One more thought... one place we could learn from, however, is Scandinavian view on education - merit-based access to any level of it. In a nutshell, if you are

One more thought... one place we could learn from, however, is Scandinavian view on education - merit-based access to any level of it. In a nutshell, if you are good enough, society should give you a chance to get all of the education you need to realize your full potential and benefit the society, as well as yourself. But then again, a system like this has to be entirely merit-based. At the scale of US (300+ million people), policing a system like that and ensuring fairness will be a disaster and it will likely fail. Throw in special-interests and affirmative action, and you have a mess no better and maybe worse than what exists today.