This is the approximate tuition for 4 years at Harvard (@ $40k/year), and not at all representative of the the real cost of university degrees in the US. Tuition at state schools, which are often quite good, is much less. CSU schools, where I went to school, estimate total cost of attendance at about $25k/year [0] split roughly evenly between school costs and living costs... on the high end (less if you live with family, or in a lower cost area of California). Anecdotally, I can verify these numbers.
Unless you are a very high net worth family, $160k for college tuition is overpriced.
I'm paying for UC Davis, $35,000 | $140,000 [1]
My next kid wants to go to Loyola Marymount, $63,000 | $252,000 [2]
Average student loan debt in 2005 was $15,600
Average student loan dept in 2016 was $37,000 [3]
[0] https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/how-aid-works/cost...
[1] https://www.ucdavis.edu/admissions/cost/
[2] http://financialaid.lmu.edu/generalinformation/costofattenda...
[3] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/congrats-class-of-2016-youre-the...
Groups that have had (or have had the promise of) something react differently when that something is taken away, compared to groups that never had (or were promised) it in the first place.
There were never the same promises made to black men as were made to white men. So while black men have lost that nebulous "american dream", they're much less interested in demagoguery and strongman solutions.
A portion of white men, however, might feel a sense of strong injustice at losing something that has felt almost like our birthright. Others might change their perspective and realize that the promise was never all that concrete to begin with.
The existence of the Black Panther Party and numerous similar movements for decades, says otherwise. Louis Farrakhan is an obvious recent example of a demagogue.
This is a part of my theory as well. There are several groups of Americans who have had a bad time of it over the last 10-15 years. Many of them/us fall into more than one group, whether its chronically unemployed, or paying more than $20,000/yr. for health insurance, or staring at a $160,000 tuition bill per child. Many voters feel neglected by policy makers and point the finger at lobbyists and elected officials becoming too, say, symbiotic in Washington. Trump calls them out, and his outlandish proclamations of wrongdoing and wrongheadedness resonate. When you add these groups up, it turns out to be a lot of Americans because, in my view at least, this has been going on for a long time.