As a nation, we can afford to provide free higher education and vocational training for all qualified students who need and want it; what we can’t afford is not to provide it. Human talent is too precious to waste. Educational opportunities should not be determined by the wealth of a student’s family or prevented by the lack of it. But the unfortunate reality is that rising tuition costs are rapidly becoming unaffordable, not just for the poor, but even for the middle class.

Our most costly mistake is our tendency to undervalue the important contributions a better-educated population could eventually provide. Training for a maximally productive life should be regarded as a full time socially valuable job that benefits everyone and therefore qualifies for public funds to whatever extent necessary. Even people who can easily afford to pay for whatever education they want, profit if we provide the same options to the rest of the population. Better-trained people almost always give back to our economy much more than they take from it. Payback comes in the form of the skills we need as a society, more diverse purchasing power, increased taxable income, and better-informed participation in the democratic process.

A well-prepared professional and technical workforce could help to lower poverty and perhaps eventually end it. Certainly, it will revitalize our middle class in one generation. These things are possible and in dangerous times like ours, anything less is unaffordable.

Too many good students just can’t pay for their training, but don’t qualify for the few currently available scholarships and grants. Many have to support their families, in addition to paying their own expenses. To meet these challenges while getting an education, poor or middle class students often work while they’re in school or incur huge debts. Most do both. Yet we know that to be maximally effective, valuable study time should be as available and stress-free as we can make it.

Many families choose to sacrifice their own financial security, or their personal pleasures and dreams, to pay for their sons’ and daughters’ futures. Such burdens should not be imposed on anyone just because they aren’t rich.

Greatly increasing the availability of scholarships and stipends will make it possible for more students to concentrate their energy on their studies. Some of the time liberated should be spent volunteering to intern in work situations appropriate to each student’s training. Credits toward their degree should be granted for this hands-on experience, in which they’ll learn about their field first-hand and have opportunities to make contacts with people in it. Also students will find out if they have real aptitude and inclination for their chosen career.

Such learn by doing opportunities should become as important a part of all professional training as they are in medicine. Arrangements for relevant internships might be made by the schools and regarded as part of their elective curriculum. Many companies might be persuaded to select and support students who will then be trained for the specific jobs they’re needed for. In this way, relevant internships might be coupled with tax-exempt corporate financial support for specific students. A liaison between students, companies in their chosen field, and the schools might be established early, to the benefit of everyone involved.

The development of new or expanding industry (and therefore new jobs) relies on the availability of people who are well trained. In turn, corporations that need skilled people for specific jobs are likely to make tax-deductible contributions to schools that provide appropriate courses of study. Those that eventually will do the hiring should therefore be included in curricular planning.

Accommodating to substantial increases in the numbers of college and graduate students generated, will probably require additional school buildings and many more teachers at city, state, and federal government expense. But the economy can also be expected to continue to expand and create many new jobs and produce more taxable income in the process.

The availability of a better-trained workforce and a larger middle class consumer market will eventually result in increased tax revenues generated by the expanding economy. The cost of shifting poor populations to a better-educated middle class would probably have to come initially from drastic decreases in our exorbitant military budgets. It would obviously be difficult to handle expanding educational opportunities and war in the Middle East at the same time.

Historically, economic expansion has generated many expensive small and large wars. These conflicts arise at least in part from growing needs to control the sources of cheaper raw materials and labor, and to open new markets. These concerns are not directly impacted by an expanding educational industry. But they do apply to the Iraq War. Such economically based wars, which have not made us safer or made most of us more prosperous and can’t. But continuing it can make expanding educational opportunities unaffordable into the immediate future.

The economic benefits of war tend to accrue to the wealthy, and more hurt than help most of the rest of the population. War has helped to produce crippling deficits and each war has increased the danger of even more dangerous wars, and thereby creates continuing need for its own expansion.

Our usual international policy of sanctions against hostile or uncooperative nations, coupled with maintaining a huge military force and excessive nuclear bomb stockpiles, has created as much security as we can expect of such policies in a dangerous world, but they also escalate the danger. Additionally, wars cause many new economic problems and exacerbate old ones.

Conversely, research conducted by a very large force of well-trained personnel can produce and develop energy alternatives that lower our dependence on foreign resources, including fossil fuels. If that labor force includes many people with good research skills, it might generate the new products and the ideas we need to control pollution and global warming, as well as stabilize our global relationships, while still further growing our economy.

Such a labor force could provide valuable economic alternatives to a world seeking better options than poverty, war, and the environmental disasters that are the predicted result of excessive use of fossil fuels. Regrettably, new directions that could work very well for the environment and the people might require adjustments that some large corporations are unwilling or unable to make. These adjustments are difficult for them because of their commitments to the huge return of doing “business as usual,” and that includes wars. But the increasing urgency of environmental threats might require that we find ways to resolve these dilemmas by other more peaceful means as they arise. These "more peaceful" ways to deal with conflict will involve a better educated and informed population.

Large increases in the number of government sponsored scholarships and stipends, although they would be less costly than war, could nevertheless probably require substantial upper income tax increase, at least at the beginning. Low corporate taxes contribute substantially to accumulating concentrations of great wealth for a relatively small number of people. Strong, very expensive military forces are then needed to protect that wealth. Long term, both a growing economy and enduring national security are better served by a productive, well-paid, highly motivated educated population than by low taxes, cheap labor, and a large powerful military that’s just too dangerous and too expensive to maintain.

Technology and outsourcing of low skilled jobs will eventually lower the need and the market for American labor. But the market for skilled well-trained personnel is likely to continue to grow. The expansion of an educated and prosperous middle class will create new consumer markets. Both increased training and expanded American consumer markets will make continuing development of new products and industrial growth at home more possible and therefore much more profitable.

PROBLEM: Well-functioning democracy in a peaceful and prosperous nation requires more effective leadership than we have and far more active, better-informed grassroots participation in politics. Many potential leaders never evolved because they had to drop out of school. Their families often depended on them for the immediate income they provided. They simply couldn’t pay for the education their career choices required. Too many people take dead-end jobs that they don’t want and don’t like. Some keep them or jobs like them because they never accumulate the money or the courage needed to start all over again. Essentially, they missed their chance to train for work they wanted very much, in which they might have been extremely productive and possibly very valuable. Our educational system just doesn’t adequately provide people with enough help when they need it.

CONCLUSION: A truly great nation is not based exclusively on the huge wealth of a few corporate entities and a powerful military, or on the continuing availability of cheap foreign labor. It depends more on the wisdom, the skills, and the active informed participation of its people. That’s why universal opportunity for higher education serves all of us, and is necessary to our progress as a great democratic nation.