All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

I relate to this a lot. All of my friends were on welfare growing up. My family were poor, but my dad did work a crappy job.

I guess that's what upset me – growing up I never felt privileged at all. I remember growing up there was a kid on my street who's dad was a builder and who's mum worked in a school and I thought they were super rich because they had two cars lmao... It was just kinda annoying to be punished for my dad having a job as a postman, and arguably me having to work two jobs while trying to get a degree is why I didn't do that great at uni. If I had government support or if my parents were richer I wouldn't have been in that position.

> I still don't feel like I belong amongst "rich" people (aka middle class).

This is something I have written endless comments about here. Trying to emulate being middle class today is very hard for me. I don't know if you find this, but middle class people are so polite and so well spoken compared to what I'm used to. They're also very sensitive and have a different sense of humour to what comes naturally to me. That often makes it difficult to fit in. Also trying to talk about my personal life is nearly impossible because middle class people don't have a good understanding of drug abuse and criminality.

Super cool that you broke the cycle and are doing well though man!

(tldr - in which I conclude that we agree on the goal but disagree on “which was easy to implement”, after thinking through my own educational / economical history at some length ;))

I benefited from:

* a nearly free and (luckily) high quality school education from kindergarten through 12th grade - most schools were not that great in my time, I lucked out (with parents who strived / persisted until they got me into the right one) * a nearly free but terrible education for my bachelors in engineering in India * a largely discounted and excellent post-graduate education in the US, paid for by my work as a research assistant, which I had to compete for, and that paid the equivalent of $375/month after taxes for working 20 hours a week with a full course load from which I paid my living expenses (in the early oughts - so i was poor :)), but came with a tuition waiver.

Here’s how it has led me to approach this subject:

* I definitely agree that the ideal of nearly free education for everyone that wants it is the right one for a richer society like America to strive for, but subject to some basic rules(eg maintain non-abysmal grades that reflect at least basic effort)

* Free just means someone else is paying for it - and that has its limits. In a free / subsidized college world, major states in India had (have?) so few engineering colleges that if you got less than 99%, you couldn’t study technology - at all! Barring a stroke of luck (family moving to another state where I at least got into a pretty bad engineering college) , I would have had to study economics instead of engineering.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/delhi-uni...

* Around the time of the article above (maybe a few years before) India started allowing private colleges to charge more. This has made education a lot more expensive in India on average, although I believe a similar number of “free seats” still exist, but the number of “seats” to study popular fields has gone up by on order of magnitude, and that has enabled a LOT more people to study what they want, but incomes have grown a lot too for white collar workers. For many (not all) fields, folks are able to take a loan and pay it back.

* If, for instance, the US government paid for just “degree granting post-secondary institutions” expenses, it would instantly become the #2 budget category just below social security and above health, medicare, “income security” and defense.

* It seems that 65% of US adults over 25 do not have a bachelors degree. It seems likely many of them will not support using their tax dollars to create a new #2 budget liability - despite the “chicken-or-egg” dynamic - that if the education was free, many of them would have a degree, and might support it.