Many college students are deeply in debt today. An average debt recently quoted on the news mentioned a figure of $22,000, and the debts of students going into preprofessional graduate programs are far higher, amounting to six-digit sums. Usurious loan company interest rates have certainly been part of the problem.

A larger and more basic part of the student-debt crisis, however, is current college tuition rates. When I attended the University of California, Berkeley in 1950, California colleges were virtually free. Further, course books were relatively inexpensive. Now, even at a state university like Berkeley, the cost per year for an undergraduate, according to the UC Office of the Registrar, is almost $5,000 a semester. For a non-resident, it’s over $16,000 — all this without counting books and living expenses. Despite coming from a poor family, I was able to attend college because in the 50s it cost almost nothing to attend.

State school fees such as Berkeley’s, if less than those of private colleges, still constitute debts that can imprison students financially for many years. A quick check of representative public universities like the University of New Mexico and the University of Michigan reveal similarly high college fees.

Higher education should be free to all young people who show an aptitude for and aspiration to advanced learning and professional or technical training. Society needs doctors, nurses, teachers, scholars, engineers, lawyers, architects, philosophers, accountants, scientists, artists, writers and other experts, but if high-debt hurdles persist, the consequences are obvious. Only those youths from wealthy or well-off families will be able to afford college, especially the quality colleges that allow students to secure significant jobs. The results are not only a class-based educational structure but the hardening of a class-structured society.

In a society as wealthy as ours, what’s happening to the money needed for something as crucial to a society’s future and well-being as financially democratic colleges? Let’s consider the kind of money available in America’s financial institutions and the military sector. Extremely wealthy investors contribute billions of dollars to hedge fund managers who transmit this money electronically around the world in seconds — huge sums of money free of taxation — to make more money for those investors. The issue implicit here is that the availability of wealth has been structured so that vast sums of money badly needed by social and public services have for generations not only been privatized but — especially recently — manipulated for privileged peoples’ gain.

Enormous sums of money that should be accessible for America’s infrastructure, schools, medical health programs and cultural facilities have been pouring into corporate, bank and private-investor coffers. The most egregious manifestation of this robbery of the public is of course the recent financial meltdown. Individuals and financial institutions have profited extraordinarily from deregulated financial dealings and are now repeating the crisis with public money used to restore their former financial status quo and CEO bonuses.

One institution using massive amounts of public money with very little critical media attention or evaluation is the Pentagon. A recent Mother Jones ongoing report entitled “Shock and Audit: The Hidden Defense Budget” (June 2009) indicates that “cost overruns for major weapons programs now total $296 billion.” The report further observes that the 2009 budget President Obama requested is $534 billion and that the 2010 Pentagon budget will be $707 billion. Those two sums would, combined, amount to $1.24 trillion — for merely two years. This figure would — one hopes — include the immense cost of some 725 American military posts spread all around the world.

As if all this isn’t enough public money seized for the military, the Pentagon has a $300 billion 20-year-plus program to build F-35 Joint Strike Fighter warplanes. Finally, as if to fantasize about more ways to spend American taxpayers’ money, the Pentagon harbors a high-placed senior officer named Michele A. Flournoy whose job is to conceive and plan for new wars. This involves, according to The New York Times (July 4, 2009) “preparing for conflicts that could tie up American forces for decades … ”

Massive sums of money are going through hedge funds. Enormous bank and corporation-taxable money is slipping into off-shore tax havens. Money supporting our two current unnecessary and illegal wars projected by Nobel-economist Joseph Stiglitz to amount to $3 trillion over a decade — all of this involves sums of money, just a moderate portion of which would allow all young people qualifying in merit to go to college free. According to journalist Adolph Reed Jr., “education is a social right, like health care … the cost of free college education is laughably low … about $80 billion to make all public institutions free … ” (Nation, June 29, 2009). That $80 billion is less than 10 percent of the current Pentagon budget.

The University of California and other state universities throughout the country in the 1950s embodied educational democracy by making merit rather than wealth the means of access to higher education. We are now betraying that ideal and reality through a rigidly class-oriented structure of college costs and access. The United States will never be an open society of opportunity for all if education is not once again democratized as it was after World War II. Money unjustly arrogated by America’s financial and military sectors must be returned to essential civilian needs, among which higher education is crucial.