In high school? Oh, hell no. High school education has generally declined in rigor and relevance for decades. The majority of our parents generation were adequately prepared for most entry level roles needed in the workforce when they left high school. Most high school graduates today aren’t ready for that, or even the attenuated and irrelevant educational experience of today’s mainstream college classroom and spend the first 3 semesters or so in dressed up remedial classes.
I disagree. I think what regular people, white and otherwise, got was sort of a pale imitation of those opportunities, purpose built to put them six figures in the hole and chain them to the wheel at 22.
Meanwhile, the actual opportunity ladders for regular people were knocked down and broken up.
A vital progressive movement would correctly understand that as a declining middle class standard of living. In the last 50 years the number of dual income houses has roughly doubled but their inflation adjusted income has stayed roughly the same, even while their debt increased radically and the cost of education exploded. But because progressivism is a dead ideology intellectually dominated by privileged navel gazers and bullshit artists, Democrats are genuinely confused about why they are losing the working and middle class.