OPINION: The Bill That Threw Low-Income Students Under the Bus

This op-ed by Ian Zuckerman appeared on Colorado Newsline on August 18, 2026.

I just had a difficult conversation with one of my favorite students. A brilliant, motivated and focused first-generation college student from Denver, she relies on work-study to help fund her education. As a college professor, I had planned to hire her as a research assistant using her work-study funding, both supporting my research and building her resume for law school.

In undergraduate mentoring, I’ve leaned on work-study as a way to compensate for the inequities that are built into the internship process. Wealthy students with parental support can pursue unpaid internships that build their resumes without having to worry about how to pay the rent or fill their gas tank. Low-income students often need to split their time between schoolwork and off-campus jobs to pay their bills and help their families. Work-study research and teaching assistantships can help fill the resulting resume gap.

This summer I had to tell my student that our research assistantship wasn’t happening. The work-study funds that she counts on vanished in a single line of the 22-page Colorado House Bill 26-1345 as part of a late-stage floor amendment that bypassed any public hearing. The amendment stripped state funding for Colorado Work-Study at private institutions, including Regis University, where I am a professor.

Ordinarily, a major cut to need-based CWS would require advance public notice, expert testimony, and dedicated committee debate before lawmakers. It also would have forced the legislators who favored sacrificing need-based student aid to defend their priorities in an open debate.

Instead, lawmakers opted to exploit a procedural loophole stripping these students of aid in a late-stage amendment appended without public notice or dedicated committee debate. Low-income Colorado college students at private universities found themselves stripped of the support they relied on, left to absorb the blow in silence.

The budget trade-offs faced by the state Legislature were real: Increases in Medicaid costs needed to be absorbed, and the TABOR straightjacket demanded reciprocal cuts. What’s indefensible is which group the Legislature chose to sacrifice. While throwing low-income students under the bus, the state leaders opted to protect tax loopholes that lavish millions of dollars of state funding into the pockets of the state’s richest and most privileged millionaires and billionaires, illuminating their own values in the process.

Consider the Colorado tax code loophole that allows corporations to deduct massive, multi-million-dollar salaries of their CEOs as a routine operating expense, like paying for raw materials or factory rent. This legal trick allows corporations to manipulate a tax subsidy intended to encourage corporations to direct profits back into production and, ideally, innovation. Instead, the loophole incentives corporations to do the exact opposite: rather than plow those millions back into innovation, the law rewards corporations to line the already bloated pockets of their shareholders and CEOs.

What’s worse is that they do so at public expense. A tax deduction is fiscally indistinguishable from a cash handout in which the state directly subsidizes gargantuan CEO salaries. Don’t let the technical language fool you: This is welfare for the rich, amounting to tens of millions of dollars per year.

Progressive statehouse Democrats attempted to close this notorious loophole in the same 2026 legislative season during which work-study was axed. The reform bill was relatively meek, restricting state tax deductions for executive compensation exceeding $250,000 rather than closing the loophole altogether. Roused by this threat to his favorite constituency, however, Gov. Jared Polis and his corporate allies leapt into action. Polis threatened to veto the bill, working with his allies in the Senate to kill it.

The political economist Joseph Schumpeter once wrote that “the budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies.” Polis and his centrist Democratic allies bloviate about meritocracy and equal opportunity, but when faced with a choice between state subsidies for millionaires and billionaires and support for low-income students working their way through college, they threw my student, and thousands like her, under the bus. Hundreds or possibly thousands of students across the state will not return to their studies this year because of the state Legislature’s decision to shield the wealthy and powerful at their expense.

If Colorado can afford tax breaks for wealthy corporate CEOs, it can afford work-study for students trying to work their way through college.

Next January, Colorado lawmakers must restore CWS to all Colorado colleges and universities.