Education, be it kindergarten or at the PhD level is never free. There is a cost. The question is at what point society continues to recognize a benefit from seeing a majority of its citizens educated to that level, regardless of ability to pay.

In the founding days of country, our economy was primarily agrarian, and a rudimentary "3R" education was sufficient. As we moved into industrial age, the 3Rs became a base requirement, with secondary now moving into the category of 'desireable by society', and as a result, public secondary schools were founded to provide a secondary education.

In the early to middle part of the twentieth century, we again shifted the focus of our economy from an industrial one to a more technological one. Again, the educational requirements for the average citizen shifted. It was in society's best interest to see a large portion of it's population educated at the university level (either in true liberal arts universities, or in technical colleges). Yet, this time, the onus was left on the individual to pay for their education. The government acted more as a facilitator, establishing guaranteed loan programs to see to it that a college education was achieable, at the expense of starting life in debt. Still, with the increased earning potential of the individual, it still made educations affordable.

I would argue that we have moved to a place where a college degree is a minimum. The whole illegal immigration trend is an orchetsrated attempt by both parties to ensure low salary pressures on unskilled labor. There's actually been movement to press salaries down at the college educated level as well. Accounting, banking, software design, engineering, medical research... many fields that were traditionally a 'slam dunk' for somebody who had the intelligence and drive to get through four years of college are now being farmed out to 3rd world educated populations, such as China and India, or they are brought here in sufficient numbers to deflate prices. The only way forward for the 'average American' is to continue to drive their own producitivty and knowledge level up... financial security in today's day and age requires a post graduate degree. If we're going to require such an advanced degree of people we have two options: 1) establish programs to help people achieve these goals 2) devolve into a stratified society, where it becomes cheaper for the sufficiently educated to just keep a majority of the population on sustenance living and farm all the labor they could have been doing over to India and China. Personally, I lean towards one.

In a representative democracy, equal access to sufficient education must be a basic right, otherwise you devolve quickly into a Platocracy.