Reminiscent of Langston Hughes’ famous poem, “A Dream Deferred,” the so-called American Dream is quickly drying up as our hopes and dreams as a nation are no longer available to entire generations of American college-aged students, students who are economically and intellectually languishing in ways that previous generations never experienced simply because college is no longer affordable. This is a failure that we, as one of the world’s great nations, own. This failure is on us. This failure, when the tab is rung up, will be listed on our receipt and brought discretely to every one of our tables. This failure affects all of us, whether we are students or not because it cuts to the heart of a functioning American economy as well as a functioning and equitable society. Without education, there is no Democracy writ large or small. This failure is our legacy, the legacy of failed economic choices and bad, weak-willed, and watered-down policies that have brought millions of American college students to face failure, abjection, and obsolescence.

Langston Hughes wonders if “Maybe it just sags / like a heavy load.”

While it is true that the American Dream has always been harder to come by for certain demographics — African-Americans, women, Latinos, and wave after wave of new immigrants — once upon a time, there was always at least a little hope for equality through hard work, through learning how to penetrate the system, through ingenuity, through creativity, and through resourcefulness. Indeed, the chronicles of our history do not state on precisely what day it was when American Dream died or what was written on its epitaph, but sealed in the tomb below was the transformation of college from a grand intellectual experience to a great yoke about the necks of students burdened by outrageous and intractable student debt. While more and more students attend college, nonetheless American employers now demand more four-year college degrees. This includes students seeking jobs that did not traditionally require Bachelor’s degrees. But capitalism has its own logic and designs, and with demand comes supply, in this case in the form of exploiting college students’ needs for economic security by baldly raising college tuition and fees so that colleges now charge an average of 10-30K per year, not counting housing, food, books, or other baseline expenditures. In 1965, the average public college tuition fee was $243.

Worse, in the past three decades, student debt has gone up 1,000%, and the average student carries $25,000 of student debt beyond college with one out of ten students graduating with an excess of $54,000, with the average African-American and Latino student saddled with even higher loads of student debt at 81% and 67%, respectively. Now if you happen to want to get a job, remember, you still need that awesome degree too! Just pull yourselves up by the bootstraps and get out there and work for your keep (as nearly 50% of all college students do, with one out of eight working nearly full-time while juggling a full-time college course load – and yes, these students will still come out with the same damned debt). And even more obscene? The US Government makes over $100 billion dollars off of the backs of students through loans. I don’t expect that from a first-world country. I don’t expect that from any country. That’s some bullshit right there. That’s some creepy financial weirdness that makes absolutely no sense. This is about the lowest of moral low roads one can actually take, making money off of their own most financially desperate and financially vulnerable citizens like mercenaries. It’s craven.

You think that doesn’t demoralize this demographic about what it means to be an American? Think again.

Langston Hughes asks, “Or does it explode?”

In other words, to go to college today, it really helps to already be born wealthy and white in the first place. But if you are not particularly financially well-endowed or gifted with white skin, or both, or either, or some horrible mindfuck of a Venn diagram of these, you can guarantee that you too can be the recipient of orders of magnitude of debt at the end of it. I guess this is why when the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, first took office, he still carried nearly $50,000 of debt from school himself, and his wife Michelle carried nearly as much.

One of America’s worst failures has been to provide the single most important means for everyone to have the chance to achieve success, stability, and prosperity despite being the so-called “greatest nation in the world” because we have faltered at the level of our basic imagination and our political will. We choose to create every system in which we live. We authorize these systems. We create our own America, as voters and as representatives for the electorate. Yet we have chosen to create a byzantine, for-profit failure, a shaky house of cards on which to rest our cumulative heads instead and we dare to call this “our higher educational system.”

Langston Hughes asks, "Does it stink like rotting meat?”

College has become our ultimate dream deferred, deferred by sky-high student loans, deferred by bloated administrative salaries and new and fancy positions like “assistant to the office of the assistant manager of the department of resource oversight” (when up until the 1970’s, it was much more common to draw administration straight from faculty), deferred by the adoption of a bald-faced for-profit system that relies even in public universities on maintaining upward bond ratings through accumulating more and more students who are basically factored in as “planned obsolescence” and whose first-semester or first-year tuitions, fees, and housing costs are happily gobbled up by university administrators, deferred by needless vanity projects like student dorms that have pools that would make Las Vegas drool, and deferred by ever-increasing tuition to justify the costs of maintaining all of these.

Langston Hughes asks, “Or does it explode?”

Maybe Mr. Hughes was onto something after all.

So here we are. Students need college. The American economy needs students. Students cannot afford college. The American economy figures out how to lend out money to create an indentured underclass of students so that students – who by the way, I really should just call “people” since the category of “student” is innately deflecting the blame by turning the mirror slightly askew so that we forget human beings are volleyed back at us within that guilty glass – and what do our politicians do?

Nothing.

Now this is where this twists up and gets a bit gnarled. We’re the world’s greatest superpower, right? We’re like this big economic beast. We bleed, we lead. Except…

…many colleges in civilized countries don’t seem to charge their own citizens for college because it’s obscene. Most countries seem to recognize the innate value in having an educated electorate in a global workforce. They tuck it into their taxes and are done with it. Like it doesn’t come up. It’s not controversial. It’s just not “a thing;” it is a social good:

France

Germany

Norway

Finland

Denmark

Brazil

Argentina

Sweden

Iceland

Malta

Cyprus

Chile (as of next year)

Trinidad and Tobago

Sri Lanka

Yes, we are being out-classed by Sri Lanka. We lack the political will of France. We are more concerned by our own for-profit, capitalist, predatory, unequal, and exploitational college system than Brazil, which incidentally has some screamingly pretty beaches too.

So once upon a time, ever the visionary and the rebel, California State had this dream, this vision of tuition-free college imagined in the fever of 1960 when the American Dream was still considered a point of national pride in the wake of the Baby Boom. It was called The Master Plan for Higher Education in California (I do not recommend clicking this link unless your internet connection is rock solid). This plan laid out a three-fold idea for how to make colleges in California tuition-free or as close to it as possible by a simple tax levied on property and paid for by a quite bipartisan state legislature. It was a glorious thing! And if you went to some backwoods high school or urban hellhole high school performing in the low-whatevers, no problem; the California Master Plan made sure that there was absolute mobility between Community Colleges and the two other public state college systems, the CSU’s and the UC’s. Everyone in California had access to college, equally, and no one paid for it. This Master Plan probably single-handedly aided California as not only a great place to get an education – even if sometimes that meant California was a trailblazer in nuclear weaponry -- but also, a political epicenter for free intellectual debate where people from all walks of life, regardless of the color of their skin or their economic status could come together to know each other, to dialogue, to debate, and to grow our Democracy. And of course, such a beautiful and productive and good thing could only be ended by one man: Ronald Reagan. Waging war on the UC’s, which he perceived to be hotbeds of liberal thought and protest, and the CSU’s, which harbored radically-minded math professors like Mario Savio. In 1969, Reagan started to shut down such nonsense as “tuition-free” college, shoving anti-tax rhetoric down everyone’s gullets until they looked like stuffed Christmas hams. By the 1980’s, it was in shambles. By 2015, nothing about California’s Higher Education is in any way particularly exceptional when it comes to cost-effectiveness and student savings in that it still is about the same cost as that national average of 14K per year for in-state residents at the UC’s (plus another $2,100 in “mandatory health insurance fees”) and about 9K per year at the CSU’s, which if adjusted for the cost living in California are anything but below the national average. Today, California’s higher educational infrastructure has as much derelicte utility as the Venetian canals.

But the California Master Plan experiment disclosed something vital: that small, strategic taxes can, in fact, fund large public educational systems for the benefit of the masses. And that’s where I stop, and I think, and I have rested for many years, wondering why we don’t return to such a system.

So where are we today?

Well, on the one hand, we could just say “We just need a few more Pell grants” and slap a band-aide on this bloody stump. Unfortunately, Pell grants cap out at like 5K a year, and even that’s pretty high for a Pell grant. Ask around.

Ohhh, but there is another interesting option that has recently been discussed, and it falls kind of in line with California and Nevada’s current state funding of its university systems: the lottery, although the funds here only contribute to a teeny, tiny portion of California state public education, whereas over the border in Nevada, 1/3rd of public college funds are reported to come from casinos (this figure could be high). However, this option is not quite gambling. Well not exactly. Well kind of. Maybe. We’ve all seen The Wolf of Wall Street, right? If not, it’s actually really good — there may be nothing more humorous than watching Jonah Hill attack Leonardo DiCaprio with a cat dish while on qualuudes, but I digress and will return to this in a moment. The human psyche can never seem to say “NO” to a good gamble, can it?

Now to explain something: I’m like a kid in a candy store when I think about tuition-free college for a few reasons. For one, I have a kid about to go to college. For two, I work full-time at a public university and see my students working full-time as well, often taking up to six or more years to complete their degrees before walking out with tremendous, soul-sucking, eye-reddening, crazy-making debt –- there are the classes that many professors dread teaching, the first-generation college student courses where 95% of your students come into your 8am class not yet having slept after an all-night shift doing inventory at Target, and where despite loving these students the most and knowing how well they could do, how well you ache in your bones for them to do, you realize that it is not possible for them to do the damned reading or write the damned essays you assign when they have spent their every waking moment scanning bar codes or whatever it is that they do at 4am in a Target. In fact, the more that students work, the less likely they are to complete college at all, a word which we call “attrition” which is bit of a code word for a really tidy little revenue stream for anyone handing out loans (like the U.S. Government). And it is first generation students who often most need help because remember, less often white or less wealthy, thus higher loan rates and percentages. For three, because we are savages in this country when we make a profit off of human beings who aren’t even in the work force yet but trying to simply buy their ticket into that, which is unacceptable, amoral, occasionally unthinkable, absolutely obscene, and bitterly unjust. This is not the behavior of a great nation at all; it is the behavior of financial opportunists running rough shod over their own populace simply because no one will stop them out of ignorance, malice, or simply being compromised in some way, shape, or form.

Bernie Sanders is running for President, and he has proposed a plan that my inner-gambler loves, one that may in fact revivify the American Dream for all by no longer consigning it to the predation of the Educational-Industrial Complex, as I shall henceforth and rightfully call it. Part of why I support Sanders for President is because he has a vision for how to fix this Capitalist Wet Dream that has literally knee-capped our entire economic future by indenturing students to a life-time of loans and interest rates just out of reach at the cost of the American public, the economy, intellectual debate, and public displays of shameless intellectualism (which have even been rumored to leading to Democratic voting).

BELOW is what Sanders has proposed, and it could be quite viable if the needle were threaded right. But even if it’s not all viable or completely viable, it’s simply amoral to flaccidly sit around and not try to thread this particular needle, just like how in the 1960’s, California took the same risk that Chile (Chile!) is about to take next year. It is amoral not to try, or care, or to say “Welp, it’s just too darned hard. We’re doomed to our own designs. We’re powerless to the big interests out there.” America, we’re lagging if we don’t try to get on par with at least Chile. At least Argentina. At least Malta. We’re going to start a global economic race with Bolivia if we aren’t careful here. The rich? They get richer. The poor? They go to college and they stay poor. This is some really bad acid. This is not the trip I want to be on or that you want to be on either. Breaking up the big banks won’t do everything if the electorate itself is shot through with poverty. You are right there. Thus it is a moral imperative to try to pass tuition-free college or else this country is about to blow itself to financial smithereens. Never mind all that rhetoric about how college is gratifying, good for your mind, good for political health, and all that extra stuff. Never mind the idea of education-qua-education, or education as a public good in and of itself. I just want to talk about the financial realities and racial inequities associated with not following through with this one. We can play chicken with Wall Street later. We’re already driving off the cliff. They aren’t. That gives some of us a little leverage here.

So back to Sanders’ plan:

1.) Make tuition free at public-four year universities. – this is not a radical idea. Sri Lanka is doing it. France is doing it. Norway is doing it not only for four-year degrees but graduate degrees as well. You can acquire four graduate degrees in Iceland for free, and with that long of a winter, people do.

2.) Stop the Federal Government from profiting from student loans. – this is frank profiteering given how much they are bleeding the economy dry doing this, and it is not how to run a country.

3.) Slash student loan interest rates. – literally, cut them in half. Restore them to the rate that they were at in 2006. They have been inflated because they can be inflated not because there is any sane reason why they are being inflated.

4.) Allow student loans to be refinanced. – this is a no-brainer. You can refinance a car, but you cannot refinance a student loan. D-E-F-A-U-L-T. That’s how it’s spelled.

5.) Expand the work study program for low-income students. – given that I’ve already explained that most students are already working full-time, it’s only sane and fair for this to count towards paying back student tuition. Also, perhaps Target isn’t the greatest on-the-job experience; perhaps these work study programs can shift into more meaningful paid internships that give students a chance to ease into their post-college careers rather than moving back in with mom and dad while sending out 1,000 resumes to companies where students don’t have enough experience to be hired.

6.) How are we going to pay for this? By taxing Wall Street speculators! – Win-win-win! This is a tiny dent, a paper cut, out of their earnings, they aren’t about to stop speculating, and 40 countries worldwide, like Switzerland, already have this tax built in. We don’t. We’re too nervous to stand up to Wall Street, or we think they are our best buddies, or something really weird and delusional like that. But Wall Street helped to hand us the financial crisis of 2008, we bailed them out, and all is fair in love and war. This is their time to bail this country back out .

So if you like this idea, please support it! And thanks for reading this far. I apologize for any rambling, incoherence, profanity, and poetry that snuck into this piece. I just did not want to defer this dream any longer. I want to see this flourish, not droop, on the proverbial vine. I want to see my students have a shot at what many of us grew up believing we could have, and which many of us may have achieved. America, you can so totally have your Dream back, but you need to get out there and vote for it if you are interested in reclaiming it once and for all. Who even are you? What is your name? What does your face look like? What do you dream of when you lie with your eyes closed at night? Is it this? Is this you?

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What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore--

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over--

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode? — Langston Hughes

If You Are a College Student, or Want to Encourage College Students to Vote in the Primaries, Please Remember to Find Out When and If Their State Have Open or Closed Caucuses/Primaries, When to Vote, and If They are Properly Registered TO Vote (at the Address Where They Will be When the Election Rolls Around) — also, Remember to Be Sure Everyone Has a ride, Knows What Time The Polls Close and How Important This Vote is For Your Future and For the Future of Our Country.