Southern New Hampshire University isn’t the only institution quietly unraveling. Across the U.S. higher education landscape, millions of students are being failed not by accident—but by design.
Financial aid systems are convoluted. Mental health services are threadbare. Loan forgiveness programs are bureaucratic nightmares. Advising and support services are being outsourced or cut altogether. And as universities continue to raise tuition, slash labor costs, and celebrate "efficiency," it becomes increasingly clear: these aren’t unfortunate oversights. They are intentional. The failure is the strategy.
This is what scholars and critics call strategic inefficiency—the deliberate maintenance of confusing, slow, or inaccessible systems to limit responsibility and reduce costs. In other words, when students slip through the cracks, it's often because the cracks were engineered that way.
At every level of higher education, we see systems designed to frustrate and exhaust the very people they're supposed to help. Financial aid forms get lost. Transfer credits vanish. Borrower Defense claims sit idle for years. Campus disability services are underfunded and overwhelmed. Counseling waitlists stretch for months. The result is a student experience marked by delay, confusion, and denial—not because schools can’t do better, but because they choose not to.
This isn't just negligence. It is institutional betrayal. Colleges and universities advertise themselves as spaces of care, opportunity, and transformation, but then they abandon students when they are most vulnerable. The betrayal is especially cruel because it wears the mask of benevolence. The smiling brochures, the mission statements, the student-first slogans—all serve as cover for a business model that exploits rather than supports.
Meanwhile, respected voices in academia are stepping away from this battlefield. Steven Mintz’s recent farewell to Inside Higher Ed exemplifies this retreat. He chooses to move toward quieter explorations of literature, aesthetic experience, and cultural inquiry. While his Substack musings on Bob Dylan, T. S. Eliot, and the inner life of students may be intellectually rich, they avoid the urgent reality facing most people in higher education today. The house is on fire, and some of our most thoughtful voices are choosing to paint watercolors instead of sounding the alarm.
But who benefits from this design? Not students. Not faculty. Not families. The winners are university executives, educational tech vendors, loan servicers, and financiers. These stakeholders thrive in a system where services are minimal and revenues are maximized. It’s no coincidence that tuition climbs as instruction quality declines, or that the most visible innovation in higher ed is financial packaging, not pedagogical reform.
And above it all, the rich and powerful quietly reap the benefits. They need their soldiers, and underfunded community colleges and for-profit trade schools supply them. They need their sex workers, and the crushing weight of student debt pushes desperate students into survival economies, including cam work and transactional relationships. They need a compliant, credentialed workforce that is obedient, overworked, and drowning in debt—unable to organize, challenge authority, or dream of another way. What they do not need is a generation of radical thinkers or empowered critics. They do not want philosophy majors with housing security or history graduates with zero debt. They want streamlined, segmented, and indebted labor—perfectly positioned to serve, not to resist.
Higher education is not broken. It is operating exactly as designed, serving the interests of power while selling the illusion of mobility. The rhetoric of opportunity masks the machinery of extraction. Every unpaid internship, every unanswered financial aid ticket, every overwhelmed advisor is a cog in that machine.
Real reform won’t come from think pieces about ambiguity or nostalgia for the humanities. It will come from student and worker organizing. From lawsuits and public exposés. From demanding transparency and refusing to be treated as liabilities. From confronting the fact that this system is not failing. It is succeeding at doing precisely what it was built to do.
Until that truth is widely recognized, students will keep being misled, mismanaged, and monetized—by design.
The Higher Education Inquirer will continue to name that design and expose those who profit from it.
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