"Not an Agenda to Help a Small Group of People, an Agenda to Build a Future for This Country"

"But start with this: three out of four kids in college are in public universities. A generation ago, state support for public universities was strong enough that three out of four dollars to educate those kids came from taxpayers and the family had to make up the difference for the fourth dollar. Today, that has basically reversed itself. That is, that the states are putting up, just generally across the country, about one out of four dollars and the families have got to come up with the other three out of four dollars. This matters because it is the state universities that are the backbone of access to higher education for middle class families, and I think that’s the place you have to start the conversation. I'm not going to let anybody off the hook, but I think it's the critical part of the conversation. And I say this—it's like I talk about in the book—this is personal for me. I graduated from a commuter college that cost $50 a semester in Texas."


Thomas Frank in Salon interviews Elizabeth Warren.