End of an Era

For now, we have suspended our three decade long run of citizen journalism and will let you know where we go from here.  Two of our other publications, American Injustice and street sociologist are also closed, but remain online for now on Blogger. 

Our Anti-SLAPP lawsuit (Chip Paucek and Pro Athlete Community v Dahn Shaulis) is pending. While the legal bill is enormous, we expect to win. In the meantime, please support independent voices like Richard Wolff, Julie K. Brown, Roger Sollenberger, and Troy Barile. 

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   Higher Education and Class Sorting. Image by Glen McGhee

On our last full day of operation, we extend our deepest gratitude to the many courageous voices who have contributed to the Higher Education Inquirer over the years. Through research, reporting, whistleblowing, analysis, and public service, you have exposed inequities, challenged powerful interests, and helped the public understand the realities of higher education. Together, you form a resilient network of knowledge, courage, and public service, showing that collective insight can illuminate even the most entrenched systems. Your dedication has been, and continues to be, invaluable.

Special thanks to:
Bryan Alexander (Future Trends Forum), J. J. Anselmi (author), Devarian Baldwin (Trinity College),  Lisa Bannon (Wall Street Journal), Joe Berry (Higher Education Labor United), Kate Bronfenbrenner (Cornell), Stephen Burd (New America), Ann Bowers (Debt Collective), James Michael Brodie (Black and Gold Project Foundation), Patrick Campbell (Vets Ed Brief), Richard Cannon (activist), Kirk Carapezza (WGBH), Kevin L. Clay (Rutgers), Randall Collins (UPenn), Marianne Dissard (activist), Cory Doctorow, William Domhoff (UC Santa Cruz), Ruxandra Dumitriu, Keil Dumsch, Garrett Fitzgerald (College Recon), Glen Ford (with the ancestors), Richard Fossey (Condemned to Debt), Erica Gallagher (2U Whistleblower), Cliff Gibson III (Gibson & Keith), Henry Giroux (McMaster University), Terri Givens (University of British Columbia), Aaron Glantz, Luke Goldstein (The Lever),  Nathan Grawe (Carleton College), Michael Green (UNLV), Michael Hainline (Restore the GI Bill for Veterans), Debra Hale Shelton (Arkansas Times), Stephanie M. Hall (Protect Borrowers),  David Halperin (Republic Report), Bill Harrington (Croatan Institute), Phil Hill (On EdTech), Investor X (business insider), Robert Jensen (UT Austin), Seth Kahn (WCUP), Hank Kalet (Rutgers), Ben Kaufman (Protect Borrowers), Robert Kelchen (University of Tennessee), Karen Kelsky (The Professor Is In), Neil Kraus (UWRF), LACCD Whistleblower, Michelle Lee (whistleblower), Wendy Lynne Lee (Bloomsburg University of PA), Emmanuel Legeard (whistleblower), Adam Looney (University of Utah), Alec MacGillis (ProPublica), Jon Marcus (Hechinger Report), Steven Mintz (University of Texas), John D. Murphy (Mission Forsaken), Annelise Orleck (Dartmouth), Margaret Kimberly (Black Agenda Report), Austin Longhorn (UT student loan debt whistleblower), Richard Pollock (journalist), Debbi Potts (whistleblower), Jack Metzger (Roosevelt University), Derek Newton (The Cheat Sheet), Jeff Pooley (Annenberg Center), Fahmi Quadir (Safkhet Capital), Chris Quintana (USA Today), Jennifer Reed (University of Akron), Kevin Richert (Idaho Education News), Gary Roth (Rutgers-Newark), Mark Salisbury (TuitionFit), Stephanie Saul (NY Times), Christopher Serbagi (Serbagi Law), Alex Shebanow  (Fail State), Bob Shireman (TCF), Bill Skimmyhorn (William & Mary), Peter Simi (Chapman University), Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (Yale), Gary Stocker (College Viability), Strelnikov (Wikipedia Sucks), Taylor Swaak (Chronicle of Higher Education), Theresa Sweet (Sweet v Cardona), Harry Targ (Purdue University), Moe Tkacik (American Prospect),  Kim Tran (activist), Mark Twain Jr. (business insider), Michael Vasquez (The Tributary), Marina Vujnovic (Monmouth), Richard Wolff (Economic Update), David Whitman, Todd Wolfson (Rutgers, AFT), Helena Worthen (Higher Ed Labor United), DW (South American Correspondent), Heidi Weber (Whistleblower Revolution), Michael Yates (Monthly Review), government officials who have supported transparency and accountability, and the countless other educators, researchers, whistleblowers, advocates, and public servants whose work strengthens our understanding of higher education.

Dahn Shaulis and Glen McGhee

The Expanding Crisis in U.S. Higher Education: OPMs, Student Loan Servicers, Deregulation, Robocolleges, AI, and the Collapse of Accountability

Across the United States, higher education is undergoing a dramatic and dangerous transformation. Corporate contractors, private equity firms, automated learning systems, and predatory loan servicers increasingly dictate how the system operates—while regulators remain absent and the media rarely reports the scale of the crisis. The result is a university system that serves investors and advertisers far more effectively than it serves students.

This evolution reflects a broader pattern documented by Harriet A. Washington, Alondra Nelson, Elisabeth Rosenthal, and Rebecca Skloot: institutions extracting value from vulnerable populations under the guise of public service. Today, many universities—especially those driven by online expansion—operate as financial instruments more than educational institutions.

The OPM Machine and Private Equity Consolidation

Online Program Managers (OPMs) remain central to this shift. Companies like 2U, Academic Partnerships—now Risepoint—and the restructured remnants of Wiley’s OPM division continue expanding into public universities hungry for tuition revenue. Revenue-sharing deals, often hidden from the public, let these companies keep up to 60% of tuition in exchange for aggressive online recruitment and mass-production of courses.

Much of this expansion is fueled by private equity, including Vistria Group, Apollo Global Management, and others that have poured billions into online contractors, publishing houses, test prep firms, and for-profit colleges. Their model prioritizes rapid enrollment growth, relentless marketing, and cost-cutting—regardless of educational quality.

Hyper-Deregulation and the Dismantling of ED

Under the Trump Administration, the federal government dismantled core student protections—Gainful Employment, Borrower Defense, incentive-compensation safeguards, and accreditation oversight. This “hyper-deregulation” created enormous loopholes that OPMs and for-profit companies exploited immediately.

Today, the Department of Education itself is being dismantled, leaving oversight fragmented, understaffed, and in some cases non-functional. With the cat away, the mice will play: predatory companies are accelerating recruitment and acquisition strategies faster than regulators can respond.

Servicers, Contractors, and Tech Platforms Feeding on Borrowers

A constellation of companies profit from the student loan system regardless of borrower outcomes:

• Maximus (AidVantage), which manages huge portfolios of federal student loans under opaque contracts.

• Navient, a longtime servicer repeatedly accused of steering borrowers into costly options.

• Sallie Mae, the original student loan giant, still profiting from private loans to risky borrowers.

• Chegg, which transitioned from textbook rental to an AI-driven homework-and-test assistance platform, driving new forms of academic dependency.

Each benefits from weak oversight and an increasingly automated, fragmented educational landscape.

Robocolleges, Robostudents, Roboworkers: The AI Cascade

Artificial Intelligence has magnified the crisis. Universities, under financial pressure, increasingly rely on automated instruction, chatbot advising, and algorithmic grading—what can be called robocolleges. Students, overwhelmed and unsupported, turn to AI tools for essays, homework, and exams—creating robostudents whose learning is outsourced to software rather than internalized.

Meanwhile, employers—especially those influenced by PE-backed workforce platforms—prioritize automation, making human workers interchangeable components in roboworker environments. This raises existential questions about whether higher education prepares people for stable futures or simply feeds them into unstable, algorithm-driven labor markets.

FAFSA Meltdowns, Fraud, and Academic Cheating

The collapse of the new FAFSA system, combined with widespread fraudulent applications, has destabilized enrollment nationwide. Colleges desperate for students have turned to risky recruitment pipelines that enable identity fraud, ghost students, and financial manipulation of aid systems.

Academic cheating, now industrialized through generative AI and contract-cheating platforms, further erodes the integrity of degrees while institutions look away to protect revenue.

Advertising and the Manufacture of “College Mania”

For decades, advertising has propped up the myth that a college degree—any degree, from any institution—guarantees social mobility. Universities, OPMs, lenders, test-prep companies, and ed-tech platforms spend billions on marketing annually. This relentless messaging drives families to take on debt and enroll in programs regardless of cost or quality.

College mania is not organic—it is manufactured. Advertising convinces the public to ignore warning signs that would be obvious in any other consumer market.

A Media Coverage Vacuum

Despite the scale of the crisis, mainstream media offers shockingly little coverage. Investigative journalism units have shrunk, education reporters are overstretched, and major outlets rely heavily on university advertising revenue. The result is a structural conflict of interest: the same companies responsible for predatory practices often fund the media organizations tasked with reporting on them.

When scandals surface—FAFSA failures, servicer misconduct, OPM exploitation—they often disappear within a day’s news cycle. The public remains unaware of how deeply corporate interests now shape higher education.

The Emerging Picture

The U.S. higher education system is no longer simply under strain—it is undergoing a corporate and technological takeover. Private equity owns the pipelines. OPMs run the online infrastructure. Tech companies moderate academic integrity. Servicers profit whether borrowers succeed or fail. Advertisers manufacture demand. Regulators are missing. The media is silent.

In contrast, many other countries maintain strong limits on privatization, enforce strict quality standards, and protect students as consumers. As Washington and Rosenthal argue, exploitation persists not because it is inevitable but because institutions allow—and profit from—it.

Unless the U.S. restores meaningful oversight, reins in private equity, ends predatory revenue-sharing models, rebuilds the Department of Education, and demands transparency across all contractors, the system will continue to deteriorate. And students, especially those already marginalized, will pay the price.

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Sources (Selection)

Harriet A. Washington – Medical Apartheid; Carte Blanche
Rebecca Skloot – The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Elisabeth Rosenthal – An American Sickness
Alondra Nelson – Body and Soul
Stephanie Hall & The Century Foundation – work on OPMs and revenue sharing
Robert Shireman – analyses of for-profit colleges and PE ownership
GAO (Government Accountability Office) reports on OPMs and student loan servicing
ED OIG and FTC public reports on oversight failures (various years)
National Student Legal Defense Network investigations
Federal Student Aid servicer audits and public documentation

The Link Between Greed and Efficiency

In the mythology of American capitalism, “efficiency” is the magic word that justifies austerity for workers, rising tuition for students, and ever-expanding wealth for administrators, financiers, and institutional elites. It is framed as neutral, technocratic, and rational. In reality, efficiency in higher education has become inseparable from greed, functioning as a mask for extraction and consolidation.

Universities and their sprawling medical centers have become some of the largest landowners and employers in the cities they inhabit. As Devarian Baldwin has shown, these institutions operate as urban empires, expanding aggressively into surrounding neighborhoods, raising housing costs, displacing long-time residents, and reshaping cities to suit institutional priorities. University medical centers, nominally nonprofit, consolidate smaller hospitals, close services deemed unprofitable, and charge some of the highest healthcare prices in the nation. These operations are justified as efficiency or economic development, yet they often destabilize the communities they claim to serve.

Endowments, some exceeding fifty billion dollars at elite institutions, have become central to this dynamic. Managed like hedge funds, these pools of capital are heavily invested in private equity, venture capital, real estate, and derivatives. The financial logic of endowment management now shapes university priorities, shifting focus from public service and learning to capital accumulation, investor returns, and risk management. Efficiency is defined not by educational outcomes but by the growth of financial assets.

This culture of extraction has been amplified by decades of government austerity. Public funding for higher education has steadily declined since the 1980s, forcing institutions to behave like corporations. At the same time, the aging Baby Boomer generation is creating unprecedented financial pressures on Social Security, Medicare, and healthcare systems, leaving public coffers stretched thin and reinforcing a winner-take-all national mentality. In this environment, universities compete fiercely for students, research dollars, donors, and prestige, producing conditions ripe for exploitation.

Outsourcing has become a standard method to achieve “efficiency.” Universities frequently contract out food service, custodial work, IT, housing management, and security. Workers employed by these contractors often face lower wages, fewer benefits, and higher turnover, while administrators present these arrangements as cost-saving measures. Meanwhile, administrative layers within institutions continue to expand, creating a managerial class that oversees growth and strategy while teaching budgets shrink. As Marc Bousquet has argued, the corporate-style management model displaces faculty governance and treats students and staff as revenue streams rather than participants in a shared educational mission.

The adjunctification of the faculty exemplifies efficiency as exploitation. Contingent instructors now teach the majority of classes in American higher education, earning poverty-level wages without benefits while juggling multiple teaching sites. Institutions call this “flexibility” and “cost containment,” but in reality it transfers value from instruction to administrative overhead, athletics, real estate, and financial operations, all while reducing the quality of education and undermining academic continuity.

The rise of Online Program Managers, or OPMs, further illustrates the fusion of greed and efficiency. These companies design, manage, and market entire online degree programs, often taking forty to seventy percent of tuition revenue. While presented as efficiency partners, OPMs aggressively recruit students, inflate costs, and minimize academic oversight. Their business model mirrors the exploitative strategies of for-profit colleges, which pioneered high-cost, low-quality instruction combined with heavy marketing to capture federal loan dollars. The collapse of chains such as Corinthian, ITT, and EDMC left millions of borrowers with debt and no degree, yet the model persists inside nonprofit universities through OPMs and algorithm-driven online programs.

“Robocolleges” represent the latest evolution of this trend. AI-driven instruction, predictive analytics, automated grading, and digital tutoring promise unprecedented efficiency, but they often replace human educators, reduce pedagogical oversight, exploit student data, and prioritize enrollment growth over educational quality. Efficiency here serves the financial bottom line rather than the learning or well-being of students.

The result of these extractive practices is a national crisis of student debt, now exceeding one trillion dollars. Students borrow to cover skyrocketing tuition, outsourced services, underpaid instruction, and the costs of programs shaped by OPMs or automated platforms. Debt is not an accident of the system; it is the intended outcome, a mechanism for transferring public resources and student labor into private profit.

The broader social context intensifies the problem. Higher education exists in a winner-take-all, financialized society, where resources flow upward and the majority of people are told to compete harder, work longer, and borrow more. Universities have internalized this ideology, acting as both symbols and engines of extraction. Efficiency, under this paradigm, is defined not by the effectiveness of teaching or research but by the expansion of institutional power, wealth, and influence.

True efficiency would look very different. It would invest in educators rather than contractors, stabilize academic labor rather than exploit it, serve surrounding communities rather than displace them, expand learning opportunities rather than debt, and prioritize democratic governance over corporate-style hierarchy. Efficiency should measure how well institutions serve the public good, not how well they protect endowment returns, OPM profits, or administrative salaries.

Until such a redefinition occurs, efficiency will remain one of the most powerful tools of extraction in American higher education, a rhetorical justification for greed disguised as rational management.

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Sources

Devarian Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower
Marc Bousquet, How the University Works
Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed
Christopher Newfield, The Great Mistake
Sara Goldrick-Rab, Paying the Price
Government reports on for-profit colleges, student debt, and OPMs
Research on higher education financialization, outsourcing, and austerity policies

Confidence Games and Crumbling Institutions: Echoes of 1857 in 2025

In 1857, Herman Melville published The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a cryptic, satirical novel set aboard a Mississippi steamboat. The titular character—ever-shifting, ever-deceiving—exploits the trust of passengers in a society obsessed with profit, spectacle, and moral ambiguity. That same year, the United States plunged into its first global financial crisis, the Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision denying citizenship to Black Americans, and violence erupted in Kansas over slavery. The nation was expanding westward while morally imploding.

Fast forward to 2025, and the parallels are chilling.

The Collapse of Confidence

The Panic of 1857 was triggered by speculative bubbles, banking failures, and the sinking of a gold-laden ship meant to stabilize Eastern banks. In 2025, the U.S. faces a different kind of panic: record-high debt servicing costs, a fragile labor market dominated by gig work, and a public increasingly skeptical of financial institutions. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, has slashed federal jobs and privatized public services, echoing the confidence games of Melville’s era.

Trust—once the bedrock of civic life—is now a currency in freefall.

Judicial Earthquakes and Political Fragmentation

In 1857, the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision shattered any illusion of unity. Today, the return of Donald Trump to the presidency has reignited deep political divisions. Executive orders, agency dismantling, and immigration crackdowns have triggered constitutional challenges reminiscent of the 1850s. The rule of law feels increasingly negotiable.

Higher education institutions, once bastions of reasoned debate, now find themselves caught between political polarization and economic precarity. Faculty are pressured to conform, students are surveilled, and public trust in academia is eroding.

Spectacle, Deception, and the Digital Masquerade

Melville’s confidence man sold fake medicines and bogus charities. In 2025, deception is digitized: AI-generated content, deepfakes, and influencer culture dominate public discourse. The masquerade continues—only now the steamboat is a livestream, and the con artist might be an algorithm.

Universities must grapple with this new epistemological crisis. What is truth in an age of synthetic media? What is scholarship when data itself can be manipulated?

Moral Reckonings and Institutional Failure

In both 1857 and 2025, America faces a reckoning. Then, it was slavery and sectional violence. Now, it’s climate collapse, racial injustice, and the erosion of democratic norms. The question is not whether institutions will survive—but whether they can evolve.

Higher education must decide: Will it be a passive observer of decline, or an active agent of renewal?

The Confidence Man Returns

Melville’s novel ends without resolution. The confidence man disappears into the crowd, leaving readers to wonder whether anyone aboard the steamboat was ever truly honest. In 2025, we face a similar uncertainty. The masquerade continues, and the stakes are higher than ever.

For higher education, the challenge is clear: to restore trust, to defend truth, and to prepare students not just for jobs—but for citizenship in an age of confidence games.

Maria Ressa - Fighting Back Against Trump’s Authoritarian Algorithm With Truth (The Daily Show)

 

TikTok is the Smallpox of the 2020s

In the 18th and 19th centuries, smallpox was more than a disease—it was a weapon. European colonizers intentionally spread it to weaken and destroy Indigenous populations. The infamous case of Lord Jeffrey Amherst in 1763, when British forces distributed smallpox-infected blankets to Native communities during Pontiac’s War, stands as one of the most notorious examples of biological warfare in history. Smallpox was terrifying not only because of its lethality, but because it struck at the heart of populations with no immunity. It reshaped the demographic and political order of North America for centuries.

Biological warfare did not end with the colonial period. The 20th century brought industrialized efforts: the Japanese Imperial Army’s Unit 731 conducted horrific experiments during World War II, weaponizing plague and anthrax. The United States and the Soviet Union pursued their own offensive bioweapons programs well into the Cold War, stockpiling pathogens with the potential to devastate civilian populations. The logic of such programs was clear—disease could be used to destabilize entire societies more effectively than conventional warfare.

Today, the battleground has shifted from bodies to minds. Social media platforms—TikTok foremost among them—serve as delivery systems for disinformation and psychological contagion. Where smallpox spread through blankets and close contact, TikTok spreads through algorithms designed to maximize engagement. What once took weeks to devastate a community can now happen in hours, with a video or meme reaching millions before fact-checkers or educators can respond.

The analogy is not metaphorical flourish. Both smallpox and social media weaponization exploit vulnerabilities: biological susceptibility in the first case, and cognitive-emotional susceptibility in the second. Both create dependencies: populations weakened by disease became reliant on colonial powers, while users conditioned by TikTok’s endless scroll become dependent on an algorithm that thrives on outrage, spectacle, and division.

Weaponization of social media takes many forms. Disinformation campaigns around elections, climate change, and public health spread faster than corrections. Extremist groups use TikTok’s short-form videos to recruit younger audiences with humor and cultural references. State actors experiment with algorithmic nudges to destabilize adversaries, just as Cold War militaries once experimented with viruses in clandestine labs.

Universities are not insulated from this epidemic. Students now arrive on campus carrying not only smartphones but cognitive frameworks shaped by algorithmic feeds. Professors struggle to compete with the authority of viral influencers. Entire institutions have found themselves dragged into controversy over short clips that strip away context but ignite outrage. The terrain of higher education is increasingly defined by psychological contagion, much as earlier centuries were defined by outbreaks of smallpox.

If smallpox forced the development of public health measures, TikTok and other social media platforms demand the development of new digital immunities: critical media literacy, institutional resilience, and transnational cooperation to blunt the impact of algorithmic manipulation. Without such measures, the scars may not appear on skin, but they will mark a generation in cognition, behavior, and trust.

Just as history judges the weaponization of smallpox as a crime against humanity, it may one day judge the weaponization of social media in the same light. The question is whether societies will act before the damage becomes irreversible.

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Sources

• Alibek, K., & Handelman, S. (1999). Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World. Delta.

• Crozier, A. (2022). “Colonialism, Contagion, and the History of Smallpox in North America.” Journal of Colonial History, 23(3), 245–268.

• DiResta, R. (2018). “The Information Wars.” Foreign Affairs, 97(6), 146–155.

• Lakoff, A. (2017). Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency. University of California Press.

• Meselson, M., et al. (2000). “The Sverdlovsk Anthrax Outbreak of 1979.” Science, 266(5188), 1202–1208.

• Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs.

The Forgotten Value of the “Community of Scholars”

In the race for market share, rankings, and research grants, many U.S. colleges have lost sight of one of higher education’s oldest and most fertile ideals: the community of scholars.

This concept—once central to the mission of universities—rests on a deceptively simple truth: the most powerful breakthroughs often come from hearing perspectives outside your discipline and engaging with people whose work seems, at first glance, irrelevant to your own.

In an authentic community of scholars, a physics student might stumble into a conversation with a medieval historian; a music major might find themselves challenged by an environmental scientist; a business student might be forced to grapple with the moral arguments of a philosopher. These encounters aren’t just “nice to have.” They form the unpredictable crosscurrents that spark creativity, encourage critical thinking, and lead to what some would call pure genius.

A Tradition Worth Remembering

The ideal of the community of scholars is not new. Medieval universities like Oxford were built around the idea that students from across Europe, speaking different languages and studying different subjects, could live and learn together. The University of Chicago’s early 20th-century model emphasized the Great Books and interdisciplinary conversation, requiring students to wrestle with texts and ideas far outside their intended careers.

Even America’s land-grant universities, founded in the 19th century, blended practical training with exposure to the liberal arts, aiming to create citizens as well as skilled professionals. These institutions understood that broad intellectual engagement was not a distraction—it was the soil in which innovation grew.

The New Monoculture

Today, this cross-pollination is endangered. A 2023 study by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) found that 62% of college students reported taking courses only within their major field, with fewer than 20% participating in interdisciplinary classes. Moreover, 71% of students said they had limited meaningful interaction with peers outside their academic discipline.

Colleges, driven by market logic, have created silos—both academic and social—where students stay within their majors, their professional networks, and even their ideological bubbles. The shift to online learning has, in many cases, accelerated this isolation. Cross-disciplinary curiosity is increasingly treated as a luxury, not a necessity.

This narrowing of intellectual horizons harms everyone. It produces specialists who can code or model or calculate with great precision, but who lack the breadth to see the larger social, ethical, or historical implications of their work. It fosters students who are career-ready but not idea-ready. According to a 2022 survey by the Association of American Colleges & Universities, only 34% of employers rated recent graduates as “very well prepared” to solve complex, interdisciplinary problems.

Rebuilding the Garden

Restoring the “community of scholars” is not just about offering more electives or organizing a few interdisciplinary conferences. It requires a deliberate cultural shift:

• Creating more spaces—physical and virtual—where students and faculty from radically different fields can collide intellectually.

• Valuing curiosity for its own sake, not just for its potential market application.

• Encouraging students to explore “useless” subjects, precisely because their utility may emerge in ways no algorithm could predict.

Universities love to market themselves as incubators of innovation and genius. But genius rarely grows in monoculture. It flourishes in the wild garden of unexpected encounters, where ideas mingle across disciplines, and where “irrelevant” conversations can suddenly change the world.

If higher education continues to forget this, it risks producing graduates who are highly trained but narrowly formed—capable, but not transformative.

Sources

• National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), 2023 Report, “Interdisciplinary Learning and Student Interaction.”

• Association of American Colleges & Universities, 2022 Employer Survey on College Learning Outcomes.

• Geiger, Roger L. Knowledge and Money: Research Universities and the Paradox of the Marketplace. Stanford University Press, 2004.

• Kimball, Bruce A. Orators & Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education. College Board, 1995.

• Thelin, John R. A History of American Higher Education. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.

• Klein, Julie Thompson. Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice. Wayne State University Press, 1990.

• Bok, Derek. Higher Education in America. Princeton University Press, 2013.

• Alexander, Bryan. “Digital Learning and the Risk of Intellectual Silos,” EDUCAUSE Review, 2020.

The Digital Dark Ages of Higher Education: Greed, Myth, and the Ghosts of Lost Knowledge

In a time of unprecedented data collection, artificial intelligence, and networked access to information, it seems unthinkable that we could be slipping into a new Dark Age. But that is precisely what is unfolding in American higher education—a Digital Dark Age marked not just by the disappearance of records, but by the disappearance of truth.

This is not a passive erosion of information. It is a systemic, coordinated effort to conceal institutional failure, to commodify public knowledge, and to weaponize mythology. It is a collapse not of technology, but of ethics and memory.

A Dark Age in Plain Sight

Digital decay is usually associated with vanishing files and outdated formats. In higher education, it takes the more sinister form of intentional erasure. Data that once offered accountability—graduation rates, job placement figures, loan default data, even course materials—have become reputational liabilities. When inconvenient, they vanish.

Gainful Employment data disappeared from federal websites under the Trump administration. Student outcomes from for-profit conversions are obscured through accounting tricks. Internal audits and consultant reports sit behind NDAs and paywalls. And when institutions close or rebrand, their failures are scrubbed from the record like Soviet photographs.

This is a higher education system consumed by image management, where inconvenient truths are buried under branded mythologies.

The Robocolleges and the Rise of the Algorithm

No phenomenon illustrates this transformation more starkly than the rise of robocolleges—fully online institutions like Southern New Hampshire University, University of Phoenix, and Liberty University Online. These institutions, driven more by enrollment growth than educational mission, are built to scale, surveil, and extract.

Their architecture is not intellectual but algorithmic: automated learning systems, outsourced instructors, and AI-driven behavioral analytics replace human-centered pedagogy. Data replaces dialogue. And all of it happens behind proprietary systems controlled by Online Program Managers (OPMs)—for-profit companies like 2U, Academic Partnerships, and Wiley that handle recruitment, curriculum design, and marketing for universities, often taking a majority cut of tuition revenue.

These robocolleges aren’t built to educate; they’re built to profit. They are credential vending machines with advertising budgets, protected by political lobbying and obscured by branding.

And they are perfectly suited to a Digital Dark Age, where metrics are manipulated, failures are hidden, and education is indistinguishable from a subscription service.

Myth #1: The College Degree as Guaranteed Mobility

The dominant myth still peddled by these institutions—and many traditional ones—is that a college degree is a golden ticket to upward mobility. But in an economy of stagnant wages, rising tuition, and unpayable debt, this narrative is a weapon.

Robocolleges and their OPM partners sell dreams on Instagram and YouTube—“Success stories,” “first-gen pride,” and inflated salary stats—while ignoring the mountains of debt, dropout rates, and lifelong economic precarity their students face. And when those stories come to light? They disappear behind legal threats, settlements, and strategic rebranding.

The dream has become a trap, and the myth has become a means of extraction.

Myth #2: Innovation Through EdTech

“Tech will save us” is the second great myth. EdTech companies promise to revolutionize learning through adaptive platforms, AI tutors, and automated assessments. But what they really offer is surveillance, cost-cutting, and outsourcing.

Institutions are increasingly beholden to opaque algorithms and third-party platforms that strip faculty of agency and students of privacy. Assessment becomes analytics. Learning becomes labor. And the metrics these systems produce—completion rates, engagement data—are as easily manipulated as they are misunderstood.

Far from democratizing education, EdTech has helped turn it into a digital panopticon, where every click is monetized, and every action is tracked.

Myth #3: The Digital Campus as a Public Good

Universities love to claim that their digital campuses are open and inclusive. But in truth, access is restricted, commercialized, and disappearing.

Libraries are gutted. Archives are defunded. Publicly funded research is locked behind publisher paywalls. Historical documents, administrative records, even syllabi are now ephemeral—stored on private platforms, subject to deletion at will. The digital campus is a gated community, and the public is locked out.

Third-party vendors now control what students read, how they’re taught, and who can access the past. Memory is no longer a public good—it is a leased service.

Greed, Cheating, and Digital Amnesia

This is not simply a story about decay—it is a story about cheating. Not just by students, but by institutions themselves.

Colleges cheat by manipulating data to mislead accreditors and prospective students. OPMs cheat by obscuring their contracts and revenue-sharing models. Robocolleges cheat by prioritizing growth over learning. And all of them cheat when they hide the truth, delete the data, or suppress the whistleblowers.

Faculty are silenced through non-disclosure agreements. Archivists are laid off. Historians and librarians are told to “streamline” and “rebrand” rather than preserve and inform. The keepers of memory are being dismissed, just when we need them most.

Myth as Memory Hole

The Digital Dark Ages are not merely a result of failing tech—they are the logical outcome of a system that values profit over truth, optics over integrity, and compliance over inquiry.

Greed isn’t incidental. It’s the design. And the myths propagated by robocolleges, OPMs, and traditional universities alike are the cover stories that keep the public sedated and the money flowing.

American higher education once aspired to be a sanctuary of memory, a force for social mobility, and a guardian of public knowledge. But it is now drifting toward becoming a black box—a mythologized, monetized shadow of its former self, accessible only through marketing and controlled by vendors.

Without intervention—legal, financial, and intellectual—we risk becoming a society where education is an illusion, memory is curated, and truth is whatever survives the deletion script.

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Sources and References:

• Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol

• Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed

• Christopher Newfield, The Great Mistake

• Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains

• U.S. Department of Education archives (missing Gainful Employment data)

• “Paywall: The Business of Scholarship” (2018)

• SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)

• Internet Archive reports on digital preservation

• ProPublica and The Century Foundation on OPMs and robocolleges

• Faculty union reports on librarian and archivist layoffs

• Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education coverage of data manipulation, robocolleges, and institutional opacity

How Neoliberalism Haunts Our Lives: 24/7/365

Neoliberalism isn’t just an economic theory or a dry policy framework. It’s a lived reality that operates around the clock, shaping our lives in ways many people don’t fully see. Neoliberalism tells us that markets solve everything, that individual responsibility trumps social solidarity, and that human worth is best measured by productivity, consumption, and credentialing. Its presence is constant—at work, in education, in healthcare, in housing, even in our relationships.

This is not a new critique. But as the 21st century drags on and late capitalism becomes more extractive, predatory, and digitally surveilled, the impacts of neoliberal ideology have intensified. For the working class, for students, for adjuncts, for debtors, for renters, and for the chronically ill, neoliberalism is not an abstraction—it is a system of permanent exhaustion.

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The Day Begins: Sleep-Deprived and Algorithmically Watched

The neoliberal day begins before the alarm rings. If you’re poor, you may be sleeping in your car or waking up in a crowded home. If you’re middle-class, the first thing you see is likely your phone, already feeding you metrics about your body (sleep scores, heart rate, missed messages). Neoliberal logic tells us our time must be optimized, even our rest must be productive.

Gig workers check their apps to see if they’ll get enough rides or orders to survive. Others log into remote jobs monitored by keystroke trackers, digital timesheets, or AI productivity tools. Control is constant, and surveillance is internalized: we discipline ourselves with planners, metrics, reminders, shame.

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Education: Credentials Over Knowledge

For students, neoliberal education is a high-cost simulation of opportunity. Degrees are sold as investments in "human capital," with ever-rising tuition and debt. Public funding is replaced by predatory loans, branding consultants, and privatized ed-tech platforms. The curriculum is shaped by market demand, not civic responsibility. Liberal arts are gutted, and adjuncts are paid poverty wages while administrators balloon in number.

The university, once imagined as a space for critical thinking and collective inquiry, is now a debt-fueled credential mill—an HR pipeline for corporations, a subscription model of social mobility that rarely delivers.

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Healthcare: A Business of Despair

Neoliberalism doesn’t take a break when you get sick. In fact, your illness becomes a profit center. In the U.S., the healthcare system is a financial trap. Insurance is often tied to employment; losing your job means losing your access to care. Big Pharma, hospital chains, and insurance conglomerates operate under the logic of maximizing shareholder value—not public health.

Even mental health is commodified. Wellness apps, “self-care” products, and Instagram therapy push the idea that individual solutions will fix systemic problems. Suffering is reframed as personal failure.

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Housing: A Market, Not a Human Right

Housing insecurity is one of neoliberalism’s clearest failures. Real estate speculation, gentrification, and the financialization of housing have made shelter a luxury good. Renters face skyrocketing costs and eviction threats, while homes sit vacant as investment vehicles.

Public housing is stigmatized and underfunded. Homelessness becomes a criminal issue instead of a humanitarian one. You’re told to “pull yourself up” while the ladder is systematically removed.

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Work and Labor: You're Always On

The 9-to-5 is no longer the norm. Neoliberal work is either hyper-precarious or all-consuming. The gig economy pretends to offer flexibility, but in practice it strips away rights, benefits, and security. Professional workers face unpaid overtime, side hustles, and an expectation of constant availability. Labor laws lag decades behind. Union-busting is normalized.

At the same time, those without work are treated with suspicion. Unemployment, disability, and even retirement are framed as moral failings or burdens on the system.

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Nightfall: No Rest for the Weary

At night, the apps don’t sleep. Your data is still harvested. Your bank is still charging fees. Your landlord’s algorithm is still adjusting rent. Your student loan is still accruing interest. Your body, overstressed and under-cared-for, begins to break down.

Even dreams aren’t free: entertainment has been colonized by neoliberal culture, feeding you aspirational lifestyles and endless content to dull your exhaustion. Everything is monetized. Everything is a subscription.

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Resistance in the Cracks

Despite its pervasiveness, neoliberalism is not invincible. People are resisting in small and large ways—through union organizing, mutual aid, alternative media, degrowth activism, and radical pedagogy. These aren’t just political choices; they are survival strategies.

But for resistance to grow, we must name the problem clearly. Neoliberalism is not just a phase of capitalism—it’s an ideology embedded in every institution and mediated by every platform. It isolates us, overworks us, and extracts from us while pretending to offer freedom and choice.

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The 24/7/365 Trap

We live in neoliberalism’s world, but we don’t have to live by its rules. That starts with refusing its myths: that poverty is personal failure, that education is a private good, that health must be earned, that the market is sacred.

As long as neoliberalism governs our lives without challenge, inequality will deepen and democracy will continue to erode. The question isn’t whether we can afford to abandon neoliberalism—the question is whether we can survive if we don’t.

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Sources:

• Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos

• David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism

• Sarah Jaffe, Work Won’t Love You Back

• Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, “Seeing Like a Market”

• Astra Taylor, The Age of Insecurity

• Michael Hudson, The Destiny of Civilization

• Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man

Defunding Public Media and the Dumbing Down of the United States of America

In the summer of 2025, as political battles raged over spending priorities, the Trump administration quietly moved to strip federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which helps sustain PBS and NPR. The justification? Cost-cutting and “eliminating liberal bias.” But beneath the surface, the defunding of public media is part of a much larger and more troubling trend: the deliberate degradation of public knowledge and critical thinking in the United States.

While elites send their children to private schools and consume high-quality journalism behind paywalls, the American public is being left with infotainment, partisan outrage, and algorithm-driven misinformation. Public broadcasting—though imperfect—has long served as one of the few accessible sources of educational content, cultural programming, and fact-based journalism available to all. Its erosion is a symbolic and practical blow to civic literacy in a country already struggling with basic educational attainment.

A Nation Struggling with Literacy

According to the U.S. Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics, only about half of U.S. adults read above a sixth-grade level. The OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) has also found that nearly 20% of U.S. adults perform at or below the lowest levels of literacy and numeracy, placing the U.S. behind many other developed countries in basic skills.

A 2020 Gallup report estimated that low levels of literacy cost the U.S. economy more than $200 billion annually in lost productivity, wages, and tax revenue. Yet funding for adult education, public libraries, and public broadcasting continues to shrink—even as disinformation spreads faster and wider.

Who Benefits from a Dumbed-Down Public?

As the Higher Education Inquirer has documented in its reporting on for-profit education, digital credential mills, and the student debt crisis, the American knowledge economy is deeply stratified. Access to high-quality information, critical discourse, and even basic educational tools is increasingly a function of wealth and geography.

The defunding of NPR and PBS aligns with other coordinated efforts to dismantle public goods: the closure of public libraries, the corporatization of public universities, and the privatization of K-12 education through charter networks and voucher programs. These moves benefit private equity, edtech entrepreneurs, and ideological actors who profit when the public cannot think critically or access reliable information.

Far-right activists have long targeted public media as an enemy, not because it is radical, but because it provides a baseline of factual reporting that challenges misinformation and offers cultural programming outside the commercial marketplace. As trust in mainstream institutions declines, the vacuum is filled by influencers, conspiracy theorists, and partisan content creators—many of whom now dominate online spaces where public discourse once lived.

The Role of Public Media in Civic Life

PBS and NPR have historically played an important role in fostering civic engagement and lifelong learning. Shows like Frontline, Nova, NewsHour, and Morning Edition offered context and depth not found on commercial networks. Educational programming for children, such as Sesame Street and Arthur, supported early literacy and social development, particularly for families without access to high-quality preschool.

The attack on public media is, therefore, not just about money. It is about erasing a platform for critical inquiry and shared public knowledge. In many rural communities, public radio is still the most consistent, nonpartisan news source. Removing federal support won’t just weaken these outlets—it may silence them entirely.

A Broader War on Intelligence

This latest move fits within a broader campaign to delegitimize expertise, suppress academic freedom, and dismantle public education. As we reported in “Socrates in Space: University of Austin and the Billionaire Pipeline,” there’s a concerted effort by political operatives and billionaires to replace traditional knowledge institutions with ideologically-aligned alternatives.

The result is a country in which millions lack the literacy to read a ballot initiative, interpret a news article, or understand a contract—and where those with access to capital can shape the discourse while the rest are locked out.

In this environment, public media is not simply an institution—it is a last line of defense.

Consolidating Informational Power

The defunding of PBS and NPR is not an isolated event. It is part of a systemic effort to dismantle civic infrastructure, suppress critical thinking, and consolidate informational power in the hands of the wealthy and the politically connected. In a country where half the adult population cannot read beyond a sixth-grade level, eliminating access to high-quality, accessible programming is not just negligent—it is a form of engineered ignorance.

The Higher Education Inquirer will continue to investigate the erosion of public knowledge and its consequences. If you have stories about media access, censorship, or attacks on public institutions in your community, contact us at gmcghee@aya.yale.edu..

Sources:

• U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), “Adult Literacy in the United States,” 2020

• OECD, “Skills Matter: Further Results from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC),” 2016

• Gallup, “Assessing the Economic Gains of Eradicating Illiteracy Nationally and Regionally in the United States,” 2020

• Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Budget History

• Pew Research Center, “News Consumption Across Social Media in 2023”

• Higher Education Inquirer, “Socrates in Space: University of Austin and the Billionaire Pipeline,” 2024

• Higher Education Inquirer, “The 2U-PAC Nexus,” 2025

The Rise of Joe Rogan, AI, and Distrust: What It Means for Traditional Journalism and Higher Education

The media landscape in the United States continues to shift rapidly, with significant implications not only for journalism but also for education, politics, and civic engagement. A recent Reuters Institute Digital News Report reveals a dramatic change in how Americans—especially younger citizens—consume news. For the first time, more Americans reported getting their news from social and video networks than from traditional television and news websites or apps. In the post-inauguration week of January 2025, this milestone marked a sobering moment for legacy media and higher education institutions tied to conventional notions of media literacy and journalistic integrity.

One of the most visible signs of this transformation is the prominence of podcasters and online influencers such as Joe Rogan, whose reach now rivals—and often surpasses—that of network anchors and seasoned reporters. According to the report, one in five Americans encountered news or commentary from Rogan during the week after the presidential inauguration. Other influential figures included Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, Ben Shapiro, and Brian Tyler Cohen—names that draw significant loyalty from ideological audiences but also raise concerns about bias, misinformation, and the growing power of personality-driven content.

The influence of these creators extends beyond simple popularity. As Nic Newman of the Reuters Institute noted, they attract demographics that traditional media often fail to reach—particularly young men, conservative audiences, and those with low trust in what they see as a "liberal elite" mainstream press. This trend has a direct bearing on the mission and structure of American higher education, which has historically aligned itself with liberal democratic norms, academic rigor, and journalistic objectivity.

While university journalism programs and public radio stations have long been the training grounds for reporters, the new wave of content creators is largely self-taught, algorithm-amplified, and commercially successful—often without journalistic credentials or institutional backing. The implications for higher ed are profound: students may no longer see value in traditional journalism degrees or media studies if alternative paths offer greater visibility and profitability. This further challenges colleges and universities already struggling with enrollment declines, public distrust, and questions about ideological bias.

Another significant development is the role of artificial intelligence in news consumption. The report found that 15% of those under 25 now rely on AI chatbots and interfaces like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Meta AI for news weekly. While AI can provide quick and customized information, it also raises concerns about the decline of direct traffic to publisher websites, the risk of disinformation, and the erosion of context and investigative depth that traditional outlets once provided.

Meanwhile, over 70% of Americans expressed concern about their ability to discern truth from falsehood online. Despite—or perhaps because of—the abundance of content, trust in the news remains at a stagnant 40% across global markets. In the U.S., politicians are viewed as the leading source of false or misleading information, followed closely by online influencers. This environment has created a digital Wild West in which news, propaganda, entertainment, and advertising are increasingly indistinguishable.

Social media platform X (formerly Twitter) has also seen a resurgence as a news source, particularly among right-leaning users and young men. Twenty-three percent of Americans now use X for news, a jump of 8 percentage points from last year. In contrast, platforms like Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon have failed to gain similar traction.

The implications for higher education go beyond media studies departments. Civic literacy, critical thinking, and democratic engagement are all at risk when information is consumed without vetting or context. Universities and public educators must now grapple with how to teach digital literacy in an age where the loudest voices—and not the most factual—command attention.

At the same time, institutions must reflect on their own roles in this shift. The traditional media’s alignment with elite academic and political cultures has alienated large segments of the population, especially those who feel economically or culturally marginalized. The rise of Rogan and others is as much a symptom of that alienation as it is a media phenomenon.

For the Higher Education Inquirer, the message is clear: if truth still matters, then new strategies for reaching the public—especially younger generations—must be developed. That means embracing new technologies without surrendering to them, and fostering independent, investigative voices that hold power accountable, wherever it resides.

The old media model is collapsing. But the need for trustworthy information, critical analysis, and bold reporting has never been more urgent.