I’m so sick of this “nOtHiNg is fReE” retort. Yeah, no shit it isn’t. Most of us are aware of that. Like others have said, what we mean is taxes should be the means by which we pay for education. Taxes paying for education is not utopian. It exists as a means for paying for education in the USA already, K-12. I personally don’t think it is a stretch to change higher education to a tax drive model. Even in a world where it is “free” for the students there will still be people who don’t go, so it’s not like we have to collect taxes to account for all persons. College is not for everyone. Also if you try to use current college tuition as an excuse for it costing the tax payers too much, I don’t want to hear it. It is already well established that higher education costs have balloned faster that other products and services in the market and I think that is a symptom of the stupid profit models of modern universities and colleges. From personal experience at university, you get treated like a line item on there accounting sheets rather than a student and that alone is a huge factor in the enshittification of higher education.