The Cost of School

 Noticed in Adventures in the Atomic Age: From Watts to Washington by Glenn Seaborg:

Given my family's finances, the nearby University of California at Los Angeles was my only possible choice because it was tuition free and I could commute from home.

This was 1929, and he had the challenge of coming up with the money for other expenses, but after a summer spent in the quality control department of a Firestone tire plant

I'd saved just enough over the summer to afford the forty dollars needed for incidental fees and to buy my books at UCLA.

In the course of his career, Seaborg was one of the discoverers of elements including plutonium, californium, berkelium, and (not his choice for name) seaborgium, and of the isotopes iodine 131 and cobalt 60, both heavily used since in medicine. For the discovery of plutonium, he shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He led an important part of the Manhattan Project and served some years as chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, leaving to become chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

I would say that the University of California system more than got back its investment in Seaborg's tuition-free undergraduate education, and in the scholarships and fellowship that carried him through his bachelor's to his doctorate.

Tuition and fees for UCLA now run to about $14 thousand for California residents. In Seaborg's undergraduate days, one could earn the $40 for fees and books in about three weeks of apricot picking. Assuming a $15/hour minimum wage, the tuition and fees are nearer twenty-four weeks' work.

But certainly some matters are managed better now. When Seaborg attended David Starr Jordan High School in Watts,

 I saw firsthand the insidious irrationality of race and the restraints it placed on my black friends. When it came time for them to find a job, their own option seemed to be "railroading," as they called it.

(I assume that railroading meant manual labor for the Southern Pacific Railroad.) And women weren't much found in the laboratories, or really much employed by universities outside of secretarial roles.