It’s been intriguing to witness the evolution of American attitudes toward higher education during the past 75 years. By 1950, the G.I. bill approved following World War II offered a free college education to any interested veteran. It graduated millions of engineers, scientists, teachers and even more who pursued advanced degrees. The phenomenal growth of the U. S. economy during the 1950s was attributable, in a significant way, to this sudden influx of skilled and well-educated workers, just when they were needed. Perhaps most surprising was the success of students from families which had never before sent a member off to college.

My father was among those returning veterans. He had only completed three semesters at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque when his Naval ROTC unit was activated. Home in 1947, he chose to complete his chemical engineering degree at New Mexico A&M, now New Mexico State, in Las Cruces, mostly because his parents were available to assist with babysitting twin boys, born in 1945. We lived on campus in a converted Army barracks together with other G.I. families. I have dim memories of attending football games where my Dad played his French horn in the pep band. I learned decades later he traded his instrument after graduation for our first car.

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The better jobs and better pay earned by this greatest generation instilled a sense of national pride and near universal appreciation for the value of a college education. The discovery so many young men, who previously would never have considered attending college, went on to earn degrees made voters feel it only fair to hold down tuition and fees. Legislatures generously funded higher education at public institutions from junior colleges to flagship universities. Soviet Russia’s launch of its Sputnik satellite in 1957, which was little more than a soccer ball-sized sphere with a beep-beep-beep transmitter, accelerated public support for better instruction from kindergarten through high school. The national defense education act poured money into what we now call STEM curricula.

The educational panic that ensued produced several education misfires. In eighth grade, I was introduced to something called “new math’ with a focus on Boolean algebra. In less than a decade new math was scuppered in favor of traditional algebra but it did introduce us to the notion of computer architecture. Culturally, the pressure on nearly every student to consider college began to ratchet up. Though only 20% of high school graduates advanced to a college campus before Sputnik, this proportion had grew to 50% by 1970. We learned, of course, not everyone is suited for the demands of college life. Unnoticed at first was a growing fracture and increasingly unequal economic outcomes that began to separate the college graduates from those who dropped out or hadn’t attempted higher education.

A recent essay in The Atlantic by Xochitl Gonzales examines this insecurity gap in an excellent analysis, “What the Comfort Class Doesn’t Get: People with generational wealth control a society they don’t understand.” She explains, “Members of the comfort class are not necessarily wealthy… but wealth is not the marker of the comfort class. Security is.” Gonzales continues, “It’s not hard to understand the resentment of a working-class person who sees Democrats as careful to use the right pronouns and acknowledge that we live on stolen Indigenous land while happily mocking people for worrying about putting food on the table.” Neither is it difficult to understand why political support for higher education spending has plummeted from nearly 80% in 1960 to just 32% today.

The first semester of my freshman year at the University of Maryland in 1963 cost $963 — this included tuition, room and board, books and health insurance. It was possible to work my way through college. That’s no longer possible. There were no “student loan” programs available to students then. They weren’t needed. Pell grants were first authorized in 1965 but weren’t named for their legislative sponsor until 1980, only to be swiftly supplemented with student loans. When I was elected to the Colorado legislature in 1978 the state’s share of an in-state student’s expenses at the University of Colorado was about 70% of the total cost, while tuition provided the remainder. Today, this balance has been reversed, and most resident students require loans to cover 70% of their costs. Launching our graduates into a job market burdened with a $60,000 to $90,000 debt is nothing short of nuts.

The MAGAverse has launched a war on science, research and higher education that denies the importance of all three to ongoing American prosperity. As Princeton economist and former Federal Reserve Governor Alan Blinder noted recently, “The outcome of this clash over the purpose of higher education stands to shape American culture for a generation or more. If the president realizes his ambitions, many American universities — public and private, in conservative states and liberal ones — could be hollowed out.” During his 2024 campaign then-candidate Donald Trump claimed, “Colleges have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars from hardworking taxpayers … and now we are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all. We are going to have real education in America,” by reclaiming “our once great educational institutions from the radical left.”

What is radical about the Soybean Innovation Lab at the University of Illinois, which will close next month? In a conversation with Blinder, University of Illinois Chancellor Robert Jones fears, “…research on everything from insulin production to artificial intelligence (will) ultimately wither.” Harvard University’s decision to resist White House demands to seize control of its admissions, hiring and curricula policies has been joined by more than 200 colleges in fewer than 10 days. The University of Colorado and its Board of Regents have been shockingly mute despite the DOGE destruction of its academic partner at NOAA, co-located in Boulder. Todd Saliman has proven virtually invisible since his selection as president of the CU system, with the sole exception of signing off on the hiring of football coach Deion Sanders.

Our neighbors at the University of Nebraska, in a ruby red state, are sufficiently alarmed to enlist in Harvard’s crusade, while Nebraska’s attorney general was willing to partner with Colorado’s AG Phil Weiser, together with 10 other states, in challenging President Trump’s on again-off again tariff squabbles. Our premier university should make it crystal clear they can and will manage their own affairs as they see fit. Pollsters tell us Colorado voters have recently relegated college funding to the bottom of their list of spending priorities, yet I doubt they are ignorant of its economic importance. Any attempt to blackmail the world’s foremost university, founded 125 years before the American Revolution, by withholding grant money at Harvard has to strike nearly everyone as a losing proposition. Neither will the 66,000 active students and another 36,000 employees at our four CU campuses, along with 300,000 alumni living in the state, be willing to surrender their keys to DOGE from fear of threats packaged as little more than a mafia-inspired federal “protection racket.” CU’s $17 billion dollar annual economic impact and the 300 tech startups spun from the university’s research ingenuity belong to us!

Miller Hudson is a public affairs consultant and a former Colorado legislator.