I agreed with the original post in that in the US today, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the middle class is disappearing. This is nothing new; it's been going on, to a greater or lesser degree, since the advent of Reaganomics in the early 80s. My sister puts it succinctly: there are two classes in the US today, those with and those without stock portfolios.

Access to higher education, however, is not the worst aspect of this development. It *is* true that many opportunities for financial aid are available, most notably Clinton's "Hope" tax credit.

The negative aspect of educational financial aid is that more money is available in the form of loans than grants, and with rising tuitions and fees, a young student can easily get deeper in debt than they'll be able to handle, unless they not only complete a degree, but also get into an especially high-paying field. Salaries available to those with "ordinary" arts-and-sciences bachelors degrees aren't really enough to allow loan repayment along with normal expenses for food/rent/transporation, etc. And those who accumulate two or three years worth of college-loan debt and then fail to finish up -- they're in real financial trouble.