Two pieces in the Chronicle of Higher Education ask a question which I've been wondering about as well--how much is the disinvestment in public higher education part of a larger disinvestment on the part of older and richer whites in a public context where their money goes to aid and advance younger people who are not white?  In other words, how much of this is due to racism?  

One piece, from late 2016, tells a story about businessmen in Arizona pleading with state legislators to fund more higher education (in a state that has among the lowest levels of public support for higher ed in America).  The response of the (presumably Republican) legislators?

the legislators waved off their requests. One reportedly said: "Those kids don’t need college."

Everyone knows who "those kids" are--or rather, what color their skin is.

The other piece is new, and talks about more recent scholarship.  The evidence seems pretty strongly associative, at least to me. (How in social-scientific terms it would prove a causative connection is a big issue--part of what won the Nobel in Economics this year is a series of studies that work in this fraught area, about figuring out the complicated space between correlation and causation in social policy.)

There's a popular and powerful narrative that a great deal of this is due to racism, operating as an independent variable. I find that account very plausible, though I know many people who are not as convinced as I am.

This is a fight, as so many things are these days, where the main alternatives are "racism" and "neoliberalism." But of course that's not necessarily an either/or.  And I think that the cause that has been mostly unspoken, until the past couple of years, is not economics, but race.  So it's worth paying attention to racial resentment now, because, to many of us, it is too easy to overlook.

Anyway, all this is well worth your attention.