders, I have a more inclusive proposal: No matter your race or class or gender, you should be able to afford a degree from a public university without crippling debt if that path best maximizes your potential; and we should all value the important work being done at universities.

But I want to invest as heavily in ambitious, hard-working young people who appreciate that carpenters, day-care workers, sous chefs, masseuses, and plumbers do jobs every bit as important as accountants, marketers, lawyers, and IT staff, and who’ve concluded they can best flourish and contribute to society with an education they acquire outside of college. I don’t want anyone getting a four-year degree just because that’s the only way to receive government help, or because folks with college degrees have rigged the system so that having a credential like theirs is the only way to get ahead in America.

I want to stop robbing people of their comparative advantage.

The future I want to see begins with redoubling America’s efforts at civic education in high school. Everyone with a high-school diploma should have learned all the tools they need to meaningfully participate as citizens in America’s government-by-the-people. In fact, adults who want to study American civics now should have that opportunity.