That was before the technocrats seized power and forced austerity measures down the throats of Europe's poorer nations (the so-called "PIIGS"). Deficits have less to do with it than income inequality, corruption and tax evasion by the financial elites. The same story that's going on here.

I was reading an opinion piece in Al Jazeera not long ago about how one of the main differences between social democrats and neoliberals is their approach to funding public services (like education). Social democrats prefer to pay for services through taxes and reduce the costs to the user. Neoliberals say that their goals are the same, but they prefer to give a credit to the end user, which will then be spent on privately provided services.

In a perfect market system, the theory says it shouldn't matter, but of course we don't have a perfect market. In reality, when more money is available, private service providers (like universities) will raise prices. OTOH, when more students are given access to public education, private universities will tend to lower tuition to compete and provide as good of a value as the public schools. Thus every $1 provided to public universities translates to more than $1 net benefit to society. But every $1 provided for use in private universities in the form of financial aid, translates to something LESS than $1 in benefit.

It's a potent argument. Personally, I think higher education is a public good. Once upon a time, not everybody even went to primary school. Now, university education is arguably essential. We should start thinking about how we can provide it free to students through progressive taxation. To those who argue that it's too expensive because more people are going to college now, I would say that the same arguments could have been made about primary school as more people were entering school at the turn of the last century.

Quite simply, whether or not you go to college shouldn't be based on ability to pay. That said, until we gather the political will to make college free for everyone, student loan relief and forgiveness is a very crucial first step to allow struggling people to survive in the immediate term.

that takes up much of the block on Kearny and Pacific everyday.

There's a downtown campus that is a twenty minute walk at 4th and Mission, that building offers few classes and is easier to get to for most people in the city, yet offers few classes. I have to wonder what they are going to do with the new one.

A lot of this expansion into colleges and school districts seems to be about getting matching state and federal funding, and they will figure out the classes and long term budgeting after that.