To set the time frame, this past January I turned 62. Twice in my lifetime the US government put into effect affirmative programs that launched the country on an arc the results of which was the greatest, most prolonged and most widely enjoyed national economic surge in human history.

Yes, there were recessions, especially during Dwight Eisenhower’s two terms. But it’s the protracted trajectory, the long shot, from which this commentary commences, and the proposal that, unless we seriously engage equivalent national programs, we could be witness to the very real, very tragic end of “the American dream.”

The first federal program was the World War II — broadened to include Korean War vets — GI Bill that spurred housing construction and gave millions of young men a college education they never would have been able to even dream of otherwise.

The second was the federal government’s response, after the Soviet Union beat us into space. No cost was too great a burden, no obstacle too challenging, en route to educating America’s youth, to compete with and to surpass the perceived technological superiority of our most vaunted rival.

Billions upon billions were expended in both programs, and no one (well, very few) complained of the price tags.

The GI Bill kept millions of returning vets from flooding the workforce while concomitantly providing the nation with a highly trained cadre of upwardly mobile engineers and scientists and business leaders and . . ..  Regardless those were the results, the purposes were to recognize the sacrifices borne by those who served our country militarily during periods when it most demanded from them those sacrifices, and to slow the flow into a workforce that could not absorb them fully.

The second was 100% a dedication to educating as many as we possibly could. The country’s security was clearly at stake.

And what the expenditure of those billions and billions bought the country was a thriving middle-class and an industrial powerhouse that were the envy of the world. Those who, like my own father, opted to not enter college benefited almost as much as if they had delayed starting a family, on behalf of pursuing a higher education. Because the industrial unions were strong, across the land came the establishment of the 40-hour workweek, workplace safety, paid overtime, paid vacations, fully paid-for medical and dental benefits, paid defined benefit pensions, and employment security. 

What those expended billions and billions bought was the opportunity to escape poverty! In the absence of those programs, in an industrialized society, the lower income class would have been exponentially larger and the middle-class significantly smaller. Aside from what the aggregated country got, what 150 million Americans got was a chance they never would have gained without the beneficence of heavy federal funding.

To preemptively counter calls I can already hear, that America has always been a land of opportunity for those willing to “work hard and play by the rules,” let me introduce the fact of the statistically normal bell curve. It’s visually divided into five segments called quintiles. On each end are the tails, the much less populated extremes: those who will achieve no matter what their generative circumstances and those who will not, again, no matter how lucky or how unlucky they were to begin with. Moving in from each tail are the next better populated segments. And finally, we reach the middle, where the overwhelming bulk of a normal population finds itself.

An example how it is that the tails are to be disregarded draws from my experience, listening to my father — a designer at Ford Motor in Dearborn — complain loudly and bitterly when the federal government mandated first padded dashboards, then other safety features be installed on American vehicles. “The overwhelming cause of accidents is the nut holding the steering wheel!” That overlooked two facts. One was that, given X miles driven nationally, the insurance industry data proved conclusively there were going to be Y accidents which would result in Z costs. The second was that all drivers are human, and our levels of attentiveness rise and fall in patterns not unlike radio frequencies, and nothing was ever going to change the construction of the wiring in the human brain. You can improve your odds of not being involved in an accident, but you can’t eliminate them. And no matter what you do, from a strictly probability perspective, you’re going to find yourself near the middle of the bell curve.

The very same objective probability analysis pertains to what’s going on today with the American educational system — K through 12, and college — and one’s un-spun, real-life, genuine chances of escaping poverty, if that’s where one begins, and of entering and staying in the middle-class, if that’s your starting point.

As the saying goes, “If someone is to pull himself up by his own bootstraps, one must first have boots.”  Since Ronald Reagan’s inaugural, more and more find they’ve begun without boots, or those fortunate to have had them, had retreads that were without straps, while those who began with Gucci’s today have gained the capacity to literally buy store-fulls of Gucci products, diamond-studded Rolexes, and more.

All that my father, and most of the fathers in my neighborhood, had was a high school diploma. My best friend’s father didn’t even have that. They worked in one of the rust-belt factories, assembly-lines or offices. They all bought a home in a middle-class community, new cars every three years or so, fed and clothed their families, took vacations (albeit modest), participated in golf or bowling, invested for retirements that were beyond the corporate pensions, had fully-paid medical and dental benefits, and none of the mothers worked outside the home, or had to. Life in the middle-class was good.

Those of us in the baby-boomer generation were the downstream as well as the direct beneficiaries of the two generative federal programs note above. I secured my degree from the California State University system. Had I commenced the quest in one of the area’s community colleges, except for the $10.00 enrollment fee, there was no tuition cost. As far as university tuition went, it was something around $45.00 per quarter, for as many hours as I could handle, which averaged 20. I never worked while actively in school. I’d work for six months, then take a couple quarters of classes. Jobs at wages that enabled my scheme were plentiful.

But what about today’s kids, our children, and what about theirs? Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party’s primary objectives were to get rid of the unions and to eliminate as much of any remnant of a nationally sponsored and financed social net as they were able. The “family values” cover that so many bought and are yet buying was just that: cover for what the GOP was really after. And this explains disproportionately much of why everything that benefited my parents’ and my generation is now gone. 

On February 20, C-SPAN recorded “Public Agenda’s Panel on Rising College Costs.” (http://c-span.org) The public report, available at (http://www.makingopportunityaffordable.org/pdfs/solution_papers/squeeze_play.pdf) is downloadable in pdf. If you care at all for your children and your grandchildren, and their futures, you will view the video and download the report.

Similar conclusions and supportive data are also available in Walter Benn Michaels’ The Trouble with Diversity, in which he argues the dislocation in American education today is less related to race as it is with economic status.

Essentially what they demonstrate, then explain, with solid data is that a top-level, straight-A high school student from a lower quintile, has at best a 25% likelihood of finishing a 4-year degree, while a poorly performing C-student from an upper quintile is three times as likely to finish a university undergraduate program. Additionally, the student from one of the lower quintiles, if he or she does complete the four years, accompanying the baccalaureate degree will be $40,000 of student loan debt. The debt of the student from a more affluent family will likely be one quarter as much, and that he will also get more financial aid from the institution than will his less well of associate. Furthermore, the odds are exponentially enhanced for the wealthier student that his or her grade performance will be exceptional and that graduate studies will follow.

The rich will get richer, and the poor, poorer. We’ve seen ample evidence. We also know that there is not a shred of morality to it. But here’s why it’s happening, according to the cited program and the report, and, failing any serious change in our national priorities, why it will only accelerate, and why this country cannot afford to let it happen.

It is statistically more probably the economically poorer student will be from a single-parent home, and that the parent will have neither the time, nor the financial, nor the educational history to assist the child. That child’s K-12 school system will be substantially inferior, compared to that of the more fortunate child. It will have older, outdated texts, poorer facilities and poorer, less current technological assets, and a poorer paid faculty. If there are student counselors to help guide the student to the most appropriate college or university, they will be fewer in number, more overburdened, and less qualified to render any genuinely useful assistance.

The less-advantaged student will be required to work, to pay some but not nearly all of the costs of attending college. He will have less time for study, and will have poorer grades as a consequence, in comparison with his better advantaged compatriot. It will take him longer to graduate, if he graduates at all. And whether he does or does not graduate, he will leave with an extraordinary debt burden; one that very likely will not be soon paid off. (Not an endorsement of the candidate, but a few days ago, Michelle Obama admitted that it was only three years ago when she and Barak finally paid their student loans off.)

The less advantaged student sees all of this and is much more likely to decide the investment on what is at best a bet the ends will be sufficient to justify placing the wager. Fewer and fewer jobs are available with salaries sufficiently higher that incurring a mid-five figure debt load makes sense.

As to the upper-income student receiving more student aid from the universities is explained by the competition those schools engage for the top students. It’s all in the annual U.S News and World Report school rankings. All the majors and minors want to be in their respective top 100. It’s how they recruit professors, faculty, and alumni gifts. Because they want those students with the greatest chances helping the schools succeed, they fork over more Merit Scholarships to the high school grads with the highest GPAs and (not or) the greatest chances of successfully completing the 4-year program.

Disadvantaged and less well-advantaged students do not have those statistical benefits appending to their applications.

And the spiral downward for America and the disproportionate bulk of America’s youth continue unabated.

The consequences this poses for the United States are crisis serious. That both India and China screen through fine-mesh which of their students obtain a university education, the fact of their three- and four-times population sizes puts us at great peril of being overtaken economically by dint of their superior-trained workforce. This is a real danger for our national security that we cannot, must not dismiss. 

So what stands in our way of addressing the circumstance? Look and listen to your Republican relative or associate and to what those they vote for have been and are saying: “If it takes another 100 years in Iraq,” and “God abominates a homosexual lifestyle,” and “lower taxes,” . . ..  The key, perhaps the only key, is for this country to once again decide that education of ALL our youth is in fact a national priority, a priority of the first order.