"Heavily subsidized" is relative. The people being forced to pay a hefty bill every month aren't comforted by being reminded that the bill could be higher. You

"Heavily subsidized" is relative. The people being forced to pay a hefty bill every month aren't comforted by being reminded that the bill could be higher. You're conflating college and education. That is exactly the kind of elitism that the rural poor interpret as a personal attack. I know you don't mean it as such, and I know most people who say similar things as you're saying similarly don't mean it that way, but that's how it's received.* When I talk about empathy, that is what I mean - understanding others' perspectives and feelings. And no, "free" college does not help the working class, though it may help their children if they're lucky enough to benefit from the limited upward mobility in this country. There is a baseline number of jobs in the trades and service industries that need to be filled, they don't require a college degree, and for the people going into those jobs, getting a "free" college degree will only incur opportunity costs and additional taxes. * In understanding this anger, it's useful to understand the effect of childhood poverty on stress response. "By age five, the lower a child’s socioeconomic status, on the average, the (a) higher the basal glucocorticoid levels and/ or the more reactive the glucocorticoid stress response, (b) the thinner the frontal cortex and the lower its metabolism, and (c) the poorer the frontal function concerning working memory, emotion regulation, impulse control, and executive decision making; moreover, to achieve equivalent frontal regulation, lower-SES kids must activate more frontal cortex than do higher-SES kids." Robert Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst 195 (Kindle edition: Penguin Press 2017) (citing, inter alia, S. J. Lupien et al., Effects of Stress Throughout the Lifespan on the Brain, Behaviour and Cognition, 10 Nat'l Rev. Neuroscience 434 (2009); D. Hackman et al., Socioeconomic Status and the Brain: Mechanistic Insights from Human and Animal Research, 11 Nat'l Rev. Neuroscience 651 (2010); M. Sheridan et al., The Impact of Social Disparity on Prefrontal Function in Childhood, 7 Pub. Libr. Sci. One e35744 (2012); I. Liberzon et al., Childhood Poverty Alters Emotional Regulation in Adulthood, 10 Soc. Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience 1596 (2015)).