In the United States of America, nearly all high schoolers are exhorted to attend a college or university. Acquiring a post-secondary education is vital to a person’s success in the modern world of advanced technology and a competitive economy. However, for many young Americans, this is simply not feasible, and many bright-minded and ambitious teens find themselves wasting away in jobs of manual labor where they are trampled under the boot of society. Meanwhile, generations past are strangled by crippling debt from when they were naive enough to take on large loans and attended classes they could not afford. But a sufficient education in the land of the free need not remain a dominant fate that is yet a delicate luxury. The federal government in this country has the means to establish the foundation of a university system functioning in some ways quite similar to and in other ways quite different from public schools at elementary and secondary levels.
This is of vital importance and is a topical issue in the election campaigns of politicians, as it remains an important talking point of what policies should be enacted in order to preserve the best interests of the American and global economy through the individuals of every generation who will comprise its body. The United States Department of Education defines its role as a responsibilty to safegaurd the best interests and academic welfare of American youths under its charge: “Although ED’s share of total education funding in the U.S. is relatively small, ED works hard to get a big bang for its taxpayer-provided bucks by targeting its funds where they can do the most good. This targeting reflects the historical development of the Federal role in education as a kind of ’emergency response system,’ a means of filling gaps in State and local support for education when critical national needs arise” (ED). This binds them to respond to a crisis wherein needs go unmet for far too many children.
Their task and goal is to ‘fill gaps’, so then their obligation is to manipulate the federal financial aid system so as to ensure the gaps are not so vast as they are now. The best way to attain the desired end result is to act on the plans that will lead us most directly to it; the College for All plan, then, is sufficient in the importance of the problem it has been called to resolve. What becomes apparent to anyone who analyzes a modern state of economic, social, and scholarly affairs with factual information at their disposal is unquestionably that the United States is today in desperate need of a resolution to the crushing economic problem that plagues each person even before the onset of their adult life and remains a monkey on their back for years, in many cases decades, after they join the workforce. The most logical and most feasible option is to establish a federal university system. While this proposal is broadly daunting and bears the burden of undeniable potential for issues, rejecting it is effectively condoning an eventual economic collapse that degrades the welfare of American interests internationally and domestically as well as bars the average citizen from the success they are promised from birth based upon a tantalizing tale of the American dream.
There are many different political agendas at play in the discussion of this weighty issue, and many of them do fall on the favorable side of adopting a federally funded university system. Some are idealistic and impractical while others are sparse in practicable ideas and still others fail to address the serious problems truly presented in this situation (source). However, amidst numeric evidence now available to the common public, the rational mind concludes it is plausible that such a system could be promptly established and appropriately developed so as to ameliorate an educational (by extension, social and economic) crisis that becomes increasingly urgent with each class to don a graduation cap. In 2013, the Center for American Progress convened a Commission on Inclusive Prosperity aimed at establishing sustainable prosperity, focusing on raising wages and expanding job growth. The commission was composed of high-level American and international policymakers, economists, business leaders, and labor representatives and was charged with developing thoughtful solutions to the economic issues of today (Bergeron & Martin 9).
Their conclusions reflected with inductive reasoning that assistance is a necessary investments. They found that the American adults who were considered the most educated and best prepared for the future are now a trickle that gradually leaves the workforce through retirement and is otherwise stagnant. These people, now about sixty-five, are the generation that “attained postsecondary education at a time when state and federal investment in postsecondary education was high and tuition for public colleges and universities was affordable for many middle-class families” (Bergeron & Martin 5). In contrast, “young adults in the United States ranked 10th in terms of their rate of postsecondary education credentials” due to the fact that the opportunities available to them were a dream to later students after states withdrew public investment in higher education, and as a result, many students from low- and middle-income families were priced out of public colleges and universities.
All in all, the Center of Progress reports, the Commission for Inclusive Prosperity declared an immediate need for substantial action- and aggressive approach to tackling this problem so that the economy need not become reliant upon masses of people who never managed a proper tertiary education, sending already-high poverty levels through the glass ceiling little else has been able to fracture. Even those who were able to attain credentials missed the mark of success, finding themselves incapable of providing for their own basic needs (Gale). While they were qualified to embark on promising careers, they were too strangled by the debts incurred in attaining that (meaningless) qualification to land on the side with greener, more prosperous grass, and in many cases were unable to even take the necessary steps because they were in desperate need of help providing for the most basic of human needs.
The reliable data of researchers reflect that poverty is cyclical and continues in college to affect those it has plagued since early childhood. Many kids consider tertiary education a chance to escape all that constrained them through their secondary education, higher education being a prominent one of the few routes to upward mobility for those wanting to break the cycle of poverty, but an extensive body of research documents barriers to college access and success for students from low-income families (. While many might consider this the case of a post-apocalyptic dystopia, it is approaching complete veracity. Reporting on events of Congressional activity in February 2018, Lauren Camera of U.S. News & World Report finds what she identifies as progress towards her suggested radical solution of federal universities. She analyzes the skills gap blocking unemployed Americans from “more than 6 million job openings” as her reasoning (Camera 1).
Millions of Americans need jobs. Millions of jobs need Americans. Yet, thanks to a gross failure of the education system, these two puzzle pieces are occluded from the connection that would eliminate pressing economic issues. She develops thoughtful conclusions from a political perspective, claiming bipartisan support for major changes, including “paring down federal aid and repayments offerings to make it less confusing, and opening those federal aid purses to job training programs and others, like apprenticeships, aimed at filling the skills gap” (Camera 2). This connects the dots she has laid out in her article, leaving Americans with an overview of complex details and a look to the future they can hope Congress will enable them to have.
