As siblings note, the "historically" I'm talking about is pre-WW2. Life in the US from 1950-2000 will one day be seen as a historical blip, not a state of bein

As siblings note, the "historically" I'm talking about is pre-WW2. Life in the US from 1950-2000 will one day be seen as a historical blip, not a state of being the US can ever return to. In that period, the US reaped massive profits from its position as sole industrial powerhouse for the first 20-30 years of that period (thanks to the destruction of the rest of the world's industrial capacity in WW2), and then as the world's bank for the following 20-30 years. It was a privileged position that--combined with the rise of the automobile and the opening up of cheap hinterlands for suburban development, without accounting for the externalities of course--enabled all sorts of leverage and quality of life for the working and middle classes, including massive subsidies for higher education. Those days are over. Labor has little leverage these days, there's little exploitable land, and the middle class is more or less gone. We could definitely decide to bring back the massive subsidies for higher ed -- after all, they're present in much of the EU. But it's not clear why one would think that heavily subsidized education would have an appreciably better effect here than it does in the EU.