In the US, students protesting the Vietnam war directly led to the end of free public education in California. Generally, the wealthy seem to fear an “overeducated” working class that is overly conscious of both world affairs and their own class position. Charging high tuition (and granting legacy admission, etc.) guarantee that the wealthy make up the majority of those who end up going though college.
I really like immutable distros, and am currently using NixOS. I feel like despite still being relatively obscure, NixOS is a bit of an outlier since it has more packages than any other distro and is (so far) the only distro I’ve used that has never broken. There is a steep learning curve, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for non programmers, but it is something truly different than all mainstream Linux distros while being extremely reliable.