Thread by @rortybomb

One of the smartest and most prescient things I've read about current higher education was written in 1974, by the great education editor Fred Hechinger, who predicted splitting aid by income would create a "class war over tuition." Relevant for today. /1
nytimes.com/1974/02/05/arc…

He saw taking higher-education tuition (which, I can't stress this enough, was a brand new thing in 1974) and mitigating it by providing aid to poorer families, with those with more covering themselves, would cause latter to react with vindictiveness and further retrenchment. /2

This fight quickly defined all higher ed debates. See Carter's 1978 Middle Income Student Assistance Act. Under pressure, they made it so the middle-class could draw from limited pell grants, and who could blame them? People were scrambling on tuition. /3 congress.gov/bill/95th-cong…

As @caitlinzaloom finds, a key, defining characteristics of middle-class life is an overwhelming, decades-long, anxiety on paying for college. Plans to create a gap at $100K, like Buttigieg's, expand that anxiety, conjure a political battle where one doesn't need to exist. /fin