[whatshisface]

>When college becomes a right instead of an exclusive privilege for the intellectually gifted, it no longer serves the purpose of intellectual advancement.

The amount of intelligence that constitutes gifted is an accident of history and economics. You can't divide people into those who can advance human knowledge and those who cannot, because everyone has some capability to do it. Presently there appears to be a "cut line" of competence that separates intellectuals from regular people, but that only exists because of economic forces that require us to limit the number of professional intellectuals. If budgets contracted the smart-ness of the average intellectual would rise as the lower performers were cut, and if budgets were expanded the smart-ness of the average intellectual would fall as hiring dug deeper into the baseline human population.