Its my opinion that "universal aid to help the exceptional overcome financial barriers" does not in fact aid the exceptional. Rather it aids the mediocre and less than mediocre, while obfuscating the exceptional. A "tragedy of the commons" is a fair assessment. If you were to make college free for everyone in a real sense, you would not be helping the impoverished attain equal footing - rather you would be diminishing the intrinsic value of the degrees to begin with. In essence, "college for everyone" means "college for no one" and turns it into a mandatory decision rather than value based. This is why there is a prevalence towards higher and higher degress of education, with the Bachelor's being replaced by the Master's and Master's replaced by the Doctorates - at some level an employer needs to find distinction in a sea of CV's, when you remove one distinction you are merely shifting things upward.