Free Public College

If college was free, the people who were going to college despite getting tens of thousands in debt + have no job will now get to go to college with no debt + still no job. The ones that were denied an opportunity of college education will have access to it now. The keyword is access.

I'm surprised people are against it when we've had budget cuts to education for years and tuition has been rising

Having financial stability as the determining factor to getting higher education... that's got to be the most insensitive line of reasoning, something you would find in a poor country, not the richest, most spoiled, and world leading education-centric country on earth... Also, "it makes degrees in general a bit more trivial" is an even stupider reason because it fails to see education beyond an economic investment.

Poor countries, like mine, are actually spending a lot in education, poor higher education though, in order to make it more accessible, profitable and sustainable because it'll make people get jobs easier. Technical degrees take no time and nearly no money to get here; people who get them all they become is trained workers that can follow instructions and a lot of money is going into that. When it comes to university and professional degrees, or quality higher education, we have what you describe to some extent. And politicians are trying really hard to change it so that only upper middle class and above can get a professional degree... which is funny because our constitution says that higher education should be provided by the government to make it easily accessible, fair, quality and so on. Anyway, it isn't only insensitive but antidemocratic too. Education should be an option available for everyone no matter what.

The second part reminds me of Swerve's post questioning the intrinsic value of modern curricula, or school or education, or whatever... which makes me think that education has already been trivialized to an economic investment and unless one's truly interested in improving one self nothing is going to change that mindset. Not even school. It's up to each individual to decide if there's something beyond that economic investment or not... and why would they, when their whole world is telling them just that, and also it's much more simple and comfortable to believe it's something you paid for to get a job and nothing else.