I want you to look back at yesteryear, when a summer job could pay for a college education. I worked in warehouses taking inventory all summer — and it paid for my tuition that year. One summer I even moved a store, and it paid for my education!
What changed? Well, from 1950 through 1963, the top marginal tax rate on the last dollar of income was around 91%. It even briefly hit 92% in the early 1950s! College tuition was heavily supported by state and federal funding, but around the time of the Reagan administration, funding for colleges and education was cut back. Back then, the question was whether you could do the work — not whether you could afford tuition.
By the 1970s, the philosophical foundation of higher education began to shift. College was no longer seen primarily as a public good that strengthened democracy and society; it became a private investment in an individual’s future earnings. Higher education now cost a full year’s salary — but don’t worry, we have low-cost student loans! Until they weren’t low-cost, interest rates skyrocketed, and those loans became lifelong debt traps.
Meanwhile, conservatives introduced “vouchers,” siphoning funding away from public schools to private schools. Their goal? To reduce education to the “three Rs” — Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmetic — and limit federal oversight. By dismantling regulations and letting states set their own rules, they created a race to the bottom.
Today, the divide in education is painfully clear — a new version of “haves” and “have-nots.” Wealthy families still move smoothly through elite universities, enjoying resources, mentorship, and connections that set them up for lifelong advantage. Meanwhile, students from middle- and lower-income families face overburdened public schools, skyrocketing tuition, and limited opportunities. For many, the “three Rs” are all they get, while the full promise of higher learning slips further out of reach. Education, which was once the great equalizer, now risks becoming the newest gatekeeper, reinforcing social hierarchy instead of breaking it down.
It is the rich who are using vouchers. For families with little or no wealth, vouchers often do not cover the actual cost of private schools, leaving low- and middle-income families to cover the difference. The National Coalition for Public Education writes:
Before 2022, many private school voucher programs were sold to the public as an opportunity for low-income students to “escape” public schools. Voucher programs often limited participation to families with low incomes, and also generally required children to previously have attended public schools.This is no longer the case. Many states now operate universal voucher programs that allow virtually every student in the state—regardless of their family’s income, whether their local public school is high performing, whether they have only attended private school, or any other factor—to get a taxpayer-funded voucher to pay for tuition at private school.As a result, most recipients of private school vouchers in universal programs are wealthy families whose children never attended public schools in the first place. These wealthy families can afford to pay for private school tuition without help from taxpayers in the form of a voucher. Private school vouchers are simply a way for wealthy families to get a taxpayer-funded discount on their private school tuition. And our public schools, which educate 90% of the nation’s students, pay the price.Vouchers are the reverse Robin Hood of education: they take educational opportunities from the poor and the working class in order to give more advantages to the rich.
For Republicans, the Department of Education has long been a thorn in their side. Why? It dates back to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Right-wing conservatives argued that federal involvement in education was an invasion of states’ rights — a familiar refrain going back to the Civil War.
Now, Republicans are doing their very best to make education primarily for the rich.
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