A bit conspiratorial of me to say this but I think keeping the people dumb is beneficial for both political parties in the US and so this not a failure but the system working as intended. Also neoliberalism doing it's thing of course.

Of course there is financial benefit to having some intelligent workers for certain trades and to compete internationally but why give the working class the cognitive potential to see beyond the bourgeois bipartisan political façade when you can keep them stupid enough to blame immigrants, the illuminati and lizard people etc?

Freeman’s remarks were reported the next day in the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline “Professor Sees Peril in Education.” According to the Chronicle article, Freeman said, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].”

“If not,” Freeman continued, “we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people.” Freeman also said — taking a highly idiosyncratic perspective on the cause of fascism —“that’s what happened in Germany. I saw it happen.”

Freeman was born in 1904 in Vienna, Austria, and emigrated to the United States after the rise of Hitler. An economist who became a longtime fixture in conservative politics, he served on the White House staff during both the Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon administrations. In 1970 he was seconded from the Nixon administration to work on Reagan’s campaign.

https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reagan/