College for the Middle Class Helps the Poor. Honest!
'Tis the season of middle class entitlements, and the Room for Debate blog over at the New York Times site has a good forum up about everyone's favorite entitlement—higher education!
One great contribution, from engineer Alfonso Trujillo:
Subsidizing top-tier universities in the hope of getting more underprivileged students to attend is tantamount to subsidizing top-tier department stores in the hope that some underprivileged consumers will be clothed. In the end, both results are predictable: higher prices, higher status for those who purchase the product, and an inefficient method of helping the poor.
(Wanting to know more about Trujillo, I Googled him and found this: The BBC seems to have used him as a "hombre on the street" in a forum about Latino voters in 2004. Five years later, Trujilo has become a person who "writes often on education issues" and blogs, fittingly enough, as Hispanic Pundit. Nice work dude.)
We, too, expressed a certain amount of skepticism about the current system at Reason.tv this summer:
