Can you imagine? Tuition at the University of California school system was little more than $100 a year. State schools like San Jose State and Fresno State, were just a little more. The explosion of junion colleges (not the ersatz community colleges of today) were affordable, and were often the preferred means of beginning the route to a BA. Thus the fifties generation was the most highly educated group of young people in American history.
The difference between then and now is that those students cherished their opportunity to advance. Today's kids think higher education is a right, as is the right not to fail. It is a significant difference.
Oh, and by the way, a "student loan" was unheard of, and "working one's way through college" was so common it was taken for granted.
I've seen the footage of Woodstock and the rest of the 60s. It wasn't just high school kids who were smoking the pot and living in communes, etc. There were plenty of people in their 20s and 30s too, which places them in high school in the 1950s. I've recently read books by Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson about hippie life and the Hell's Angels in the mid-1960s. I think 1965 was the key year for both books. The main characters in these books were already in their late 20s and early 30s. That means that they were products of the 1950s. That is, they were in high school during the 1950s.
I'm not trying to make an agenda with those facts. Just wanted to rebut your statement that I have a poor grasp on history.
Sam Adams, you yourself have a poor grasp of history! The fifties were not a time of pot-smoking, acid-dropping, and hip-hopping. It was the first generation in American history whose students, born of working parents, could study and grasp the opportunity that higher education offered.
Can you imagine? Tuition at the University of California school system was little more than $100 a year. State schools like San Jose State and Fresno State, were just a little more. The explosion of junion colleges (not the ersatz community colleges of today) were affordable, and were often the preferred means of beginning the route to a BA. Thus the fifties generation was the most highly educated group of young people in American history.
The difference between then and now is that those students cherished their opportunity to advance. Today's kids think higher education is a right, as is the right not to fail. It is a significant difference.
Oh, and by the way, a "student loan" was unheard of, and "working one's way through college" was so common it was taken for granted.
PK - HS1952, BA1956, MA1967, PhD1971 with no Student Loans, no debts, some scholarships. Grew up "poor". Retired young. The '50s strikes again!