Free The Time of Our Lives by Tom Brokaw

young president, John F. Kennedy, summoning us to rise to the occasion.
    Russia was the major international concern, and many of my friends plunged into engineering classes as the nation’s industrial infrastructure geared up to meet the Sputnik challenge, when the Soviets beat us into space. In my political science classes I read about missile throw weight and the larger question of how to conduct foreign policy in the nuclear age, in a seminal book by a little-known Harvard professor by the name of Henry Kissinger.
    China was Red China, a closed, mysterious, and primitive cult with hundreds of millions of people marching in lockstep to the incantations of Chairman Mao. On the map of the world China might as well have been one of those blank spaces on the cartography of ancient mariners that read “Beyond here serpents lie.”
    Japan was beginning to produce a little car called Toyota and inexpensive electronics.
    Korea was still struggling to recover from the bitter and costly war that had so deeply divided that forbidding landscape. The United States was sending military advisers to a place called Vietnam, which the French had abandoned not too many years before.
    The overwhelming majority of students in American institutions of higher learning were white and from public schools. Most, I would guess, were adequately prepared academically for what was expected of them. The graduate schools—law, business, medicine—were dominated by white males. However misrepresentative that student profile may have been of the general population, it was adequate to the needs of a country that was so dominant in the world economy.
    THE PRESENT
    First-rate educations are available at what were originally land grant colleges—and not just at the best known of them, such as the University of California–Berkeley, Cornell, or Michigan State; they’re available at the smaller state institutions as well. South Dakota State University is the archrival of the school where I finished my undergraduate studies, the University of South Dakota, but I have to give State, as we call it, full credit for turning out important scientists, business leaders, political leaders, and educators.
    However, in the Great Plains states, as the population grows older and the young move on, taxpayers’ priorities change, and money spent on higher education struggles to maintain its place in the state budget.
    The charge for future generations in rural America is to make those schools even more competitive in a global environment, and to do that, the more sparsely populated states will have to make tough decisions. In the early part of the twentieth century it was politically and practically popular to have a number of taxpayer-supported colleges scattered throughout the state, because the agricultural economy meant farm kids had to divide their lives between class and harvest time. Now it is a drain on resources to have so many schools in various locations—resources that should be more efficiently applied to fewer campuses.
    Wouldn’t the state budgets and the population be better served by consolidating administrative costs and higher education resources on a regional rather than state-by-state basis?
    The cost of higher education, the elixir of a progressive society, is rising at an alarming rate. According to the College Board, published tuition and fees at public four-year colleges rose almost 5 percent a year beyond general inflation from the 1999–2000 school year to the term that started in 2009. Private college tuition and fee costs went up a little more than 2.5 percent above inflation during the same period, but private schools started at a much higher level.
    A working- or middle-class family hoping to send a child to a public four-year college—an institution paid for with their taxes—must, on average, pony up between eight and twelve thousand dollars just to get through the gate. That does not include computers, books, travel, wardrobe,