I would disagree. Quite a few polls out there showing that people do not favour increasing military funding;
https://www.salon.com/2017/03/23/the-public-favors...
http://time.com/4253842/defense-spending-obama-con...
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/322975-...
This one comes closest to supporting your argument, but still only shows 37% as thinking military spending is too low, so I think it's fairly clear that the majority do not want it;
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/new-poll...
Leaving aside the various biases of such polls, more importantly those polls do not reflect the view on the hypothesis that you posited, which is that more Americans would prefer to have free tertiary education over increased military spending. What I was saying was, if you pit those two against each other, I suspect the military spending wins. Much along the lines Trump won over Hilary, despite what the polls said.
The polls don't specifically answer the question I have put forward, I could not find a poll that did, but I think the general results of these polls indicate that I am likely correct, on the balance of probabilities.
The polls I've posted say that most americans are not in favour of increased military spending, and certainly not at the expense of other departmental spending, including education.
If they don't want to cut spending on education to spend it on military instead, then I'd hazard a guess that they would prefer to spend more on education, rather than more on military, as well. I don't think that's much of a jump to take, especially with what looks like an absence of evidence against it.
Like I said, leaving aside poll biases, and the fact that they don't actually provide any answers on the hypothesis that you've set out, what you're completely ignoring is the ideological indoctrination that generations of Americans have been put through and that basically holds that heavy government investment in social services is wrong, and basically 'communism'. I mean, when the Americans are directly confronted with a stark choice on something like this, there is always a much higher proportion of them that still follows that type of thinking than you would think (and in many cases, to their own detriment). The US is a massive outlier in that respect compared to the rest of the western world.
Yes polls are fraught with issues, I agree, but that's the best that can be done with the tools I have. It's better than nothing, and when you see many poll results pointing one way, it's not unreasonable to assume a general consensus. Don't forget that despite what you say about the american election, Clinton actually got more votes than Trump.
The argument that Americans in general are against social spending does not really hold up under scrutiny.
The US has the 13th highest spend per capita on social welfare, and the highest outside of Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by...
[B]Why aren't the american public up in arms about this?[/B]
Polls show 60% of americans believe the government should provide full healthcare;
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/13/mo...
This one for Business Insider is interesting;
http://www.businessinsider.com/american-opinion-on...
A whopping 70% of people say the government spends too little on education (just 6% say they spend too much), and those stats are largely reflected over most areas - health, welfare, mass transport, the works. It seems most people polled want more spending on government services, not less.
The military question in there is admittedly closer - it's evenly split around the 30% mark between those who want to increase and those who want to decrease. But I believe from these overall results that if given the simple choice, most Americans would prefer increased spending on education, than the military. That was the hypothesis I posited, and I see nothing here that tells me it is wrong.
Aren't they? Don't they keep voting in representatives who run on anti-government spending platforms, and frequently deliver on those?