Read the Business Week article on "public education." The major state universities are rapidly turning into private schools. Typical tuitions are getting into the 20K range, what a bargain!
Kerry's proposal would do little to fix this... adding more money to a two tier system, community colleges for the proles and Yale for the elite.
If we do not have equality of educational opportunity, any pretense that the US is the land of opportunity is deeply wounded.
Combined with Our Dear Leader's Imperial Army, the national dedication to spreading theistic democracy around the world under the banner of American man's burden, the two tier education system looks awfully like the British Empire at its peak.
The Harvard-Amherst-Yale-MIT-Stanford-Caltech-Duke campus is America's Oxbridge. Increasingly it is also the sole privilege of the well-to-do, a situation to warm the hackles of Disraeli and the House of Lords.
Adding financial barriers to the second tier of red brick schools, just widens the gap. Soon we will only have three classes of Americans:
Those who can afford to send their kids to Dartmouth.
Those who can't.
Those lucky enough to grow up overseas where education is free.