If the personal responsibility extends only as far as a summer job, or even a part time job year round, then the rest of the responsibility must fall to someone else. Who would that be?
The student in future. Val's addressed the payment of tuition costs at the time of their expenditure. She's assuming some future stream of debt financing that will be assumed by the student, but that the outstanding debt at graduation won't financially incapacitate the new graduate.
This isn't a question of an adultolescent wail of "do it for me! I'm entitled! I wanna go!" Instead, it's a statement that the cost of university education should have some tenable relationship to the earning power generated by such a degree.
Let's also not artificially segregate the notion of "tuition aid recipient" and "taxpayer". The two are the same individual, at different points in the individual's tax paying life cycle.
Perhaps it would help for you to think of your own children's public (presumptive?) K-12 education as being a time of you making net withdrawals on the education portion of your tax remittances. Were you unfairly requiring other taxpayers to subsidize your family's personal decisions?
Likewise, if you need to call the police to your home to intervene for a burglary, and you engage in public prosecution of the criminal, you are withdrawing--on average--from local policing budgets. However, both services are acknowledged to be valuable to both the individual and society, which is why they're funded. What makes these individual transfers fiscally sustainable is that they operate on a pooled insurance basis. No one individual is constantly withdrawing these services ad infinitum.
