James Daulton said:
As a quick google search of Germany's system noted, many countries view higher education as more of a public than a private benefit.
Yes, and those countries are wrong. The person who benefited the most from my education, by multiple orders of magnitude, was me personally. There may be some spillover benefits to my neighbors from me having attended college, but they're trivial and don't come anywhere close to justifying having "society" pick up a large chunk of the bill.
As far as welfare programs go, I'm relatively sympathetic to programs that make college more affordable for poor families. If Obama was proposing a similar program that included tech schools and that was means-tested, I'd be more supportive.