“It’s a huge tax increase on income-constrained students, and the worst part of it is that it would come as a shock to thousands of grad students who aren’t expecting it,” says Kim Rueben, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. In an essay for The New York Times, Erin Rousseau, a graduate student at MIT who studies mental-health disorders, said she is paid $33,000 for up to 80 hours of weekly work as a teacher and researcher, but she pays nothing for her tuition, which is priced at $51,000. By counting that tuition as income, the GOP plan would raise her tax bill by about $9,000. Graduate school would suddenly become unaffordable for thousands of students who aren’t independently wealthy or being subsidized by rich parents, and many who are currently enrolled would be forced to drop out.

But that’s just the start. In fact, modern GOP economic policy amounts to a massive, coordinated, multilevel attack on higher education in the U.S. It starts with the elite colleges. The House bill would apply an excise tax to private universities with endowments worth more than $250,000 per full-time student. The measure is expected to raise about $2.5 billion from approximately 70 topflight universities.

Elite colleges are just the most prestigious sliver of the U.S.’s higher-education system. Despite their outsize role in national research, Harvard and Stanford, with their multibillion-dollar endowments, might not inspire much sympathy. There is a graver, yet subtler, threat to American higher education, according to Rueben. It is a domino set of public policies and their consequences, starting with Republican health-care and tax policy, continuing on to state budgets, and ending with higher tuition for students.

The first link of this causal chain is health-care spending. Republicans are obsessed with cutting federal spending on Medicaid. Doing so, Rueben points out, would result in many states spending much more on health and public welfare to make up the difference. All things equal, that means states have to raise taxes. But the House bill reduces, and the Senate bill eliminates, the deduction for state and local taxes. This would raise effective tax rates on rich residents in high-income states, making it harder for state legislators to raise taxes again, which would in turn create a dilemma for states needing more health-care dollars without higher taxes. One solution: Spend less on higher education, and force colleges to raise tuition. This wouldn’t be a new initiative so much as the continuation of an old one. Over the past 20 years, the most important contributor to higher tuition costs has been declining public spending on colleges, as cash-strapped states shift money to health care. When states pay less, students pay more.

If that chain of causation was too confusing, here’s an executive summary: By pressuring states to spend more on health care while hampering their ability to raise taxes (never an easy thing to begin with), GOP tax and budget policies could deprive public colleges of state funding, which would force American students to pay more.