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

Penn Graduate Students (GET-UP) Authorize Strike as Contract Talks Falter

Graduate student workers at Penn have overwhelmingly authorized a strike — a decisive move in their fight for fair pay, stronger benefits, and comprehensive protections. The vote reflects not only deep frustration with stalled negotiations but also the growing momentum of graduate-worker organizing nationwide.

A year of bargaining — and growing frustration

Since winning union recognition in May 2024, GET‑UP has spent over a year negotiating with Penn administrators on their first collective-bargaining agreement. Despite 35 bargaining sessions and tentative agreements on several non-economic issues, key demands — especially around compensation, benefits, and protections for international students — remain unmet.

Many observers see the strike authorization as long overdue. “After repeated delays and insulting offers, this was the only way to signal our seriousness,” said a member of the bargaining committee. Support for the strike among graduate workers is overwhelmingly strong, reflecting a shared determination to secure livable wages and protections commensurate with the vital labor they provide.

Strike authorization: a powerful tool

From Nov. 18–20, GET‑UP conducted a secret-ballot vote open to roughly 3,400 eligible graduate employees. About two-thirds voted, and 92% of votes cast authorized a strike, giving the union discretion to halt academic work at a moment’s notice.

Striking graduate workers, many of whom serve as teaching or research assistants, would withhold all academic labor — including teaching, grading, and research — until a contract with acceptable terms is reached. Penn has drafted “continuity plans” for instruction in the event of a strike, which union organizers have criticized as strikebreaking.

Demands: beyond a stipend increase

GET‑UP’s contract demands include:

• A living wage for graduate workers

• Expanded benefits: health, vision, dental, dependent coverage

• Childcare support and retirement contributions

• Protections for international and immigrant students

• Strong anti-discrimination, harassment, and inclusive-pronoun / gender-neutral restroom protections

While Penn has agreed to some non-economic protections, many critical provisions remain unresolved. The stakes are high: graduate workers form the backbone of research and teaching at the university, yet many struggle to survive on modest stipends.

Context: a national wave of UAW wins

Penn’s graduate workers are part of a broader wave of successful organizing by the United Auto Workers (UAW) and allied graduate unions. Recent years have seen UAW-affiliated graduate-worker locals achieve significant victories at institutions including Cornell, Columbia, Harvard, Northwestern, and across the University of California (UC) system.

At UC, a massive systemwide strike in 2022–2023 involving tens of thousands of Graduate Student Researchers (GSRs) and Academic Student Employees (ASEs) secured three-year contracts with major gains:

• Wage increases of 55–80% over prior levels, establishing a livable baseline salary.

• Expanded health and dependent coverage, childcare subsidies, paid family leave, and fee remission.

• Stronger protections against harassment, improved disability accommodations, and support for international student workers.

• Consolidation of bargaining units across ASEs and GSRs, strengthening long-term collective power.

These gains demonstrate that even large, resource-rich institutions can be compelled to recognize graduate labor as essential, and to provide fair compensation and protections. They also show that coordinated, determined action — including strike authorization — can yield significant, lasting change.

What’s next

With strike authorization in hand, GET‑UP holds a powerful bargaining tool. While a strike remains a last resort, the overwhelming support among members signals that the union is prepared to act decisively to secure a fair contract. The UC precedent, along with wins at other UAW graduate-worker locals, suggests that Penn could follow the same path, translating student-worker momentum into meaningful, tangible improvements.

The outcome could have major implications not just for Penn, but for graduate-worker organizing across the country — reinforcing that organized graduate labor is increasingly a central force in higher education.

---

Sources

• Penn graduate workers union authorizes strike vote

• Ongoing contract negotiations at Penn

• AAUP-Penn denounces university “strikebreaking” memo

• Bargaining updates for graduate workers

• UC graduate workers end strike with historic three-year contract

• Liberation News: UC Academic Workers Win Historic Contracts

Higher Education in Retreat (Gary Roth)

 [Editor's note: This article first appeared in the Brooklyn Rail.  We thank the Brooklyn Rail for allowing us to repost this.]

For decades, the top-tier colleges and universities—often represented by Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, but including a few dozen other private and public institutions as well—have reshaped themselves to accommodate the rapidly-changing demographic profile of the United States.1 From all appearances, the universities were also in harmony with the sensibilities and preferences of the country’s leading citizens. Key moments, like the sanctioning of gay marriage that found support from wide-spread sectors of the upper class, seemed to solidify the drift towards a diverse and tolerant social order, one that resonated not only domestically but internationally as well.

The future evolution of civil society was, in this way of thinking, firmly and finally in hand. Bitter acrimony might characterize the political world or single-issue items like abortion, but actual developments outweighed the leftover pockets of resistance, which in any case were thought to be localized in less significant parts of the country and the world and could at best only slow the inevitable. How hard people pushed for change would ultimately determine the future.

This somnambulistic mode of thought pervaded the university world and also wide swaths of the liberal public. It helps explain the ease with which parts of the university community, after an initial round of caution, joined hands with its political opposition to suppress the campus protests that developed in response to Israel’s brutality towards Palestinian civilians.

Appeasement and accommodation, while regrettable within the academic community because of the retreat from sacrosanct ideas such as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, nonetheless set the stage for developments that followed the national elections at the end of last year. Martin Niemöller’s self-confession about his support—as a Lutheran pastor—for the German fascists during the 1930s captures nicely the corner into which the higher education community had boxed itself:

When the Nazis came for the Communists, I kept quiet; I wasn’t a communist.
When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet; I wasn’t a trade unionist.
When they jailed the Social Democrats, I kept quiet; I wasn’t a social democrat.
When they jailed the Jews, I kept quiet; I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me, there was no one left who could protest.2

Without a vibrant protest movement already in place to push against harsh and arbitrary actions, the universities seemed to have little choice but to acquiesce to a regime that seems interested in flattening the population into an undifferentiated mass.3

Because appeasement and accommodation have been embraced as proactive survival tactics, resistance has centered on a judicial system thought to be less conservative than the groups that have come to dominate the executive and legislative branches of government, a judiciary conceptualized as a mediator rather than an initiator and enforcer of social conflict. Given the legal system’s history, this too becomes another moment of sleep walking. It is a huge distance from the dynamism that characterized the world of higher education not long ago.

Among the most dynamic institutions have been the privately-governed universities like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Not just their social vision, but their great wealth allowed them to embrace initiatives that stand at the forefront of attempts to remold institutional behavior. Front and center have been efforts to diversify the upper ranks of corporate, governmental, and non-profit establishments such that they too reflect the diversity of the population at large.

Previous attempts to diversify the collegiate student body by means of affirmative action programs that focused on underrepresented groups, especially African Americans and Latines, were struck down by the judiciary. Anti-affirmative action backlash took aim at the admissions policies at highly-competitive graduate programs, such as elite law and medical schools, and on prestigious scholarship programs. The backlash, in other words, concentrated on the byways that provided access into the upper levels of society.

Schools and programs that served the remainder of the population were not of particular concern. Graduate programs in public administration, for instance, where the training of mid-level administrators is the aim, rarely came under attack, whether located at medium-sized liberal arts colleges or regional state universities. These types of institutions also suspended their affirmative action initiatives, but mostly as preemptive moves to avoid future litigation. By strategically targeting the institutions at the top, the entire system was enticed to reorient itself.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives were one of the responses to both past and recent judicial rollbacks. These were initiatives directed toward the recruitment and retention of underrepresented groups rather than their admission and funding. DEI initiatives, though, did not deal with the cost of attendance, which at the elite private institutions is beyond everyone’s means except for the wealthy. For tuition, room, and board to attend as an undergraduate, the current cost for the 2025–26 school year at Princeton, for example, is $82,650. Fees are extra.4

Financial incentives based on socioeconomic status, however, were a strategy that seemingly silenced all critics. The most generous programs encompass virtually all applicants from either a working or middle class background; that is, everyone except the elite is covered as long as household or parental income is below $200,000 annually. At Princeton, the limit is $100,000, pegged considerably above the level of median household income in the United States.5

This allows the institutions to be “needs-blind” and recruit students no matter their financial situation. A tuition-free college education—once a hallmark of publicly-funded institutions—has been revived at the upper end of the spectrum, a profound assertion by these institutions of their intent to further the socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic integration of the upper class.

One consequence of these cost-free programs is that it is often cheaper to attend an elite college like Princeton than to attend the nearby publicly-funded state university, the flagship institution—in this case, Rutgers University-New Brunswick. These figures are drawn from government calculations that show actual expenses for families at different tiers of the socioeconomic spectrum:6

CHART 1 – ANNUAL UNDERGRADUATE NET COST OF ATTENDANCE

Family income	PRINCETON	RUTGERS-NEW BRUNSWICK
Less than $ 30,000	$  2,518	$15,885
$30,001 - $ 48,000	$  4,682	$15,532
$48,001 - $ 75,000	$  7,652	$17,578
$75,001 - $110,000	$13,849	$24,020
Over $110,001	$39,943	$33,460

 

A significant reversal has taken place. The elite privates have become the exemplars for the entire system of higher education, not just academically but economically as well. It makes economic sense for the poor to attend elite private institutions (assuming they are offered one of the few open slots) and for the rich to attend publicly-funded ones. Because student loans are not part of these aid packages, students at elite colleges graduate with less debt than students at nearby public flagships.7

We find, then, that the more selective the college—Princeton admits five percent of applicants, Rutgers-New Brunswick sixty-five percent—the cheaper it is to attend, and the more likely you are to graduate—at Princeton ninety-eight percent, at Rutgers-New Brunswick eighty-four percent—the less that debt encumbers you afterwards. And what’s true about the comparison of Princeton and its nearby publicly-funded flagship is true in other states also: Harvard and University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Yale and the University of Connecticut at Storrs, and so on.

Just as important, student socioeconomic profiles parallel those at nearby public flagships. At Princeton, one in five (twenty percent) of its students receives a Pell Grant. These are the federally-funded grants awarded when family income is below, roughly, $50,000. Pell Grants thus serve as a reasonable measure of the density of students from working class and poor backgrounds at a particular institution. At Rutgers-New Brunswick, it is one in four students (28 percent).

Socioeconomic programs like the one at Princeton exist at more than a hundred public and privately-governed college institutions. Taken altogether, there has been a quiet undermining of commonly-accepted assumptions regarding elite institutions and their public counterparts. That the private elite institutions often outperform the public sector ones in matters traditionally considered the latter’s prerogative shows how deeply intertwined the private and public sectors have become.

Yet for all their efforts, the elite institutions still do not reflect the demographics of the population at large. This is true for the elite privates and also for public flagships. Nationally, thirty percent of students receive Pell Grants, a measure of the degree to which the working class has become a substantial part of the university community. At top-tier schools, however, fewer of their students receive Pell Grants. At Harvard, it is seventeen percent; at Yale, nineteen percent; at the Texas flagship, UT Austin, twenty-five percent; at the Florida flagship, UF Gainesville, twenty-three percent.8

That socioeconomic diversity is lower at elite privates and public flagships than is the national norm is not surprising, given the amply-documented correlation between parental finances and scholastic performance.9 Students from wealthier backgrounds, as a rule, perform better academically and are more likely to attend prestigious institutions. Still, the top-tier institutions have come a long way from the times in which they represented, with few exceptions: only the elite.

At places like Princeton, the student body is nearly as diverse racially and ethnically as at the nearby state flagship. According to the broad demographic categories used in government publications and legislation, we find that at both Princeton and Rutgers-New Brunswick, there are no majorities, only minorities:10

CHART 2 – RACE AND ETHNICITY AT TOP-TIER INSTITUTIONS

(in percents)	PRINCETON	RUTGERS-NEW BRUNSWICK
Asian	24	33
Black (African American)	9	7
Hispanic (Latine)	10	16
White	36	31
Non-Resident Alien (International Students)	12	7
Two or More Races (Multiracial)	7	4

 

Immigration and migration initially produced majority-less campuses at urban public institutions; in other words, at institutions located in major metropolitan areas—places where jobs are numerous and resistance to newcomers often diffuse and undirected. At Princeton and other elite institutions, however, it is not demographics, but merit—in combination with these economically-based financial aid packages—that drive the dynamic.

Forty-five years ago, individuals self-identified as white represented eighty-four percent of all undergraduates but only seventy-seven percent of eighteen to twenty-four year-olds (Chart 3). Higher education was a significant cultural dynamic for this group. A major reversal has since taken place, in which the white population now accounts for fifty-two percent of eighteen to twenty-four year-olds and the same percentage of college students. Their lead has been lost.

Every other group has moved in the opposite direction, increasing its presence within the collegiate system faster than their increase in either population or the prime college-attending age cohort (eighteen to twenty-four year-olds). The latter group has been relatively stable within the Black population, for instance, only increasing one percentage point from thirteen to fourteen percent during those decades. But the presence of Black students among undergraduate college students has increased from nine to thirteen percent. Among the Latine (Hispanic) population, the increase has been dramatic. While their share of eighteen to twenty-four year-olds tripled from eight to twenty-four percent, their share among undergraduates increased more than five-fold.

Affirmative action and DEI initiatives fostered the importance of a college education as a means to circumvent obstacles within the economy:11

CHART 3 – RACIAL & ETHNIC DIVERSITY

	18-24 YEAR-OLDS		HIGHER EDUCATION
(in percents)	1980	2022	1980	2022
Asian	2	6	2	8
Black	13	14	9	13
Hispanic	8	24	4	22
White	77	52	84	52
Two or More Races	—	4	—	4

 

Over the past half century, a leveling of the population has taken place, with the Black, Latine, and white communities all participating in post-secondary education at rates equivalent to their respective shares of the prime college-attending age group (eighteen to twenty-four year-olds).

This equalization is an aspect of reality that has been neglected by the academic community, which has generally focused on the advantages members of the white community have both educationally and occupationally due to kinship and parental networks, friendship circles, neighborhood contacts, and a lack of discrimination based on skin color. Implicit in this view is that whites need not rely on the educational system as heavily as other groups, since alternative avenues of advancement are available.

In many of the top institutions, the fall-off of white students is quite pronounced:

CHART 4 - DIVERSITY AT PRIVATE ELITES AND PUBLIC FLAGSHIPS

(in percents)	Higher Education	Harvard	Yale	Columbia	UPenn	UT Austin	UF Gainesville
Asian	8	22	23	18	28	25	12
Black	13	9	9	8	9	5	5
Hispanic	22	12	16	16	11	28	24
White	52	33	32	30	30	32	50
Non-Resident	—	14	11	18	12	4	2
Two/+ Races	4	7	7	6	5	4	5

 

During the decades in which affirmative action and DEI programs have attempted to bring some measure of equal access and equal achievement to educational endeavors, parts of the white community were drifting away. This blind-spot within the academic community’s understanding of social dynamics meant that concepts of relative disadvantage might have fit the situation just as well as ones of privilege and advantage.12

Increased funding in order to include whites in DEI initiatives is a possible solution, although a fundamental rethinking of inclusivity is also called for. Instead, the elimination of services and programs has become a mandate to ensure that no group will be helped to rise out of an undifferentiated mass. If government and higher education are taken out of the picture, social advancement, which always requires additional resources, then hinges solely on the wherewithal of individual families.

The university community, with its emphasis on inclusion and diversity, has represented a last outpost of a kind of thinking—of governmental spending and educational activism—that was once heralded under the label of Keynesianism and dates back to the immediate post-World War II period when everything seemed possible. Like the fate of the white population, society itself has gone through a long-winded period of evolution and transformation despite the tenacity of modes of thought initially generated in previous times.

Because colleges and universities depend so heavily on external funding for research grants and student loans, the political world has laid claim to its governance in ever-aggressive ways. The opening thrust has concentrated on the elite privates—Columbia, UPenn, Harvard, and Princeton among them. The integration of the two worlds of politics and education, in this sense, signals the remaking of higher education into a sphere of government in which the political world functions as its own type of board of directors. While the federal Department of Education is in the process of dissolution, the entire system of higher education is being reduced to the level of a federal department. This is part of an overall effort to curtail civil society and reign in its independence, in which scientists—initially those whose work concentrates on the environment or on global public health issues—have been a major focus.

Perhaps it is in this sense that we can understand the reluctance of university executives to confront directly what at first seemed to be scattershot criticisms aimed at various parts of their enterprises and why they did not push back harder at the assertion that criticism of Israeli policies is a form of antisemitism. It is not just that the higher education community was unprepared for the level and intensity of the criticisms, but that it was so highly vulnerable.

The top-tier institutions are the gonfaloniers of modern times, targets whose capture on the battlefield disorients the troops that follow their lead. To intimidate and diminish the top-tier institutions sends a message to the wider educational community about the punitive actions that non-compliance may bring. It effectively shifts the center of gravity throughout a major portion of society. In the conflict between the government and the educational community that depends on it, the latter can only lose, even if the degree to which it loses is still to be determined. The universities are a highly strategic and, as it turns out, easy target, ideologically and in terms of government expenses.

That the university community has also served as a base and breeding ground for liberal politics is still another reason for its subjugation.13 The overall result gestures in the direction of a shrunken and harshly repressed and repressive educational system that cowers to executive mandates because of the certainty that if not, legislative enactments will follow.14 Highly successful white males are the driving force behind all this. Their goal: a system that encourages no exceptions except for people who mimic themselves.

The world we have known is disappearing, an unraveling that would take considerable time to now reassemble. It is unclear whether and to what degree colleges and universities will remain as sanctuaries for the expression of ideas inconsonant with the political establishment. Perhaps some solace is to be found in this quip by Mother Jones, herself a fierce labor movement advocate at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth centuries. She was heard to say: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”

1. Between 1980 and 2022, the major changes were in the white population, which fell from 80 to 59 percent, while the Latine population increased dramatically from 7 to 19 percent. The Black population barely changed—from 12 to 13 percent, and the Asian population increased from 2 to 6 percent. National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics–Most Current Digest Tables, 2023, Tables 101.20.
2. Many versions of this poem exist. The version here is unabridged, translated from the original.
3. Alan Blinder, “Trump’s Battles With Colleges Could Change American Culture for a Generation.” The New York Times, March 20, 2025.
4. Cost & Aid | Princeton Admission.
5. Median annual income is just over $80,000 per year. These programs also take into account a family's wealth in property, business assets, etc., in complicated formulas that can mitigate qualifying on income alone. Stephanie Saul, “Harvard Will Make Tuition Free for More Students.” The New York Times, 17 March 2025; Peyton Beverford, Free Tuition for Low-Income Students | Appily. 21 March 2025; US Census Bureau, Income in the United States: 2023, 10 September 2024.
6. Unless indicated otherwise, all data is from the US Department of Education, College Scorecard, 23 April 2025. For each institution, see the various listings under: Costs, By Family Income; Financial Aid & Debt; Test Scores and Acceptance; Graduation & Retention; Typical Earnings; Campus Diversity.
7. At Princeton, the median debt for undergraduates when they finish their degrees is $10,320; at Rutgers-New Brunswick, it is $21,500.
8. Share of Federal Pell Grants recipients U.S. 2024 | Statista.
9. The situation a decade ago: “among ‘Ivy-Plus’ colleges (the eight Ivy League colleges, University of Chicago, Stanford, MIT, and Duke), more students come from families in the top 1% of the income distribution (14.5%) than the bottom half of the income distribution (13.5%).” Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan, “Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility,” National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.nber.org/papers/w23618, July 2017, p. 1.
10. Not listed are: American Indian/Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and Unknown. Numbers do not always equal 100 due to rounding or these absent categories.
11. National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics-Most Current Digest Tables, 2023, Tables 101.20, 306.10 (scroll down for the relevant data—based on 2022 totals, rounded up).
12. In the academic trilogy of race, class, and gender, many scholars sought a means to move the discussion of class from the theoretical, where it received extensive attention, to the concrete so that it could function similarly to the analyses of race and gender. Intersectionality has been one of the results, which nonetheless still leaves class undertheorized on a concrete level.
13. On voting patterns, see: Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins, Polarized Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics. Cambridge University Press: 2024.
14. Isabelle Taft, “How Colleges Are Surveilling Students Now.” The New York Times, March 29, 2025.

Thanks to Jules David Bartkowski, Anne Lopes, and Paul Mattick for comments.

Gary Roth is the author of The Educated Underclass: Students and the Promise of Social Mobility (Pluto Press, 2019).