This feels like a big point that needs a little more research, but is easily at least a subconscious effect.
Even though a college education was lifting white men, people of color, and women out of poverty at a reliable rate, the attitude toward higher education began to shift. As white men saw that their degrees no longer put them as far ahead of women and people of color as the degrees once did, they began to question whether a diploma was worth the cost. To add insult to injury for white men, suddenly women and people of color were demanding that college courses represent their interests as well. Students began agitating for social and political change on campus. Even white students were coming home filled with new ideas about peace and equality, which caused white parents across the country to think that a degree might not be as good for their children as they had once thought. 22 The growing doubts about the value of a college education were not entirely based on resentment over the rising status of women and people of color. Starting in the 1980s, costs for education rose rapidly. Although a college education in the 1980s and ’90s was more valuable than ever, as employers increasingly insisted on college degrees, the sticker shock of the upfront cost—especially compared to what earlier generations had paid—left many feeling as though college was once again a rich man’s game. But even with the increasing outcry over tuition prices and the seemingly lackluster returns on that investment (cries that came most notably from conservative circles), college enrollment levels kept rising—especially for women and people of color. 23 Riding the wave of economic and educational dissatisfaction in white America, President Ronald Reagan’s administration began to argue that perhaps the government funding of higher education was little more than a drain on revenue to support jobless young people on the taxpayer’s dime. They were, the Reagan administration said, “tax eaters.” 24 Like Reagan’s infamous invoking of the “welfare queen,” his rhetoric on higher-education assistance fell in line with his stories about how supposedly undeserving groups were taking advantage of the hardworking American. Reagan’s disdain for higher education—especially government funding for higher education—was both political and personal in nature. In his run for governor of California in 1966, Reagan successfully campaigned in part on a pledge to “clean up” UC Berkeley. Outraged at 1960s protests against the Vietnam War, Reagan painted a picture of spoiled hippie kids learning to be ungrateful while living on taxpayer money. Once elected governor, Reagan had UC president Clark Kerr fired, violently cracked down on student protests (in 1969, the police response to one such protest—at the People’s Park in Berkeley—left one student dead and dozens of students wounded), and immediately began undermining the UC system’s programs to keep college financially attainable to any student who wished to attend. 25 Having practiced on the University of California system, Reagan, once he became president of the United States, took his educational reforms national. He passed sweeping tax and spending cuts that slashed funding for students, making college more expensive and inaccessible to those who needed it the most. Due to the racial economic disparities in America, students of color were often more likely to need the financial assistance and educational programs that the US government had previously funded and were therefore some of the most greatly impacted by Reagan’s funding cuts. But at a time when middle-and working-class white America was dissatisfied with slower economic growth and increased competition at home (from women workers and workers of color) and abroad (from the rise in foreign manufacturing), Reagan was not punished politically for cutting the feet out from under underprivileged students. He was rewarded with reelection and the highest approval ratings since Franklin Roosevelt. 26 — Mediocre, pg 97