The Pritzker Paradox: Elite Influence and For‑Profit Exploitation in Higher Education

As the 2028 presidential race accelerates, J.B. Pritzker has emerged as a favored candidate among Democratic power brokers. His public image—competent, pragmatic, socially liberal, and reliably anti-Trump—has been carefully shaped to appeal to voters exhausted by polarization and chaos. But beneath this polished surface lies a deep and troubling contradiction that the public, and especially those affected by the student-debt crisis, cannot afford to ignore. This contradiction, the Pritzker Paradox, stems from the profound dissonance between Pritzker’s public rhetoric about educational opportunity and the private capital networks that have fueled both his family’s wealth and his political ascent.

The Pritzker family has long been intertwined with for-profit higher education and its surrounding ecosystem of lenders, service providers, and private-equity investors. These sectors have collectively played a major role in producing the contemporary student-debt crisis. While J.B. Pritzker often presents himself as a champion of equity, public investment, and educational access, his family’s financial history reveals an alignment with institutions that have extracted billions from low-income students, veterans, and Black and Latino communities through high-cost, low-value educational programs.

This is not simply a matter of past investments. It is part of an ongoing and highly influential political economy in which wealthy Democratic donors, private-equity executives, and education “reformers” operate as a unified class. Central to that class formation is The Vistria Group, a Chicago-based private-equity firm founded by Marty Nesbitt, a close friend of Barack Obama. Vistria stands at the intersection of Democratic power and education profiteering. After the collapse of scandal-ridden chains like Corinthian Colleges and ITT Tech, Vistria did not step in to dismantle the exploitative for-profit model. Instead, it strategically acquired distressed educational assets and reconstructed them into a new generation of institutions that presented themselves as “nonprofits” while maintaining tuition-driven, debt-laden business models. Former Obama administration officials moved seamlessly into Vistria and related firms, raising serious questions about regulatory capture and revolving-door governance.

Pritzker moves within this same Chicago-centered network. His political donors, associates, and advisers overlap significantly with the circles that built Vistria’s ascent. The structural relationships matter more than any single investment. A Pritzker administration would not exist outside this ecosystem; it would be shaped by it. The question, therefore, is not whether Pritzker personally signed a for-profit acquisition deal but whether the political world that produced him can be trusted to regulate higher education fairly and aggressively. The answer, based on the last twenty years of policy and practice, is no.

This is especially troubling because presidents play a decisive role in higher-education oversight. Through the Department of Education, a president can strengthen or weaken borrower protections, set standards for nonprofit conversions, determine enforcement priorities, and decide whether private-equity extraction will be challenged or quietly accommodated. Millions of borrowers harmed by predatory institutions are currently awaiting relief through borrower defense, income-driven repayment audits, and Gainful Employment rules. The integrity of these processes depends on political leadership that is independent from the private-equity interests that helped create the crisis.

Pritzker’s political style—managerial, technocratic, deeply rooted in elite networks—suggests continuity rather than challenge. The neoliberal framework he embodies does not confront structural inequalities; it manages them. It does not dismantle extractive systems; it attempts to regulate their excesses while leaving their core intact. In higher education, this approach has already failed. It is the reason the for-profit sector was allowed to expand dramatically under both Republican and Democratic administrations. It is why private-equity firms continue to control large segments of the educational marketplace through complex ownership structures and shadow nonprofits. And it is why millions of borrowers remain trapped in debts for degrees that offered little or no economic return.

The Pritzker Paradox is therefore not a story about one wealthy governor. It is a story about the consolidation of political and economic power within a narrow elite that has profited handsomely from the financialization of education while promising, cycle after cycle, to reform the very problems it helped create. Vistria exemplifies this dynamic. The Pritzker family’s history echoes it. And a Pritzker presidency would likely entrench it further.

America needs leadership willing to challenge private-equity influence in higher education, not leadership bound to it. The country needs a president who understands education as a public good, not a marketplace. For borrowers, students, and communities harmed by decades of predatory practices, the stakes could not be higher. The choice before the nation is not simply whether Pritzker is preferable to Trump. It is whether the country will continue to entrust its public institutions to elites who speak the language of equity while advancing the interests of the very networks that undermined educational opportunity in the first place.

Sources
Public reporting on Pritzker family investments in for-profit and education-related sectors; investigations by the Senate HELP Committee, GAO, and CFPB; reporting on The Vistria Group’s acquisitions and nonprofit conversions; analyses of private-equity influence in U.S. higher education; academic literature on neoliberalism and elite capture.

Renting While Educated: The Housing Crisis and the Rise of the Educated Underclass

In the United States, a college degree once promised a path to stability — a steady job, a livable wage, and a secure place to call home. Today, that promise has fractured. Millions of degree-holders and would-be graduates find themselves unable to afford even modest housing, trapped in what can only be described as the educated underclass: people with credentials but without the economic security those credentials were supposed to guarantee.

The latest data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) makes clear that the housing crisis is not just about poverty — it is about the shrinking distance between the working poor and the working-educated. The gap between wages and rent has widened so dramatically that even college-educated workers, adjunct faculty, nonprofit staff, social workers, and early-career professionals are drowning in housing costs.

The Housing Wage and the Broken Promise of Higher Ed

According to NLIHC’s Out of Reach 2025 report, a full-time worker in the U.S. needs to earn $33.63 an hour to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment and $28.17 an hour for a one-bedroom. That’s far higher than what many degree-holders earn, especially those in education, public service, healthcare support, and the nonprofit sector.

The academic workforce itself is emblematic of the problem: adjunct instructors with master’s degrees — sometimes PhDs — often earn poverty-level wages. Yet the rents they face are no different from those of skilled professionals in high-paying industries.

Higher education promised mobility; instead, it delivered a generation of renters one missed paycheck away from eviction.

An Educated Underclass Renting in Perpetuity

NLIHC’s data shows a national shortage of affordable housing: only 35 affordable and available homes exist for every 100 extremely low-income renters. While this crisis hits the lowest-income Americans hardest, it also drags down millions of educated workers who now compete for the same shrinking stock of affordable units.

This convergence — between the working poor and the working educated — reflects a structural breakdown:

• New graduates carry student debt while starting in low-wage jobs.

• Millennial and Gen Z workers face rents that have grown far faster than wages.

• Former middle-class professionals, displaced by automation and recession, re-enter the workforce at lower wages that no longer match their credentials.

• Public-sector and nonprofit workers do “mission-driven” work but cannot afford to live in the communities they serve.

Increasingly, higher education is not a safeguard against housing insecurity — it is a gateway into it.

The Spiral: Student Debt, Rent Burden, and Delayed Adulthood

The educated underclass faces a double bind:
High rents prevent saving, while student debt prevents mobility.

NLIHC data shows that renters who are cost-burdened (spending more than 30% of income on housing) or severely cost-burdened (over 50%) are forced to cut spending on essentials. For many degree-holders, this means:

• Delaying or abandoning homeownership

• Working multiple jobs to cover rent

• Moving back in with parents

• Delaying marriage and child-rearing

• Relocating constantly in search of slightly cheaper housing

This is not “adulting” — it’s economic triage.

The educated underclass is increasingly indistinguishable from the broader working class in terms of economic vulnerability, yet still burdened by expectations that their degrees should have delivered them stability.

When Housing Costs Undermine Higher Education Itself

The affordability crisis is reshaping entire higher education ecosystems:

• Students struggle to find housing close to campus, leading to long commutes, couch surfing, or dropping out.

• Graduate students and postdocs — essential academic labor — increasingly rely on food aid, emergency grants, and organizing unions just to survive.

• Colleges in high-cost cities cannot hire or retain staff because employees cannot afford to live nearby.

• Public institutions face declining enrollment because families see no payoff to degrees that lead to poverty wages and unaffordable housing.

If higher education cannot provide a pathway out of housing insecurity, its legitimacy — and its future — is in question.

Toward Real Solutions: Housing as an Educational Issue

Solving this crisis requires acknowledging a simple truth: housing policy is higher-education policy.
The educated underclass is not a natural outcome of individual failure; it is the product of a system that overcharges for education and underpays for labor while allowing rents to skyrocket.

Real solutions would include:

• Large-scale public investment in deeply affordable housing

• Expansion of rental assistance and housing vouchers

• Living-wage laws that reflect real housing costs

• Student-housing development tied to public colleges

• Forgiveness of rental debt accumulated during economic shocks

• Strengthening unions among educators, adjuncts, graduate workers, and other low-paid professionals

The promise of higher education cannot be realized while a degree-holder earning $20, $25, or even $30 an hour still cannot afford a one-bedroom apartment.

The Verdict: Housing Is the Fault Line of the New Class Divide

NLIHC’s data confirms what millions of renters already know: the U.S. housing market punishes workers regardless of education level, and higher education no longer protects against precarity. The educated underclass is not a fringe category — it is becoming the norm.

Until wages align with housing costs and the housing system is restructured to serve people rather than profit, the divide between those who can afford stability and those who cannot will continue to widen. And higher education, once marketed as the bridge to a better life, will remain yet another broken promise — one rent payment away from collapse.

Sources
National Low Income Housing Coalition, Out of Reach 2025
NLIHC Research and Policy Briefs
NLIHC Affordable Housing Data and Fact Sheets

Nonprofits and Nothingness: Follow the Money

In the world of higher education and its orbiting industries—veteran-serving nonprofits, student-debt advocacy groups, educational charities, “policy” organizations, and campus-focused foundations—there is a great deal of motion but not always much movement. Press releases bloom, awards are distributed, partnerships are announced, and donors beam from stages and annual reports. Yet too often, the people who most need substantive support—servicemembers, student-loan borrowers, contingent faculty, low-income students, and other working-class communities—receive only fragments of what the glossy brochures promise.

To understand why, you need only follow the money.

  

The Neoliberal Philanthropy Trap

Over the last four decades, American nonprofit culture has been reshaped and disciplined by neoliberal capital. So-called “impact philanthropy” and “venture philanthropy” introduced a corporate mindset: donors expect brand alignment, flattering metrics, and ideological safety. The result is a nonprofit sector that frequently mimics the institutions it claims to critique.

Organizations become risk-averse. They avoid structural analysis. They sidestep direct confrontation with the powerful. They produce white papers instead of organizing. They praise the very elite funders who limit their scope.

The most severe problems facing servicemembers and veterans—predatory for-profit schools, Pentagon-to-college corruption pipelines, GI Bill waste, chronic under-support—rarely get the oxygen they deserve. Advocacy groups that rely on neoliberal donors often focus on “financial literacy” workshops rather than taking on the multi-billion-dollar scams that actually trap servicemembers in debt.

Student-debt nonprofits, similarly, lean into “awareness campaigns” and technocratic fixes that avoid challenging lenders, profiteering institutions, or federal policy failures. Many will deliver testimonials and infographics, but few will call out the philanthropic class whose own investments are entangled in servicing and securitizing student debt.

And when it comes to helping working-class people more broadly—those navigating food insecurity, unstable housing, wage stagnation, and the crushing costs of education—the nonprofit sector too often does what neoliberal donors prefer: it performs compassion rather than redistributing power. It focuses on individual resilience rather than collective remedy.
Appearance Over Impact

This creates a strange ecosystem in which organizations are rewarded for looking productive rather than for being productive.

• Events over empowerment.
• Reports over results.
• Branding over coalition-building.
• Strategy sessions over structural change.

The donor’s name gets its plaque, its press release, its tax receipt. The nonprofit gets to survive another cycle. But the problems—deep, persistent, systemic—remain unchallenged.

Nonprofits that speak too directly about exploitation in higher education risk alienating the very people who write the checks. Some are nudged away from naming predatory universities. Others are steered toward “innovation,” “entrepreneurship,” or “student success” frameworks that sanitize the underlying issues. Many are encouraged to “partner” with the same institutions harming the people they were formed to help.

In the end, we get a sector filled with earnest staff but hollowed-out missions—organizations doing just enough to appear active but rarely enough to threaten the arrangement that keeps donors comfortable and inequality intact.

 
What Could Be—If Nonprofits Were Free

Imagine a nonprofit sector liberated from neoliberal constraints:
Organizations could openly challenge predatory colleges instead of courting them as sponsors.
Veteran-serving groups could expose fraud rather than “collaborate” with federal contractors.
Debt-advocacy groups could organize mass borrower actions rather than hold polite policy forums.
Working-class students could find allies who fight for public investment, not piecemeal philanthropy.

We could have watchdogs instead of window dressing.
We could have mobilization instead of marketing.
We could have justice instead of jargon.

But as long as donor-driven nonprofits prioritize appearance over impact, we’re left with what might be called “nonprofits and nothingness”: organizations whose glossy public-facing work obscures the emptiness underneath.

 
The Way Forward: Independent, Ground-Up Power

Real change in higher education—on affordability, accountability, labor rights, and fairness—will not come from donor-managed nonprofits. It will come from independent journalism, grassroots organizing, debt-resistance movements, student-worker coalitions, and communities willing to challenge elite decision-makers directly.

Those efforts don’t fit neatly into annual reports. They don’t flatter philanthropists. They don’t offer easy wins. But they build the kind of power that higher education, and the country, desperately needs.

Until more nonprofits break free from the neoliberal donor leash, we should continue to follow the money—and then look beyond it, to the people whose work actually changes lives.

Sources
— Eikenberry, Angela. The Nonprofit Sector in an Age of Marketization.
— Giridharadas, Anand. Winners Take All.
— Reich, Rob. Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy.

Preston Cooper Is Wrong: Enrollment Is Only One of Higher Education’s Many Crises

In a recent American Enterprise Institute article, Preston Cooper insists that the post-2010 collapse in college enrollment is “a correction, not a crisis.” According to Cooper, students are becoming more discerning consumers, abandoning low-value colleges and low-ROI degrees while flocking to higher-quality institutions and more lucrative majors. In this narrative, the system is simply shedding inefficiencies. The market is working.

But this argument is incomplete to the point of distortion. Enrollment decline is not a tidy market correction. It is a symptom of profound structural problems: affordability, inequality, political interference, labor exploitation, deteriorating academic quality, widespread cheating, and the growing reliance on “robocolleges” and automated learning platforms with questionable educational value. Cooper’s analysis ignores all of this and reduces higher education to a single variable—student choices—when the system is being reshaped by forces far larger and more corrosive than consumer preference.

Affordability remains the biggest barrier to access. Surveys repeatedly show that adults who never enrolled or who dropped out cite cost as their primary obstacle, and higher education leaders themselves acknowledge that families often do not understand the real price until they are already overwhelmed. Tuition, fees, housing, food, and transportation are enough to make college inaccessible for millions. This is not a sign of students shopping wisely; it is evidence of a system that has priced out vast segments of the population.

Cooper’s argument also ignores how structural inequalities determine who even reaches the point of decision-making. Research from multiple institutions shows that disparities in academic preparation—rooted in racial segregation, school funding inequity, socioeconomic status, and access to quality teachers—heavily influence college-going patterns. Students from under-resourced schools or low-income families do not have equal access to information, support systems, or opportunities. The idea that they are “choosing” not to attend low-value schools disregards the constraints that shape those choices.

Meanwhile, colleges themselves are destabilizing. Shrinking enrollments and stagnant public funding have produced financial crises across the sector. Even reputable institutions rely on aggressive discounting, program cuts, hiring freezes, and dependence on contingent faculty. Student support services shrink while administrative costs continue to rise. Cooper’s framing of “let the weak fail” overlooks the collateral damage: students denied needed resources, programs eliminated, and entire communities harmed when regional colleges collapse.

The crisis extends beyond finances. Students’ freedom of speech is increasingly under pressure as state legislatures, governors, and politically reactive boards restrict curricula, censor faculty, and monitor student organizations. Expression around race, inequality, gender, and geopolitical issues is under surveillance or actively punished. Whether driven by conservative politics, donor pressure, or administrative fear of controversy, the suppression of student and faculty voices undermines the university’s democratic mission.

Cooper also fails to address the degrading working conditions of adjunct faculty, who now make up the majority of instructors. Adjuncts often earn poverty-level wages, lack health insurance, and have no job security. Many teach at multiple institutions simply to survive. The system Cooper describes as “self-correcting” rests on the exploitation of the people responsible for delivering the education students are supposedly choosing.

Then there are the emerging problems he completely ignores: robocolleges and AI-driven instruction. As institutions cut costs, many outsource teaching to automated platforms, online mega-providers, and algorithmic tutoring systems. These “robocolleges” promise efficiency but often deliver shallow instruction, predatory recruitment, weakened student support, and minimal human interaction. They generate revenue, but not always learning. Cooper assumes that students are leaving low-value institutions, yet many of these automated systems are themselves low-value—and increasingly difficult to regulate or evaluate.

The rise of automated education connects directly to another crisis: academic integrity. AI-assisted cheating is now widespread across campuses. Students, overwhelmed by cost pressures, mental health struggles, large class sizes, and insufficient support, increasingly rely on AI tools to complete assignments without understanding the material. Instructors struggle to identify misconduct, institutions scramble to respond, and genuine learning becomes harder to guarantee. This is not the sign of a system “correcting” itself. It is evidence of a sector that has lost its footing and is failing to uphold educational standards.

Cooper’s argument rests on the assumption that higher education should primarily be judged by short-term labor-market returns. But higher education is more than a job-training pipeline. It is a public good that supports social mobility, civic participation, community development, scientific and cultural advancement, and democratic life. A system that suppresses speech, exploits faculty, overrelies on automated instruction, and cannot distinguish real learning from AI-generated work is not corrected. It is in crisis.

The enrollment decline is real, but it is only the surface. Beneath it lies a system plagued by affordability barriers, entrenched inequality, political intrusion, labor precarity, academic degradation, technological misuse, and rising distrust. To call this a “correction” is to look away from the deeper rot. For students, educators, and communities, it is a crisis—one that demands urgent structural reform rather than market-based optimism.

Sources
National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA). “The Biggest Barriers to Higher Education Enrollment Are Cost and Lack of Financial Aid.”
Inside Higher Ed. “Student Success Leaders Worry About Affordability, AI, and DEI.”
Brookings Institution. “Persistent Gaps in Academic Preparation Generate College Enrollment Disparities.”
Deloitte Insights. “Top Risks in Higher Education.”
Independent Institute. “Higher Education’s Triple Crisis.”
PEN America. “Tracking Campus Free Speech Legislation and Suppression.”
American Federation of Teachers / AAUP. “The Gig Academy: Precarity and the Exploitation of Adjunct Labor.”
The Century Foundation. Analyses of Online Program Management (OPM) and automated higher education risks.
Inside Higher Ed and Times Higher Education reporting on AI-driven cheating and academic integrity.

The Prestige of Partnership — and the Problem of Unclear Payoff

For more than a decade, 2U has presented itself as a premier intermediary between elite universities and the expanding global audience for online higher education. The company’s roster of partners includes some of the most recognizable names in academia, as well as a growing list of selective, mid-tier, and international institutions. On its public site, 2U highlights collaborations with universities such as Yale, Northwestern, North Carolina–Chapel Hill, Pepperdine, Maryville, and the University of Surrey. The message is unmistakable: if universities of this caliber trust 2U with their online programs, then students should as well.

These partnerships have fueled the impression that 2U-supported programs deliver high-quality, academically rigorous education backed by prestigious institutional brands. For many learners, especially working adults, international students, and career switchers, such arrangements offer a seemingly ideal blend: the name of an elite university, the flexibility of online learning, and access to fields where credentials are increasingly necessary.

Yet beneath the glossy presentation and impressive partner list, fundamental questions remain unanswered. Despite working with many of the world’s most respected institutions, 2U still does not provide sufficient data to determine the true value of the programs it supports. Even as universities lend their names and curricula, the real-world outcomes of students enrolled in 2U-powered programs remain opaque.

The core difficulty lies in the mismatch between the prestige of the institution and the limited transparency around program performance. For years, 2U issued annual “Transparency and Outcomes” reports designed to demonstrate impact and accountability across its portfolio. But the most recent report available to the public is from 2023. In the fast-moving world of online education—where competition has intensified, student expectations have shifted, and 2U itself has undergone significant financial turmoil—data that old is no longer a reliable indicator of the current state of programs.

This lack of updated reporting is especially notable given 2U’s recent trajectory. After years of rising debt and declining investor confidence, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2024. Although it has since emerged under new ownership with a streamlined balance sheet, questions persist about its future direction, the stability of its services, and whether its partnerships will endure in their current form. For universities, outsourcing key functions such as marketing, recruitment, student support, and technological infrastructure may expand enrollment and revenue, but it also raises concerns about the consistency and quality of the student experience—areas that become even more vulnerable when the partner company faces financial strain.

This structural opacity makes it nearly impossible for students, policymakers, or even universities themselves to determine whether these programs provide a meaningful return on investment. A degree or certificate bearing the name of Yale or Pepperdine may confer a level of brand recognition, but what does it signify in practice? Are students completing programs at comparable rates to on-campus peers? Are they finding jobs in their fields? Are they earning more than they would have without the credential? Are they satisfied with the instruction, advising, and support they receive? Without rigorous, current, and independently verified data, these remain open—and critical—questions.

The challenge is not solely financial or operational. It is also conceptual. The surge in online learning has created a vast gray zone between institutional brand and educational substance. While universities retain control over academic content, the underlying delivery mechanisms are increasingly intermediated by firms like 2U. Students may assume that an online master’s degree from a prestigious university carries the same weight as an on-campus equivalent, but the learning environments, student services, and community-building opportunities differ dramatically. In many cases, the online experience is shaped more by 2U’s systems and staff than by the university itself.

For prospective students, the implication is clear: a well-known university name is not a guarantee of value. For universities, the stakes are equally high. Partnering with a third-party company can expand their reach, but it can also blur the boundaries of academic identity and accountability. And for anyone tracking the direction of higher education more broadly, 2U’s situation serves as a cautionary example of how prestige can mask the absence of meaningful transparency—and how quickly the economics of online learning can shift.

Until 2U produces up-to-date, independently verifiable data about program quality and student outcomes, the value of its offerings remains an open question. The partnerships look impressive. The marketing is compelling. But the evidence is missing.

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Sources

2U Partners Page
2U 2023 Transparency and Outcomes Report
2U announcements on new degree partnerships and expansions
Washington Post coverage of 2U’s 2024 bankruptcy filing
PR Newswire statements on 2U’s financial restructuring and emergence as a private company

Higher Education and the Culture of Silence

American higher education presents itself as a beacon of truth, courage, and critical inquiry. Yet behind the marketing gloss lies a pervasive culture of silence—one that extends far beyond colleges and universities themselves. The same forces that suppress dissent on campus operate through a larger ecosystem of nonprofits, contractors, ed-tech companies, and “public-private partnerships” that orbit higher ed. Together, they form a network of institutional interests that reward secrecy, punish whistleblowers, and prioritize reputation and revenue over honesty and accountability.

At the center of this system are nondisclosure agreements. NDAs are now standard tools not only in universities, but in the foundations that support them, the think tanks that shape education policy, and the ed-tech corporations that extract profit from student data and public subsidies. Whether a case involves workplace retaliation, fraudulent recruitment, financial misconduct, algorithmic harm, or student exploitation, NDAs are used to hide patterns of abuse and protect organizations from scrutiny. What gets buried is not just information—it is the possibility of reform.

The threat of litigation is part of the same architecture. Universities, nonprofits, and ed-tech companies routinely rely on aggressive legal strategies to silence critics. Workers attempting to expose unethical contracts, deceptive marketing, or discrimination face cease-and-desist letters. Researchers who publish unflattering findings are pressured to retract or soften their conclusions. Students raising alarms about data privacy or predatory practices encounter legal intimidation disguised as “professional communication.” These organizations—flush with donor money, investor capital, or public funds—use lawsuits and threats of lawsuits as shields and weapons.

Leadership across this broader ecosystem is often weak, conflicted, or corrupt. University presidents beholden to trustees are mirrored by nonprofit executives beholden to major donors, and by ed-tech CEOs beholden to venture capital. Many leaders prioritize political favor, philanthropic relationships, and corporate growth over the public interest. They outsource accountability to law firms, PR agencies, and consulting outfits whose job is not to fix problems but to bury them.

And circulating through this system is the same cast of characters: politicians chasing influence, lawyers crafting airtight silence, consultants selling risk-mitigation strategies, bean counters manipulating data, and conmen repackaging failed ideas as “innovation.” The lines between nonprofit, corporate, and educational interests have blurred to the point of erasure. Trustees who shape campus policy sit on nonprofit boards. Ed-tech companies hire former university officials and then market themselves back to campuses. Donors direct funds through philanthropic intermediaries that simultaneously pressure institutions for access and silence.

The victims of this system—faculty, staff, gig workers in tech and nonprofit roles, graduate students, undergraduates, and even the communities surrounding campuses—are pressured to comply. They face retaliation in the form of job loss, non-renewal, demotion, academic penalties, professional blacklisting, or immigration vulnerabilities. Whistleblowers are isolated. Critics are surveilled. And when the fallout becomes too public to contain, institutions rely on payouts—quiet settlements, buyouts, and confidential agreements that allow perpetrators to move seamlessly to their next institution or company.

This culture of silence is not a collection of isolated incidents. It is a structural feature of modern higher education and the industries built around it.

But it is not unbreakable.

If you have experienced or witnessed this culture—whether in a university, a higher-ed nonprofit, or the ed-tech world—the Higher Education Inquirer invites you to share your story. You may do so publicly or anonymously. We understand the risks. We know many people cannot speak openly without jeopardizing their jobs, degrees, or health. Anonymous accounts are welcome, valued, and protected.

Your story, no matter how brief, can help illuminate the patterns that institutions spend billions to obscure. Silence is what sustains the system. Truth—shared safely and collectively—is what can dismantle it.

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Sources

• Elisabeth Rosenthal, An American Sickness

• Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul

• Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid

• Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

• Reporting from the Higher Education Inquirer on university corruption, NDAs, donor influence, and ed-tech abuses

• Investigations into nonprofit and ed-tech misconduct published in public records, court filings, and independent journalism

Kleptocracy, Militarism, Colonialism: A Counterrecruiting Call for Students and Families

The United States has long framed itself as a beacon of democracy and upward mobility, yet students stepping onto college campuses in 2025 are inheriting a system that looks less like a healthy republic and more like a sophisticated kleptocracy entwined with militarism, colonial extraction, and digital exploitation. The entanglement of higher education with these forces has deep roots, but its modern shape is especially alarming for those considering military enlistment or ROTC programs as pathways to opportunity. 

The decision to publish on December 7th is deliberate. In 1941, Americans were engaged in a clearly defined struggle against fascism, a moral fight that demanded national sacrifice. The world in 2025 is far murkier. U.S. militarism now often serves corporate profit, global influence, and the security of allied autocracies rather than clear moral or defensive imperatives.

This is an article for students, future students, and the parents who want something better for their children. It is also a call to pause and critically examine the systems asking for young people’s allegiance and labor.

Higher education has become a lucrative extraction point for political and financial elites. Universities now operate as hybrid corporations, prioritizing endowment growth, real-estate expansion, donor influence, and federal cash flows over public service or student welfare. Tuition continues to rise as administrative bloat accelerates. Private equity quietly moves into student housing, online program management, education technology, and even institutional governance. The result is a funnel: taxpayers support institutions; institutions support billionaires; students carry the debt. Meanwhile, federal and state funds flow through universities with minimal oversight, especially through research partnerships with defense contractors and weapons manufacturers. What looks like innovation is often simply public money being laundered into private hands.

For decades, the U.S. military has relied on higher education to supply officers and legitimacy. ROTC programs sit comfortably on campuses while recruiters visit high schools and community colleges with promises of financial aid, job training, and escape from economic insecurity. But the military’s pitch obscures the broader structure. The United States spends more on its military than the next several nations combined, maintaining hundreds of foreign bases and intervening across the globe. American forces are involved, directly or indirectly, in conflicts ranging from Palestine to Venezuela to Ukraine, and through support of allies such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, often supplying weapons used in devastating campaigns. This is not national defense. It is a permanent war economy, one that treats young Americans as fuel.

At the same time, Russian cybercriminal networks have infiltrated U.S. institutions, targeting critical infrastructure, education networks, and private industry. Reports show that the U.S. government has frequently failed to hold these actors accountable and, in some cases, appears to prioritize intelligence or geopolitical advantage over domestic security, allowing cybercrime to flourish while ordinary Americans bear the consequences. This environment adds another layer of risk for students and families, showing how interconnected digital vulnerabilities are with global power games and domestic exploitation.

For those who enlist hoping to fund an education, the GI Bill frequently underdelivers. For-profit colleges disproportionately target veterans, consuming their benefits with low-quality, high-cost programs. Even public institutions have learned to treat veterans as revenue streams. U.S. universities have always been entwined with colonial projects, from land-grant colleges built on seized Indigenous land to research that supported Cold War interventions and overseas resource extraction. Today these legacies persist in subtler forms. Study-abroad programs and global campuses often mirror corporate imperialism. Research partnerships with authoritarian regimes proceed when profitable. University police departments are increasingly stocked with military-grade equipment, and curricula frequently erase Indigenous, Black, and Global South perspectives unless students actively seek them out. The university presents itself as a space of liberation while quietly reaffirming colonial hierarchies, militarized enforcement of U.S. interests worldwide, and even complicity in digital threats.

For many young people, enlistment is not a choice—it is an economic survival strategy in a country that refuses to guarantee healthcare, housing, or affordable education. Yet the military’s promise of stability is fragile and often deceptive. Students and parents should understand that young Americans are being recruited for geopolitics, not opportunity. Wars in Ukraine, Palestine, and Venezuela, along with arms support to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, rarely protect ordinary citizens—they protect corporations, elites, and global influence. A person’s body and future become government property. ROTC contracts and enlistments are binding in ways that most eighteen-year-olds do not fully understand, and penalties for leaving are severe. Trauma is a predictable outcome, not an anomaly. The military’s mental health crisis, suicide rates, and disability system failures are well documented. Education benefits are conditional and often disappointing. The idea that enlistment is a reliable pathway to college has long been more marketing than truth, especially in a higher-education landscape dominated by predatory schools. Young people deserve more than being used as leverage in someone else’s empire.

A non-militarized route to opportunity requires acknowledging how much talent, energy, and potential is lost to endless war, endless debt, and the growing digital threats that go unaddressed at the highest levels. It requires demanding that federal and state governments invest in free or affordable public higher education, universal healthcare, and stronger civilian service programs rather than military pipelines. Students can resist by refusing enlistment and ROTC recruitment pitches, advocating for demilitarized campuses, supporting labor unions, student governments, and anti-war coalitions, and demanding transparency about university ties to weapons manufacturers, foreign governments, and cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Parents can resist by rejecting the false choice presented to their children between military service and crippling debt, and by supporting movements pushing for tuition reform, debt cancellation, and public investment in youth.

It is possible to build a higher-education system that serves learning rather than empire, but it will not happen unless students and families refuse to feed the machinery that exploits them. America’s kleptocracy, militarism, colonial legacies, and complicity in global digital crime are deeply embedded in universities and the workforce pipelines that flow through them. Yet young people—and the people who care about them—still hold power in their decisions. Choosing not to enlist, not to sign an ROTC contract, and not to hand over your future to systems that see you as expendable is one form of reclaiming that power. Hope is limited but not lost.

Sources

1. U.S. Department of Defense. Defense Budget Overview Fiscal Year 2025. 2024.

2. Amnesty International. “Saudi Arabia and UAE Arms Transfers and Human Rights Violations.” 2024.

3. Human Rights Watch. “Conflicts in Ukraine, Venezuela, and Palestine.” 2024.

4. FBI and CISA reports on Russian cybercrime and critical infrastructure infiltration. 2023–2025.

5. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). National Cybersecurity Annual Review. 2024.

Pete Hegseth, Authoritarian Drift, and the Shrinking Democratic World: What His Latest Rhetoric Means for Ukraine, Taiwan, Latin America—and for the Manufacturing of a New U.S. War

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s latest comments on US military strategy signal a willingness to concede strategic ground, democratic alignment, and even moral authority to China and Russia. His rhetoric is not isolationism so much as resignation, a public abdication of democratic commitments that authoritarians in Moscow and Beijing have been hoping to hear for years.

In Hegseth’s telling, defending democracy abroad is optional, alliances are burdens rather than assets, and the global contest between democratic and authoritarian systems is someone else’s problem. This shift, echoed by others within his political orbit, effectively clears a path for China and Russia to expand their influence unchecked. It is the kind of rhetorical retreat that changes geopolitical behavior long before any formal policy is announced.

For Ukraine, Hegseth’s posture is devastating. Ukraine is not only fighting for its own survival but also anchoring the principle that borders cannot be erased by force. Every time prominent American voices depict Ukraine as a “distraction” or a “European problem,” the Kremlin hears permission. It emboldens Russia’s belief that with enough pressure and enough delay, Western unity will fracture. When U.S. resolve appears uncertain, Russian aggression becomes more likely, not less.

The implications for Taiwan are even more dire. Taiwan’s security rests partly on deterrence—the sense in Beijing that an attempted invasion would trigger an unpredictable coalition response. Hegseth’s rhetoric eats away at that uncertainty. When influential figures suggest Taiwan is too distant, too complicated, or too costly to defend, they send a clear message to Beijing: Taiwan stands alone. That perception, even if strategic theater, is dangerous enough to destabilize the region. It emboldens Chinese hardliners who believe the U.S. is tired, divided, and ready to cede the Western Pacific. For Taiwanese citizens, the erosion of deterrence threatens to collapse the delicate equilibrium that has preserved their democracy for decades.

The damage is not confined to Eurasia. Latin America—long an arena of soft-power competition—is already shifting toward Chinese and Russian influence. As U.S. leaders telegraph indifference or geopolitical fatigue, Beijing and Moscow expand their economic, security, and technological footprint. Surveillance systems, infrastructure deals with opaque terms, paramilitary cooperation, and coordinated disinformation campaigns fill the vacuum Washington helped create. Countries grappling with inequality and political instability increasingly view China and Russia as stable partners—precisely because the United States appears to be backing away. Hegseth’s rhetoric accelerates this hemispheric reorientation.

China and Russia are also advancing what experts call a “4G war,” leveraging cyber operations to strike at critical infrastructure globally. Power grids, financial networks, transportation systems, and communication backbones are increasingly vulnerable to state-sponsored cyberattacks, which can be executed remotely, anonymously, and at strategic scale. These digital assaults amplify physical geopolitical pressure without conventional troop movements. In a world where the U.S. retreats rhetorically and hesitates militarily, authoritarian cyber campaigns gain a force-multiplying effect: they destabilize economies, undermine public confidence, and signal that authoritarian states can achieve strategic objectives without firing a single shot—while democracies debate whether to respond.

All of this unfolds alongside an unnerving domestic trend: the increasing normalization of deploying the U.S. military inside the United States for political and symbolic ends. The occupation of Washington, D.C., following periods of unrest—an unprecedented show of military force in the nation’s capital—has now become a reference point rather than an aberration. Calls for troops at the southern border have grown louder, more casual, and more openly political. The idea of using active-duty forces for immigration enforcement—long considered a violation of democratic norms—has seeped into mainstream discourse. These domestic deployments do not exist in isolation; they reflect a broader comfort with authoritarian tools at home, even as some political figures argue that defending democracy abroad is unnecessary. It is a worldview that diminishes democracy both outwardly and inwardly.

Compounding these geopolitical and domestic retreats is a disturbing pattern: the willingness of U.S. leaders to manufacture conflict abroad for political gain. In an era when corporate media outlets increasingly avoid stories that challenge concentrated power, The American Prospect continues to do the work journalism was meant to do. Few embody that mission more consistently than David Dayen. His Dayen on TAP newsletters have become essential reading for anyone trying to understand how political decisions intertwine with economic power and democratic fragility.

Dayen’s December 1st dispatch is a masterclass in clarity. While many newsrooms chase horse-race narratives and meme-ready outrage, Dayen focuses on something far more consequential: the construction of a new U.S. war. And disturbingly, it bears the unmistakable imprint of the media-manufactured Spanish-American War—false premises, theatrical moralizing, and elite financial interests waiting eagerly behind the curtain.

The justification being sold to the public is fentanyl trafficking, despite U.S. agencies confirming that fentanyl production in Venezuela is essentially nonexistent. The real audience is a narrow faction of right-wing Venezuelan exiles in South Florida whose political demands have long shaped Senator Marco Rubio’s foreign policy. With an administration drawn to action-based optics and largely unbothered by legality, the machinery of pretextual warfare is already in motion: lethal maritime strikes of dubious legality, deployed carrier groups, unilaterally “closed” airspace, covert operations greenlit, and the political runway being cleared for a possible land invasion.

Hovering over all of this is the unmistakable scent of patronage. The judicial approval of selling Citgo to Elliott Investment Management—Paul Singer’s hedge fund, tightly linked to Rubio’s political ecosystem—raises troubling questions about whose interests are truly being served. Dayen’s reporting suggests a war effort crafted not around national strategy, human rights, or hemispheric stability, but around satisfying a small, wealthy, politically potent constituency.

Yet perhaps the most troubling part of this moment is not only the drift toward authoritarian powers, the normalization of using the military inside the United States, or the manufacturing of new conflicts—but the near-total silence of American universities. Institutions that once prided themselves on fostering democratic discourse, civic literacy, and dissent now largely avoid discussions of foreign policy—particularly when such discussions might anger donors, trustees, or state legislatures. Faculty navigate precarious employment. Administrators fear political retribution. Students, drowning in debt and economic insecurity, have little time or institutional support to engage deeply with global issues. At the very moment when democratic norms are eroding at home and authoritarian influence is expanding abroad, the institutions charged with educating citizens have retreated.

If this trend continues, China and Russia will not simply gain ground. They will redraw the global map. The democratic world will shrink. The consequences will be felt long after the speeches, the staged outrage, and the fundraising cycles have passed. And as U.S. universities remain timid, unwilling or unable to confront collapsing democratic commitments, the vacuum deepens. In a world where silence is interpreted as acquiescence, higher education’s retreat becomes more than a missed opportunity—it becomes complicity.

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Sources

– David Dayen, Dayen on TAP, The American Prospect, December 1, 2025.
– Public statements and broadcasts by Pete Hegseth (2024–2025).
– U.S. Department of State and DoD briefings on Ukraine, Taiwan, and Venezuela.
– DEA and State Department assessments on fentanyl production in Venezuela.
– Court filings relating to the Citgo sale and Elliott Investment Management.
– Reports on PRC and Russian influence in Latin America (CSIS, Wilson Center, academic research).
– Analysis of PRC and Russian cyber operations (“4G war”) on global infrastructure (power grids, transportation, financial systems).
– Congressional statements and policy proposals on U.S. military border enforcement.
– Documentation and analysis of military deployments in Washington, D.C., 2020–2025.

HEI 2025: Over 1.4 Million Annual Page Views From Readers Across the Globe

Over 1.4 million page views from readers across the globe in 2025 reveal a simple but terrifying truth: the promise of a college degree is collapsing before our eyes. Cyber breaches, student debt spirals, for-profit exploitation, and failing oversight have combined to create a system that enriches the few while leaving millions exposed to financial, social, and personal risk. From elite endowments hoarding wealth to underfunded community colleges struggling to survive, higher education is no longer a ladder to opportunity—it is a battleground where power, profit, and policy collide. HEI’s reporting this year has lifted the veil on the forces reshaping American education, revealing a crisis that is urgent, systemic, and global.

Our most-read investigations laid bare a stark reality: a college degree no longer guarantees financial security. Graduates carry crushing debt even as wages stagnate and job markets tighten. Families struggle under the weight of rising costs, while communities confront the fallout of institutions that promise prosperity but deliver instability. The working-class recession is real, and higher education has become both a reflection and a driver of it.

Institutions themselves are showing alarming fragility. The University of Phoenix cyber breach highlighted how even the largest for-profit entities can collapse under operational mismanagement and inadequate oversight. Schools flagged for Heightened Cash Monitoring by the Department of Education illustrate a wider pattern of financial and administrative vulnerability. When governance fails, students suffer, public dollars are jeopardized, and trust in the system erodes.

Profit imperatives have reshaped the very mission of higher education. Fraudulent FAFSA claims, opaque financial practices, and political donations from for-profit entities reveal a sector increasingly beholden to investors and corporate interests. In this bifurcated system, elite universities consolidate wealth while underfunded community colleges, HBCUs, and MSIs struggle to survive. The promise of equal opportunity is under assault, replaced by a marketplace that privileges profit over learning.

HEI has also cast a global lens on these inequities. From Latin America to U.S. territories, higher education is entangled with political power, economic extraction, and social stratification. Internationally, the same forces of exploitation and inequity shape students’ futures, underscoring that the crisis is not merely domestic but systemic and global.

Yet HEI’s work does not end with diagnosis. Solutions are emerging. Federal oversight and transparency must increase, debt relief is imperative, cybersecurity and governance reforms are urgent, and reinvestment in historically underfunded institutions is critical. These measures are necessary to restore integrity and public trust in a system that has long promised more than it delivers.

As we enter 2026, HEI remains committed to relentless investigation and fearless reporting. We will continue to expose failures, hold power accountable, and illuminate both the inequities and the opportunities within higher education. Our 1.4 million page views from readers across the globe in 2025 reflect the urgent need for this work. Higher education is at a crossroads. Informed scrutiny, persistent inquiry, and uncompromising reporting are the only way forward. Hope is limited but not lost. With scrutiny, advocacy, and decisive action, higher education can reclaim its promise as a public good rather than a profit-driven system that leaves millions behind.

Sources and References

Higher Education Inquirer, various articles, 2025. U.S. Department of Education Heightened Cash Monitoring lists, 2025. University of Phoenix cyber breach reports, 2025. Investigations into FAFSA fraud and for-profit college practices, HEI 2025. Global higher education inequality studies, 2025.

The Higher Education Inquirer is requesting all emails from the US Department of Education regarding selling off the student loan portfolio.

 

The Educated Underclass and the Enshittification of Job Platforms

The Higher Education Inquirer has long examined how digital labor platforms shape the trajectories of college graduates. For years, Indeed, LinkedIn, and an expanding universe of niche job boards promised to democratize opportunity and connect graduates to meaningful work. Today, they increasingly represent something else: evidence of a broken system in which educated workers—often carrying significant debt—are funneled into precarious labor markets mediated by platforms whose incentives are misaligned with student success. What Cory Doctorow has described as enshittification is no longer an exception but the operating model.

Indeed’s trajectory is the clearest expression of this decline. The site began as a transparent aggregator designed to make employment searchable and accessible. Over time, it has transformed into a pay-to-play environment in which sponsored listings overshadow organic results, duplicates and recycled ads clutter searches, and misleading postings reduce trust. Users on both sides—job seekers and employers—report diminishing value even as the company extracts more revenue from each.

LinkedIn has followed a parallel arc. Once positioned as a professional network that expanded access and visibility, it now privileges those who can pay for premium placement or “boosted” visibility. The platform’s feed is increasingly dominated by engagement-optimized content, sales pitches, and algorithmic noise. Genuine networking—the discovery of mentors, colleagues, and opportunities—has been pushed to the background by monetized features and incessant upselling. Graduates hoping to build relationships now find themselves navigating a digital marketplace that treats their careers as data points to be monetized.

Niche job boards, often touted as more curated alternatives, have also succumbed to similar dynamics. As private equity money flows into the sector, these boards increasingly rely on subscription fees, visibility boosts, lead-generation schemes, and paywalls that frustrate both applicants and employers. The promise of specialization is overshadowed by the same structural pressures: monetization first, user value second.

For graduates—especially those from working-class backgrounds—the consequences are profound. They enter the labor market carrying debt, often underemployed, and reliant on platforms that promise opportunity while quietly undermining it. The search for stable employment becomes a cycle of misdirection: applying to ghost jobs, fighting algorithmic opacity, and competing in markets distorted by platform-driven gatekeeping. Instead of delivering upward mobility, digital labor platforms frequently reproduce inequality, masking structural failures in higher education and the U.S. economy behind glossy interfaces and “skills gap” rhetoric.

Employers, meanwhile, face their own frustrations: rising costs for visibility, declining applicant quality driven by algorithmic prioritization of click-throughs rather than fit, and a sense that recruitment has shifted from a relational process to a transactional one. The platforms that were supposed to streamline hiring have introduced new layers of friction, opacity, and expense.

The deeper issue is systemic. Digital labor markets now operate on extractive logic: workers and employers are commodities to be converted into revenue streams. For the educated underclass—graduates who followed the prescribed path but find the rewards collapsing beneath them—these platforms do not solve structural inequality. They obscure it.

Higher education institutions must acknowledge this reality. Career centers cannot simply direct students to LinkedIn or Indeed and hope for the best. Instead, institutions should cultivate critical digital literacy, teaching students how to understand the incentives and limitations of platform-mediated job markets. They must invest in direct employer engagement, build relationships that bypass intermediaries, and challenge the outdated narrative that degrees alone guarantee upward mobility. The task is not merely to help students navigate broken systems but to recognize how these systems perpetuate precarity.

The enshittification of job platforms is not a marginal story. It is a window into the lived experience of millions of graduates—and an indictment of an economy that relies on debt-financed education feeding into precarious labor. The Higher Education Inquirer will continue to track these developments, expose the structural forces behind them, and advocate for approaches that put students and workers before platform profits.

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Sources

Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (Verso, 2023).
Cory Doctorow, “Tiktok’s Enshittification,” Pluralistic (2023).
David Streitfeld, “The Cost of Posting a Job on Indeed Keeps Rising,” New York Times, 2022.
Emily Stewart, “LinkedIn Has a Spam Problem,” Vox, 2023.
Suresh Naidu and Eric Posner, Labor Market Power (2024).
Annie Lowrey, “The College Debt Crisis Is Now a Labor Crisis,” The Atlantic, 2022.
Philipp Staab, Digital Capitalism (Polity, 2019).
Alex Hern, “Job Platforms and the Algorithmic Trap,” The Guardian, 2021.
Higher Education Inquirer archives on digital labor markets, platform capitalism, and the educated underclass.

Cybercrime, Hypocrisy, and the Geopolitics of Blame: Why Russia Isn’t Always the Enemy

In the summer of 2025, the CLOP hacking group—operating from Russia—exploited weaknesses at the University of Phoenix, exposing sensitive data on thousands of students and staff. The breach was devastating, yet Russia was not officially condemned as an adversary.

The contrast with U.S. policy toward countries like Venezuela is striking. Venezuela faces crippling sanctions, economic isolation, and constant political pressure under the banner of protecting democracy and human rights. Meanwhile, Russian-based cybercriminals are allowed to inflict real harm on U.S. institutions with little official pushback. The reason, officials say, is a lack of direct evidence tying these attacks to the Russian state. But the discrepancy reveals a deeper hypocrisy: punitive measures are applied selectively, often based on geopolitical convenience rather than consistent principles.

CLOP-style attacks exploit vulnerabilities in U.S. institutions. Universities, especially those operating on outdated IT systems and under private equity pressures, are frequent targets. Students—many already burdened by debt and systemic inequities—bear the brunt when personal data is exposed. Yet the broader conversation rarely extends to foreign actors who take advantage of these weaknesses or to the structural failures within U.S. education.

Venezuela’s citizens suffer sanctions and economic hardship, while Russian cybercriminals operate from the safety of a country that tolerates them, so long as domestic interests remain untouched. This double standard undermines the credibility of U.S. claims to principled leadership and exposes the uneven moral framework guiding foreign policy.

Higher education becomes a battleground in this selective application of power. Cyberattacks, fraud, and systemic negligence converge to threaten students and faculty, revealing the real victims of international hypocrisy. Protecting U.S. institutions requires acknowledging both the foreign actors who exploit weaknesses and the domestic policies and practices that leave them vulnerable.

The CLOP breach is more than a single incident—it is a reflection of a system that punishes some nations for internal crises while tolerating damage inflicted by others on critical domestic infrastructure. Until U.S. policy addresses both sides of this equation, the cost will continue to fall on the most vulnerable: the students, staff, and faculty caught in the crossfire.

Sources: U.S. Department of Education reports; investigative journalism on CLOP and Russian cybercrime; analyses of U.S.-Venezuela sanctions and policy. 

Slop School Is Here: The Right-Wing Takeover of K-12 Education (Second Thought Staging)

University of Phoenix, Oracle, and the Russian Cybercrime Crisis That Should Never Have Been Allowed to Happen

The University of Phoenix breach is more than another entry in the long list of attacks on higher education. It is the clearest evidence yet of how private equity, aging enterprise software, and institutional neglect have converged to create a catastrophic cybersecurity landscape across American colleges and universities. What happened in the summer of 2025 was not an unavoidable act of foreign aggression. It was the culmination of years of cost-cutting, inadequate oversight, and a misplaced faith in legacy vendors that no longer control their own risks.

The story begins with the Russian-speaking Clop cyber-extortion group, one of the most sophisticated data-theft organizations operating today. In early August, Clop quietly began exploiting a previously unknown vulnerability in Oracle’s E-Business Suite, a platform widely used for payroll, procurement, student employment, vendor relations, and financial aid administration. Oracle’s EBS system, decades old and deeply embedded across higher education, was never designed for modern threat environments. As soon as Clop identified the flaw—later assigned CVE-2025-61882—the group launched a coordinated campaign that compromised dozens of major institutions before Oracle even acknowledged the problem.

Among the most heavily affected institutions was the University of Phoenix. Attackers gained access to administrative systems and exfiltrated highly sensitive data: names, Social Security numbers, bank accounts, routing numbers, vendor records, and financial-aid related information belonging to students, faculty, staff, and contractors. The breach took place in August, but Phoenix did not disclose the incident until November 21, and only after Clop publicly listed the university on its extortion site. Even after forced disclosure, Phoenix offered only vague assurances about “unauthorized access” and refused to provide concrete numbers or a full accounting of what had been stolen.

Phoenix was not alone. Harvard University confirmed that Clop had stolen more than a terabyte of data from its Oracle systems. Dartmouth College acknowledged that personal and financial information for more than a thousand individuals had been accessed, though the total is almost certainly much higher. At the University of Pennsylvania, administrators said only that unauthorized access had occurred, declining to detail the scale. What links these incidents is not prestige, geography, or mission. It is dependency on Oracle’s aging administrative software and a sector-wide failure to adapt to a threat environment dominated by globally coordinated cybercrime operations.

But Phoenix stands apart from its peers because Phoenix, Apollo Global Management, and The Vistria Group should have known better. This institution has long operated at a scale more comparable to a financial-services company than a school. It handles vast volumes of sensitive data connected to federal student aid, identity verification, private loans, tuition reimbursement programs, and employer partnerships. A university with this profile should have been treating cybersecurity as a core institutional function, not an afterthought.

Apollo Global Management, which owned Phoenix during a period of enrollment decline and regulatory exposure, was fully aware of the vulnerabilities associated with online enrollment, financial-aid processing, and aging ERP infrastructure. Apollo’s business model is built on risk analysis and mitigation, yet it consistently underinvested in sustainable IT modernization while focusing on financial engineering and cost extraction. Phoenix emerged from Apollo’s ownership with significant technical debt and a compliance culture centered on limiting institutional liability rather than strengthening institutional defenses.

When The Vistria Group, through Phoenix Education Partners, acquired the university, it promised a new era of stability and digital transformation. Instead, it delivered a familiar private-equity formula: leaner operations, staff reductions, increased reliance on contractors, and deferred infrastructure investment. All of this occurred as ransomware groups such as Clop, LockBit, BlackCat, and Vice Society were escalating attacks on universities. The MOVEit crisis, the Accellion breach, and dozens of ransomware incidents had already demonstrated that higher education was an increasingly profitable target. Vistria had every signal necessary to understand the stakes, yet Phoenix entered the summer of 2025 with outdated Oracle systems, slow patch deployment, inadequate monitoring, and minimal segmentation between financial-aid and general administrative systems.

The breach was not a surprise. It was an inevitability. A university holding the sensitive financial and identity data of hundreds of thousands of current and former students, staff, and vendors cannot protect itself with minimal investment and outdated architecture. When Clop exploited Oracle’s flaw, Phoenix lacked the tools to detect lateral movement early, the expertise to identify unusual activity quickly, and the governance structure to respond decisively. The institution did not discover the breach on its own; it reacted only when a criminal syndicate announced its presence to the world.

This incident exposes a broader truth about higher education infrastructure in the United States. Universities have grown dependent on enterprise vendors whose systems are increasingly brittle and whose security models no longer meet contemporary requirements. Meanwhile, private-equity owners emphasize cost containment and short-term returns over long-term stability. The University of Phoenix breach is the result of those conditions converging with a global cybercrime ecosystem that is more organized, better funded, and more technically agile than the institutions it targets.

Students, faculty, staff, and vendors will bear the consequences for years. Many will face identity theft, fraudulent activity, and the lingering fear that their most sensitive information is circulating indefinitely on criminal marketplaces. Phoenix, like other affected institutions, will offer credit monitoring and generic assurances. But the public disclosures arrived too late, and the underlying failures were years in the making.

Phoenix should have known better.
Apollo Global Management should have known better.
The Vistria Group should have known better.
And American higher education should finally recognize that it can no longer treat cybersecurity as a line-item expense. It is now one of the central pillars of institutional survival.

Sources
Bleeping Computer
Security Affairs
The Register
CPO Magazine
The Record
University of Phoenix breach notifications
Clop leak site monitoring data

The Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity: Rethinking—and Challenging—America’s Economic Narrative

In a political moment defined by economic confusion, precarity, and widening inequality, the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) has positioned itself as one of the most forceful critics of how the U.S. government measures economic well-being. Founded in 2019 by Eugene “Gene” Ludwig—banking regulator, financier, and longtime critic of official labor statistics—the institute argues that the traditional indicators used by policymakers, economists, and the media no longer reflect the lived experience of most working and middle-class Americans.

LISEP’s core mission is straightforward: to replace or supplement conventional economic indicators with metrics that measure whether ordinary people can live decent, stable, self-supporting lives. In place of headline unemployment levels that minimize underemployment and wage suppression, LISEP developed the True Rate of Unemployment (TRU). Instead of accepting the Consumer Price Index as an indicator of affordability, it created the True Living Cost (TLC). And to evaluate whether households can achieve a baseline level of dignity, the institute introduced its Minimal Quality of Life Index (MQL).

Taken together, these indicators paint a sobering picture. LISEP’s most recent TRU data suggests that nearly one in four Americans—far more than the official unemployment rate—remains functionally unemployed or trapped in low-wage, unstable work. Its analysis of living costs shows that basic necessities such as housing, childcare, food, healthcare, and digital access are rising at rates that far outpace reported inflation. Its income distribution research finds that the bottom 60% of households fall severely short of the after-tax income required to meet even minimal quality-of-life thresholds.

In a time when both parties often claim economic success—pointing to record stock markets, low headline unemployment, and steady GDP growth—LISEP argues that these triumphal narratives obscure the steady erosion of working-class security.

But LISEP’s work does more than diagnose hardship; it challenges the legitimacy of the economic story that the United States tells about itself. That is precisely why its metrics have garnered attention—and controversy.
Methodological Innovations and the Pushback They Attract

Economists, policymakers, labor advocates, and academics have responded to LISEP’s work with a mixture of praise and skepticism. Some see LISEP as filling a critical gap—offering metrics that better capture the realities of gig workers, part-time workers, workers with unpredictable hours, and families priced out of life’s essentials. Others argue that LISEP’s approach risks injecting subjectivity into economic measurement and complicating long-established statistical frameworks.

One major point of debate centers on LISEP’s definition of unemployment. Traditional unemployment statistics only count individuals actively seeking work. LISEP’s TRU metric, by contrast, includes the underemployed, part-time workers who want full-time jobs, and discouraged workers who have given up looking. Critics argue that combining these groups creates a metric that resembles a policy argument more than a neutral measurement. Supporters counter that ignoring these groups produces an artificially rosy portrait of economic health and undervalues persistent structural inequality.

LISEP’s True Living Cost and Minimal Quality of Life indices face a different critique: they define “necessities” more broadly than some economists are comfortable with. Including internet access, basic technology, early childhood education, and modern transportation standards is, according to LISEP, essential to functioning in the 21st-century economy. Critics contend that because these standards go beyond subsistence, the metrics risk shifting from measuring need to measuring aspiration. The institute responds that “subsistence” is not an acceptable measure of human dignity in a wealthy nation.

Other scholars raise questions about transparency. While LISEP publishes summaries and explanations of its methodologies, some economists argue that its approaches would require broader independent replication and peer review to become standard tools. Yet others note that the Bureau of Labor Statistics itself has long used imperfect methods that were never designed to measure well-being—only labor market participation.

Where supporters and skeptics agree is on one point: LISEP has forced a deeply needed conversation about what economic dignity means in the United States today.
Why LISEP Matters for Higher Education and Public Policy

For institutions of higher learning—especially those that produce the economists, policymakers, and journalists who shape public discourse—LISEP’s challenge to economic orthodoxy is a call to scrutiny and humility. Universities continue to rely on traditional metrics in research, teaching, and policy labs, even when these metrics fail to capture the economic and social pressures facing students and their families.

Students at community colleges, regional publics, and underfunded institutions live the realities LISEP describes: multiple jobs, unpredictable hours, rising food and housing insecurity, and persistent underemployment after graduation. Yet their struggles are too often minimized by conventional indicators that suggest a thriving labor market.

If academia takes LISEP’s work seriously, it could shift research priorities, reshape debates on student debt, influence regional economic development strategies, guide labor-market forecasting, and elevate the experiences of the most economically vulnerable students.

For policymakers, LISEP’s metrics offer a different foundation for assessing whether economic growth is reaching ordinary people. They provide tools for evaluating whether wages are livable, whether childcare is accessible, whether housing is affordable, and whether the economy produces stable, family-supporting jobs. If adopted or even partially embraced, LISEP’s indicators could inform legislation on minimum wage, labor protections, social services, tax reform, cost-of-living adjustments, and more.

The institute’s broader message is simple: the United States cannot address inequality if it continues to celebrate misleading statistics.
A New Economic Narrative

Whether LISEP becomes a permanent influence or a dissenting voice will depend on how policymakers, journalists, and academic economists respond. If its metrics remain on the margins, they will serve as a moral indictment of traditional measures that ignore the reality of economic insecurity. If they are adopted, they could trigger a profound reevaluation of American economic policy—one grounded not in aggregate success but in shared prosperity.

LISEP insists that a healthy economy is not one that grows on paper but one that allows ordinary people to live decently. That premise alone places the institute on the front lines of the battle over how the United States understands its own economic health.
Sources



Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, “True Rate of Unemployment (TRU),” 2025, lisep.org.
Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, “True Living Cost (TLC),” 2025, lisep.org.
Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, “Shared Economic Prosperity (SEP) Measure,” 2025, lisep.org.
PR Newswire, “Majority of Americans Can’t Achieve a Minimal Quality of Life, According to New Ludwig Institute Research,” May 12, 2025.
Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, “Wage Inequality Grows With Low-Income Workers Losing Ground,” Press Release, April 16, 2025.