So some interesting thing about the roaring 20s, it's when Stanford started the trend of charging tuition fees, at the same time you now needed higher education than college (graduate school / medical school etc. etc.) For jobs in the sciences or health sector. Schools started making crazy money hand over fist, and there was a lurch as the government started requiring advanced education, (the kind you could only get from paying these new tuition fees,) to get jobs in the applied sciences. All higher education had overnight become unaffordable for a large portion of the populace if they didn't already live in a rich area with a public funded school system. This left talented competent people who grew up in the wrong area to be completely left out of the system.