>I know a lot of kids who are good basketball players who will never get
>a shot at the NBA.
>
>> 3. Tenure track positions have been dwindling over the years
>> and are currently under attack as a whole.
>
>Not everyone can be the Queen's plumber ...
These two don't fit with the rest of your examples do they? There are fewer than 500 NBA players and only one queen. There are lots of plumbers and teachers.
>> 4. In my generation there were tuition/fee waivers for grad students
>> after you finished class work. Then they were phased out. This was at
>>UCB.
>Yes, I agree: there ought to be subtle encouragement for students to ultimately leave :-)
Maybe so. But that's not why the change happened. It's part of the policy to starve education until you can drown it in a bathtub. Or, better, until it's a gated community.
Doug quoted this in the LBO newsletter recently and here it's taken from a Michael Perelman post. It couldn't be clearer:
http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2009/12/rationalization-for-educational.html
Moskowitz, Ron. 1970. "Professor Sees Peril in Education." San Francisco Chronicle (30 October).
Governor Reagan's aide Roger Freeman, who later served as President Nixon's educational policy advisor, while he was working at the time for California Governor Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign, commented on Reagan's education policy: "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That's dynamite! We have to be selective about who we allow to through higher education. If not, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people."