Jared Bernstein has a heartfelt lament about the priorities of the American right, and in particular the way it’s determined to slash taxes for the wealthy while slashing student aid. And he gives us this chart:

The squares show the percentage of older people with college education, the triangles the percentage of younger people; what we see is that almost every other nation is becoming more educated, but we’re not — and, of course, slipping rapidly down the rankings.

And yes, affordability is surely the biggest single reason for our slide. So of course, the GOP wants to make the affordability problem worse.

It’s hard not to see this development as tied to the growing conservative distrust of science (and presumably non-faith-based inquiry in general):

But hey, I’m a pointy-headed intellectual, so you can’t trust anything I say.