In the midst of the grave and calamitous Civil War, the Lincoln Administration signed into law the Morrill Act of 1862. This Act was amended and expanded in the years following Lincoln’s death, but it was amongst the most important legislative actions in shaping modern America. The Morrill Act created the Land Grant College system in America.

Yale University, Harvard University, and Cornell University all benefited from the Land Grant program, along with the vast majority of State Colleges and Universities. The Land Grant program provided federal lands to colleges and universities for their campuses, but it also provided large tracts of land in the Western United States to be sold to fund endowments for these institutions. The trusts created by the sale of these federal lands had one goal, to provide for tuition free education in agriculture, science, military science, engineering, and classical studies.

The land grant program provided free tuition for American students at the vast majority of state colleges and universities throughout the late 1800s and most of the 1900s. It also provided tuition free education to students at the aforementioned Ivy League schools, as well as several other private colleges and universities which had benefited from Land Grant endowments.

The tuition free college provided to numerous Americans via the Land Grant system, and the additional tuition free college provided by the GI Bill following World War II suffered a backlash during the 1960s. Why? Because of those damned hippies. Governor Ronald Reagan did not like the fact that college kids were getting a “free ride” at the University of California, especially those hooligans at UC Berkeley when American GIs returning from Vietnam had LESS GENEROUS college benefits than their World War II era GI parents.

As the Governor of California, Reagan worked to impose the first tuition fees for students at Land Grant colleges and universities. He tried to impose tuition fees at the University of California which had always been a tuition free Land Grant College. As Governor, Reagan failed to impose a tuition for the University of California, but he did begin imposing hefty fees on students in the UC system. During Reagan’s Presidency, the tuition he hoped to impose finally came to fruition in the UC system. The end to tuition free public colleges and universities that Reagan pushed for in California became the norm in most of the country between the 1960s and the 1980s. For a more detailed history of the demise of tuition free public colleges and universities, you can read this 1982 article from the NY Times: www.nytimes.com/…

If you are a Bernie supporter and someone complains about “free” college, please pass this little piece of history along to them, and let them know that you just want to restore the gift to America that Abraham Lincoln gave us all during the midst of the Civil War. You know, the gift which like so many others Ronald Wilson Reagan stole to help his fat cat friends.

What fat cat friends? Why Wall Street Bankers of course. The student loan system exploded student debt in the years following Reagan, and until quite recently, most of that debt was owned by private banks and guaranteed by the federal government. In 1976 the Ford Administration ended bankruptcy protection for student debt, so once again thank the modern Republican Party for dismantling the work of Abraham Lincoln.