Reagan attacked free tuition as a moral and fiscal failure before he was president

Evidence

Friedman in particular had a direct influence on this trajectory of higher education funding in America. Reagan, a vocal opponent of the Berkeley student movement, invoked Friedman’s version of human capital theory to attack the funding structures of the University of California system as Governor of California in the late 1960s. Free tuition, he believed, had destroyed the incentive structures of private family responsibility and in the process stoked the anti-authoritarianism of the student movement. Only a return to private, parental investment in the education of children, he thought, could resolve the fiscal and moral problems associated with public education. A few short days after his swearing in as governor of the state of California in 1967, Reagan seized the opportunity to announce a 10 percent cut to the annual budget of the UC and state colleges and, more controversially, put forward a plan to introduce tuition fees as a way of covering the shortfall. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 255

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader austerity/higher-education defunding literature — Reagan’s governorship prefigures the national education overhaul. — connects to: The 1986 tax reform killed student loan interest deductibility under an anti-subsidy argument — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax…, 321

Broader Connections

• The 1986 tax reform killed student loan interest deductibility under an anti-subsidy argument #expands (0.75) — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 321