This article in today's Gazette is worth a careful read. What's important is how it ties in with this recent article in The Nation, available, unfortunately, only to online subscribers.

The Nation article makes a case that America is losing its traditional lead as an economic powerhouse and innovator. Author Will Hutton points to growing debt, the trade deficit, lagging productivity and a dwindling lead in technological innovation as factor in the U.S. decline. His key culprit is the relentless focus on shareholder profits, but he also points to the growing difficulty of affording college. He writes:

"In 1979 children from the richest 25 percent of American homes were only four times more likely to go to college than those from the poorest 25 percent of homes; by 1994 they were ten times more likely. With the recent rise in tuition fees -- up by a cool 20 percent on average since 2000 -- and further erosion of private and public grants, the divide can only have deepened. ... A new aristocracy is emerging in a country whose original ambition was to prevent such a phenomenon from ever taking place. It was only in Old Europe that status, opportunity and life chances were determined by accident of birth. Twenty-five years of conservative economic and social policies are burying that American dream."

He might have added, but didn't, that the chief guarantor of social stability during a time of growing income inequality is the belief that everybody has a shot at crossing the gap. If college becomes a preserve for the elite, that guarantee expires.

But I think universities have hurt themselves, too, by trying to keep up enrollment and funding by emphasizing the economic value of a college education. Why should I spend my tax dollars to pay for some other guy's kid to get a better job than I have? Good universities have to be seen as an investment worth making for their own sake, not just as a way to get a big paycheck.

UPDATE: Related thoughts from state Sen. Jim Elliott:
"America was not the first nation to offer universal public education (Prussia was, in the early 1700s), nor the first to provide a social retirement system (Germany, in 1881, was the first, and the first to provide universal healthcare in 1883), but when we did, we made our nation greater. They were acts filled with hope and optimism, and culminated in America becoming the leader of the world. Something I doubt was ever foreseen by our nation’s founders.
"I mention these promises because I believe that my generation of Americans will be the first to abandon them. And I believe that to do so will serve our nation poorly, both economically and morally. I believe this, for instance, because too often I hear people say, “I don’t have any kids in school, so why should I pay to educate somebody else’s kids?” (Of course, the simple answer is, “someone paid for yours”.)
"I see this gloomy forecast reflected in such things as the dramatically increasing cost of tuition at public colleges, shutting out those who would benefit the most, and in the “privatization” of Social Security and Medicare, not to mention the devastating effect that the rapidly escalating U. S. Government deficit will have on our ability to pay those benefits."