When Friedman, commenting on one of Schultz's drafts, asked him the critical question of whether returns to investment in education accrued primarily to the individual or the collective, Schultz replied that such investment raised national income and was therefore in the interests of the public as a whole. The public provision of free education, moreover, enabled rich and poor to attend college, independently of family wealth; the corresponding increase in wages for poor students could be justified in the same way as progressive taxation.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 250