Search This Blog
Showing posts sorted by date for query Henry Giroux. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query Henry Giroux. Sort by relevance Show all posts

Tuesday, January 6, 2026

End of an Era


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.

Special thanks to:
Bryan Alexander (Future Trends Forum), Lisa Bannon (Wall Street Journal), Joe Berry (Higher Education Labor United), 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), 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), 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 (education writer),  David Halperin (Republic Report), Bill Harrington (Croatan Institute), Phil Hill (On EdTech), 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), 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), Gary Stocker (College Viability), Strelnikov, 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), Helena Worthen (Higher Ed Labor United), DW (South American Correspondent), Heidi Weber (Whistleblower Revolution), 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.

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.

Dahn Shaulis and Glen McGhee

Posted by at No comments:

Sunday, January 4, 2026

Higher Education Inquirer Resources, Spring 2026

[Editor's note: Please let us know of any corrections, additions, or broken links.  We always welcome your feedback.]  

This list traces how U.S. higher education has been reshaped by neoliberal policies, privatization, and data-driven management, producing deepening inequalities across race and class. The works examine the rise of academic capitalism, growing student debt, corporatization, and the influence of private interests—from for-profit colleges to rankings and surveillance systems. Together, they depict a sector drifting away from its public mission and democratic ideals, while highlighting the structural forces that created today’s crises and the reforms needed to reverse them.











Ahn, Ilsup (2023). The Ethics of Educational Healthcare: Student Debt, Neoliberalism, and Justice. Palgrave Macmillan.
Alexander, Bryan (2020). Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education. Johns Hopkins Press.
Alexander, Bryan (2023). Universities on Fire. Johns Hopkins Press.
Alexander, Bryan (2026). Peak Higher Ed. Johns Hopkins Press.
Angulo, A. (2016). Diploma Mills: How For-profit Colleges Stiffed Students, Taxpayers, and the American Dream. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Apthekar, Bettina (1966). Big Business and the American University. New Outlook Publishers.
Apthekar, Bettina (1969). Higher Education and the Student Rebellion in the United States, 1960–1969: A Bibliography.
Archibald, R. & Feldman, D. (2017). The Road Ahead for America's Colleges & Universities. Oxford University Press.
Armstrong, E. & Hamilton, L. (2015). Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality. Harvard University Press.
Arum, R. & Roksa, J. (2011). Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. University of Chicago Press.
Baldwin, Davarian (2021). In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. Bold Type Books.
Barr, Andrew & Turner, Sarah (2023). The Labor Market Returns to Higher Education. Oxford University Press.
Bennett, W. & Wilezol, D. (2013). Is College Worth It? Thomas Nelson.
Berg, I. (1970). The Great Training Robbery: Education and Jobs. Praeger.
Berman, Elizabeth P. (2012). Creating the Market University. Princeton University Press.
Berman, Elizabeth Popp & Stevens, Mitchell (eds.) (2019). The University Under Pressure. Emerald Publishing.
Berry, J. (2005). Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education. Monthly Review Press.
Berry, J. and Worthen, H. (2021). Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education. Pluto Books.
Best, J. & Best, E. (2014). The Student Loan Mess. Atkinson Family Foundation.
Bledstein, Burton J. (1976). The Culture of Professionalism. Norton.
Bogue, E. Grady & Aper, Jeffrey (2000). Exploring the Heritage of American Higher Education.
Bok, D. (2003). Universities in the Marketplace. Princeton University Press.
Bousquet, M. (2008). How the University Works. NYU Press.
Brennan, J. & Magness, P. (2019). Cracks in the Ivory Tower. Oxford University Press.
Brint, S. & Karabel, J. (1989). The Diverted Dream. Oxford University Press.
Burawoy, Michael & Mitchell, Katharyne (eds.) (2020). The University, Neoliberalism, and the Politics of Inequality. Routledge.
Burd, Stephen (2024). Lifting the Veil on Enrollment Management: How a Powerful Industry is Limiting Social Mobility in American Higher Education. Harvard Education Press
Cabrera, Nolan L. (2018). White Guys on Campus. Rutgers University Press.
Cabrera, Nolan L. (2024). Whiteness in the Ivory Tower. Teachers College Press.
Cantwell, Brendan & Robertson, Susan (eds.) (2021). Research Handbook on the Politics of Higher Education. Edward Elgar.
Caplan, B. (2018). The Case Against Education. Princeton University Press.
Cappelli, P. (2015). Will College Pay Off? Public Affairs.
Carney, Cary Michael (1999). Native American Higher Education in the United States. Transaction.
Cassuto, Leonard (2015). The Graduate School Mess. Harvard University Press.
Caterine, Christopher (2020). Leaving Academia. Princeton Press.
Childress, H. (2019). The Adjunct Underclass. University of Chicago Press.
Chomsky, Noam (2014). Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books.
Choudaha, Rahul & de Wit, Hans (eds.) (2019). International Student Recruitment and Mobility. Routledge.
Clay, Kevin (2026). I Guess This Is Activism?: Youth, Political Education, and Free-Market Common Sense. University of Minnesota Press.  
Cohen, Arthur M. (1998). The Shaping of American Higher Education. Jossey-Bass.
Collins, Randall (1979/2019). The Credential Society. Columbia University Press.
Cottom, Tressie McMillan (2016). Lower Ed.
Cottom, Tressie McMillan & Darity, William A. Jr. (eds.) (2018). For-Profit Universities. Routledge.
Domhoff, G. William (2021). Who Rules America? Routledge.
Donoghue, F. (2008). The Last Professors.
Dorn, Charles (2017). For the Common Good. Cornell University Press.
Eaton, Charlie (2022). Bankers in the Ivory Tower. University of Chicago Press.
Eisenmann, Linda (2006). Higher Education for Women in Postwar America. Johns Hopkins Press.
Espenshade, T. & Walton Radford, A. (2009). No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal. Princeton University Press.
Faragher, John Mack & Howe, Florence (eds.) (1988). Women and Higher Education in American History. Norton.
Farber, Jerry (1972). The University of Tomorrowland. Pocket Books.
Freeman, Richard B. (1976). The Overeducated American. Academic Press.
Gaston, P. (2014). Higher Education Accreditation. Stylus.
Gildersleeve, Ryan Evely & Tierney, William (2017). The Contemporary Landscape of Higher Education. Routledge.
Ginsberg, B. (2013). The Fall of the Faculty. Oxford University Press.
Giroux, Henry (1983). Theory and Resistance in Education. Bergin and Garvey Press.
Giroux, Henry (2014). Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Haymarket Books.
Giroux, Henry (2022). Pedagogy of Resistance. Bloomsbury Academic.
Gleason, Philip (1995). Contending with Modernity. Oxford University Press.
Golden, D. (2006). The Price of Admission.
Goldrick-Rab, S. (2016). Paying the Price.
Graeber, David (2018). Bullshit Jobs. Simon and Schuster.
Groeger, Cristina Viviana (2021). The Education Trap. Harvard Press.
Hamilton, Laura T. & Kelly Nielson (2021). Broke.
Hampel, Robert L. (2017). Fast and Curious. Rowman & Littlefield.
Hirschman, Daniel & Berman, Elizabeth Popp (eds.) (2021). The Sociology of Higher Education.
Johnson, B. et al. (2003). Steal This University.
Kamenetz, Anya (2006). Generation Debt. Riverhead.
Keats, John (1965). The Sheepskin Psychosis. Lippincott.
Kelchen, Robert (2018). Higher Education Accountability. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Kezar, A., DePaola, T., & Scott, D. (2019). The Gig Academy. Johns Hopkins Press.
Kinser, K. (2006). From Main Street to Wall Street.
Kozol, Jonathan (1992). Savage Inequalities. Harper Perennial.
Kozol, Jonathan (2006). The Shame of the Nation. Crown.
Kraus, Neil (2023). The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement. Temple University Press.
Labaree, David (1997). How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning. Yale University Press.
Labaree, David F. (2017). A Perfect Mess. University of Chicago Press.
Lafer, Gordon (2004). The Job Training Charade. Cornell University Press.
Loehen, James (1995). Lies My Teacher Told Me. The New Press.
Lohse, Andrew (2014). Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy. Thomas Dunne Books.
Lucas, C.J. (1994). American Higher Education: A History.
Lukianoff, Greg & Haidt, Jonathan (2018). The Coddling of the American Mind. Penguin Press.
Maire, Quentin (2021). Credential Market. Springer.
Mandery, Evan (2022). Poison Ivy. New Press.
Marginson, Simon (2016). The Dream Is Over. University of California Press.
Marti, Eduardo (2016). America's Broken Promise. Excelsior College Press.
Mettler, Suzanne (2014). Degrees of Inequality. Basic Books.
Morris, Dan & Targ, Harry (2023). From Upton Sinclair's 'Goose Step' to the Neoliberal University.
Newfeld, C. (2011). Unmaking the Public University.
Newfeld, C. (2016). The Great Mistake.
Newfield, Christopher (2023). Metrics-Driven. Johns Hopkins Press.
O’Neil, Cathy (2016). Weapons of Math Destruction. Crown.
Palfrey, John (2020). Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces. MIT Press.
Paulsen, M. & Smart, J.C. (2001). The Finance of Higher Education. Agathon Press.
Piketty, Thomas (2020). Capital and Ideology. Harvard University Press.
Reynolds, G. (2012). The Higher Education Bubble. Encounter Books.
Rojstaczer, Stuart (1999). Gone for Good. Oxford University Press.
Rosen, A.S. (2011). Change.edu. Kaplan Publishing.
Roth, G. (2019). The Educated Underclass. Pluto Press.
Ruben, Julie (1996). The Making of the Modern University. University of Chicago Press.
Rudolph, F. (1991). The American College and University.
Rushdoony, R. (1972). The Messianic Character of American Education. The Craig Press.
Schrecker, Ellen (2010). The Lost Soul of Higher Education: New Press.
Selingo, J. (2013). College Unbound.
Shelton, Jon (2023). The Education Myth. Cornell University Press.
Simpson, Christopher (1999). Universities and Empire. New Press.
Sinclair, U. (1923). The Goose-Step.
Slaughter, Sheila & Rhoades, Gary (2004). Academic Capitalism and the New Economy. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Smyth, John (2017). The Toxic University. Palgrave Macmillan.
Sperber, Murray (2000). Beer and Circus. Holt.
Stein, Sharon (2022). Unsettling the University. Johns Hopkins Press.
Stevens, Mitchell L. (2009). Creating a Class. Harvard University Press.
Stodghill, R. (2015). Where Everybody Looks Like Me.
Tamanaha, B. (2012). Failing Law Schools. University of Chicago Press.
Tatum, Beverly (1997). Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Basic Books.
Taylor, Barret J. & Cantwell, Brendan (2019). Unequal Higher Education. Rutgers University Press.
Thelin, John R. (2019). A History of American Higher Education. Johns Hopkins Press.
Tolley, K. (2018). Professors in the Gig Economy. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Trow, Martin (1973). Problems in the Transition from Elite to Mass Higher Education. Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. 
Twitchell, James B. (2005). Branded Nation. Simon and Schuster.
Vedder, R. (2004). Going Broke By Degree.
Veysey, Lawrence R. (1965). The Emergence of the American University.
Washburn, J. (2006). University Inc.
Washington, Harriet A. (2008). Medical Apartheid. Anchor.
Whitman, David (2021). The Profits of Failure. Cypress House.
Wilder, C.D. (2013). Ebony and Ivy.
Winks, Robin (1996). Cloak and Gown. Yale University Press.
Woodson, Carter D. (1933). The Mis-Education of the Negro.
Zaloom, Caitlin (2019). Indebted. Princeton University Press.
Zemsky, Robert, Shaman, Susan & Baldridge, Susan Campbell (2020). The College Stress Test. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Zuboff, Shoshana (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs. 

Activists, Coalitions, Innovators, and Alternative Voices

 College Choice and Career Planning Tools

Innovation and Reform

Higher Education Policy

Data Sources

Trade publications
Posted by at 2 comments:

Tuesday, December 30, 2025

Higher Education Inquirer nears 2 million views, with more than 1.5 million in 2025

As 2025 draws to a close, Higher Education Inquirer (HEI) is approaching a bittersweet milestone: nearly 2 million total page views since its founding, with more than 1.5 million of those views occurring in 2025 alone. At the same time, HEI will cease operations on January 6, 2026, bringing an end to one of the most independent and critical voices covering higher education in the United States.

The extraordinary growth in readership during 2025 came amid historic disruption across higher education. HEI documented the unraveling of federal oversight, the rise of hyper-deregulation, the expanding reach of for-profit colleges and private equity, and the worsening student debt crisis. These developments drove unprecedented interest from readers seeking analysis that challenged official narratives and corporate messaging.

HEI’s growing audience was fueled not only by comprehensive reporting, but by early warnings that were often ignored by institutions and policymakers. In August 2025, Higher Education Inquirer published a warning about escalating campus violence and political radicalization exactly one month before the Charlie Kirk investigation became public, underscoring the publication’s role as an early-warning system rather than a reactive outlet. That article was part of a broader series examining how extremist politics, lax security, and institutional denial were converging on U.S. campuses.

This foresight extended back further. In early 2024, HEI analyzed Project 2025, highlighting its implications for higher education, civil liberties, and democratic governance. At a time when much of the higher education press treated Project 2025 as speculative, HEI examined its explicit calls for mass deportations, the targeting of immigrants and international students, and the restructuring of federal agencies affecting education, labor, and research. Those warnings now read less like commentary and more like documentation.

HEI’s investigative work extended beyond reporting and analysis. Over the years, the publication submitted dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to federal and state agencies, uncovering critical data about institutional misconduct, federal oversight failures, and the financialization of higher education. These FOIAs often revealed information that universities and regulators preferred to keep hidden, from financial irregularities to internal policy deliberations affecting students and staff.

Labor reporting was another cornerstone of HEI’s mission. The publication highlighted the struggles of underpaid and overworked faculty, staff, and healthcare workers connected to colleges, drawing attention to systemic exploitation across public and private institutions. Similarly, HEI closely tracked borrower defense to repayment claims, scrutinizing how the Department of Education and loan servicers handled student complaints, debt relief applications, and policy reversals—often exposing bureaucratic dysfunction that had direct consequences for tens of thousands of students.

HEI’s editorial record reflects a consistent effort to connect policy blueprints to real-world consequences before those consequences became headline news. Coverage spanned a vast array of topics, including predatory institutions like the University of Phoenix, Trump-era housing policies, climate change, militarization of campuses, labor exploitation, and the privatization of public institutions. Notable published articles from 2025 include:

Despite its growing influence, HEI’s independence came at a cost. The publication has never been backed by universities, education corporations, or major foundations. A lawsuit involving Chip Paucek became the final breaking point, imposing substantial legal fees that HEI could not absorb. While the publication stood by its reporting, the emotional toll of prolonged legal conflict made continued operations impossible.

Reaching nearly 2 million views—most of them in a single year—is not merely a metric of success; it is evidence that HEI’s work mattered to a wide and engaged audience. As Higher Education Inquirer prepares to shut down, its legacy remains in the thousands of articles that documented institutional abuse, policy failure, and human cost within higher education.

HEI ends not because its mission was fulfilled, but because the structural forces it scrutinized proved difficult to survive. The readership growth of 2025 suggests that the need for independent, adversarial higher education journalism is greater than ever—even as one of its most persistent voices is forced to fall silent.


Posted by at 1 comment:

Saturday, December 20, 2025

Financial Logic and the Limits of Educational Governance: David R. Barker and the Marketization of Postsecondary Policy (Glen McGhee)

 “Barker’s background does not prepare him to navigate this tension. It predisposes him to resolve it in favor of the market—and to treat the casualties as acceptable losses.”

Dr. David R. Barker is an economist, wealthy real estate investor, and long-time Iowa Republican activist who currently serves as Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education under President Donald Trump. A sixth-generation Iowan and former member of the Iowa Board of Regents, Barker previously worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, taught economics and real estate at the University of Iowa and the University of Chicago, and now runs a real estate and finance firm that owns thousands of apartments and commercial properties across the Midwest.

In 2025, Barker was nominated and confirmed to oversee federal postsecondary policy, with a portfolio focused on “outcomes and accountability,” accreditation reform, student aid policy, and aligning federal grants with the administration’s ideological and fiscal priorities. His academic background—most notably his 1991 dissertation, Real Estate, Real Estate Investment Trust, and Closed End Fund Valuation—reveals a conceptual toolkit grounded in financial economics, asset valuation, property markets, and quantitative modeling. That training, reinforced by decades as a real estate investor and governance actor, shapes a distinctively market-oriented understanding of higher education—one that privileges measurable returns, financial discipline, and transactional accountability.

While these perspectives can contribute to cost control and fiscal stewardship, they also generate predictable and consequential blind spots when applied to institutions whose core purposes are epistemic, developmental, and democratic rather than market-optimizing.

Barker’s intellectual formation rests firmly within a positivist epistemological framework that treats value as something discoverable through quantification, comparability, and replicability. Real estate valuation depends on observable data—comparable sales, capitalization rates, discounted cash flows—to arrive at ostensibly objective measures of worth. Higher education, by contrast, encompasses vast domains of inquiry that resist quantification. The humanities and interpretive social sciences generate knowledge through close reading, archival reconstruction, ethnography, phenomenology, and critical theory—methods that foreground context, reflexivity, and meaning rather than numerical outputs.

An institutional ethnographer, for example, does not aim to optimize organizational efficiency but to understand how power, texts, and routines structure everyday academic life, often from the standpoint of marginalized actors. Such work deliberately rejects managerial abstraction in favor of situated understanding. From an asset-valuation perspective, this kind of scholarship appears unproductive, inefficient, or indulgent. Barker’s training offers little conceptual grounding for why a historian’s decade-long archival project on subaltern voices or a philosopher’s engagement with moral reasoning might be intrinsically valuable despite producing no immediate marketable deliverables.

This epistemological mismatch extends directly into student learning. Decades of higher education research conceptualize college as a developmental process encompassing cognitive complexity, identity formation, ethical reasoning, and critical consciousness. Theories such as Chickering’s vectors of identity development, Perry’s scheme of intellectual and ethical growth, and transformative learning theory emphasize qualitative shifts in how students interpret the world and their place within it.

Barker’s emphasis on return on investment and labor-market outcomes aligns instead with a human capital model that treats education as an economic input yielding wage premiums. This transactional framework struggles to accommodate the intrinsic, non-instrumental aims of liberal education—the cultivation of judgment, curiosity, civic responsibility, and reflective self-understanding. When learning is operationalized primarily through employment metrics, the deeper question of how students think, reason, and deliberate disappears from view.

Nowhere is the mismatch more consequential than in faculty governance and academic freedom. American higher education rests on shared governance, articulated in the AAUP’s 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, which recognizes faculty as the primary stewards of curriculum, academic standards, and knowledge production.

Barker’s professional background emphasizes hierarchical authority, executive control, and fiduciary accountability—an orientation that mirrors corporate governance rather than collegial self-rule. His rhetoric echoes the managerial logic of the Jarratt Report era, which reimagined universities as corporate enterprises with academic units treated as cost centers. Barker has publicly described “battling a liberal university establishment,” mapping faculty political affiliations through voter registration data, closing departments, and curbing what he calls “indoctrination sessions.” These remarks reveal a view of faculty not as epistemic authorities but as politically suspect employees requiring surveillance and correction.

Applying asset-management logic to academic departments—judging their worth by enrollment figures or ideological balance rather than disciplinary contribution—misunderstands the distributed authority and intellectual autonomy on which academic quality depends.

Equally alien to financial logic are the tacit and relational dimensions of learning. Liberal education unfolds through mentorship, dialogue, sustained engagement with complexity, and the slow formation of intellectual dispositions. Its most profound effects often emerge years after graduation and cannot be pre-specified as metrics. Barker’s preference for standardizable outcomes and compliance-based accountability—reinforced by the Trump administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence—privileges what can be measured over what can be meaningfully understood.

The consequences are especially severe for community colleges and HBCUs. These institutions serve disproportionate numbers of low-income, first-generation, and historically marginalized students. Research consistently shows that equity gaps reflect structural inequalities in K–12 education, funding, and social stratification, not institutional inefficiency or lack of merit. Market-efficiency frameworks misread these realities, interpreting low completion rates as failure rather than as evidence of unmet structural obligations.

Saint Augustine’s University captured this tension in its response to Barker regarding the Compact for Academic Excellence, noting that restrictions on race-conscious policies conflict directly with HBCUs’ statutory mission under Title III of the Higher Education Act. Institutions designed to expand access cannot be evaluated using the same market metrics as selective research universities.

Barker’s antipathy toward critical pedagogy further reveals the limits of his framework. Educational traditions rooted in Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Henry Giroux understand education as inherently political and aimed at developing critical consciousness and democratic agency. Barker’s efforts to eliminate diversity-related accreditation standards and suppress justice-oriented curricula position him in direct opposition to these traditions.

At stake are fundamentally different answers to the question of what education is for. Market logic prioritizes efficiency, credential exchange, and wage outcomes. Critical and liberal traditions prioritize human development, democratic participation, and knowledge for its own sake. Barker’s training provides no framework for adjudicating between these visions beyond market discipline.

The predictable consequences are already visible: epistemological narrowing, erosion of faculty autonomy, commodification of credentials, punitive accountability for equity-serving institutions, and deregulated accreditation that invites predatory actors. History shows that weakened oversight benefits for-profit extractive models, not students or the public good.

David R. Barker’s expertise equips him to manage balance sheets and assess asset performance. It does not equip him to steward institutions whose central purposes—knowledge creation, human development, and democratic citizenship—cannot be reduced to financial return. The conflict articulated by Saint Augustine’s University between equity mission and market mandate will define the next phase of federal postsecondary policy. Barker’s background does not prepare him to navigate that tension. It predisposes him to resolve it in favor of the market—and to treat the casualties as acceptable losses.

Sources

American Association of University Professors. Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities. 1966.

American Association of University Professors. 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, with 1970 Interpretive Comments.

Barker, David R. Real Estate, Real Estate Investment Trust, and Closed End Fund Valuation. Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, 1991.

Chickering, Arthur W., and Linda Reisser. Education and Identity. Second edition. Jossey-Bass, 1993.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, 1970.

Giroux, Henry A. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Haymarket Books, 2014.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.

Jarratt, Alex. Report of the Steering Committee for Efficiency Studies in Universities. Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals, 1985.

Nelson, Cary. No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom. New York University Press, 2010.

Perry, William G. Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998.

Slaughter, Sheila, and Gary Rhoades. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Trow, Martin. “Problems in the Transition from Elite to Mass Higher Education.” OECD conference paper, 1973.

U.S. Department of Education. Compact for Academic Excellence. Trump administration policy framework, 2025.

U.S. Department of Education, Office of Postsecondary Education. Accreditation and State Authorization Regulations. Federal rulemakings and guidance, various years.

Yosso, Tara J. “Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth.” Race Ethnicity and Education, 2005.

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: ,

Monday, November 24, 2025

The Mis-education of Global Elites

For generations, global elites have been positioned—socially, politically, financially—as the people best equipped to shape a better world. They have had the resources to eliminate poverty, curb climate catastrophe, restrain war, expand healthcare, reform universities, and make democratic participation meaningful. Instead, the world they have built is defined by widening inequality, ecological collapse, and a global crisis of legitimacy. Their failure is not accidental. It is the product of a profound mis-education: a system that trains elites not in stewardship or solidarity, but in domination, extraction, and self-preservation.

Across the United States, the U.K., Europe, and increasingly the Gulf States and East Asia, elite education has become a finishing school for rulers rather than a training ground for genuine public servants. These institutions—rich in endowment, selective in admission, steeped in prestige—construct worldviews that normalize inequity as efficiency, privatization as innovation, and austerity as necessity. Instead of interrogating the historical and structural forces that produce suffering, elite curricula often neutralize them, reducing political economy to management science and social justice to branding.

This mis-education manifests in global leadership failures. The same graduates who enter parliaments, presidential cabinets, central banks, multinational boards, and international NGOs routinely oversee policies that accelerate inequality and erode the public sphere. Many come from universities with unparalleled research capacity and moral rhetoric, yet preside over housing crises, medical debt catastrophes, and planetary degradation. They authorize wars but rarely experience them. They tout meritocracy while gatekeeping opportunity. They celebrate entrepreneurship while dismantling public goods. Their philanthropic initiatives—often built from profits derived through tax avoidance, monopolization, and labor exploitation—give the appearance of benevolence without altering the underlying systems of harm.

Carter G. Woodson’s warning in The Mis-education of the Negro echoes eerily here: “When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.” Global elites, educated into a narrow ideology that glorifies markets and hierarchy, do not need to be coerced into maintaining destructive systems—they do so voluntarily, believing themselves enlightened.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the corporate education complex itself. Elite universities produce the analysts who rationalize austerity, the managers who coordinate privatization, the consultants who reengineer public institutions to mimic corporations, and the financiers who define the metrics of success. They also cultivate the ideological insulation that shields elites from accountability. When their policies trigger chaos, the explanation is never structural, only technical: markets corrected, externalities emerged, populists disrupted stability. The mis-education of elites ensures they cannot see failure as their own.

Global institutions—from the IMF and World Bank to the UN and WTO—have mirrored this mindset. Their leaders, mostly trained in the same corridors of prestige, have promoted development models that prioritize capital mobility over community well-being, and foreign investment over local sovereignty. Even when faced with overwhelming evidence that structural adjustment, privatized healthcare, or financialization intensify human suffering, the elite worldview persists. The inability—or unwillingness—to imagine alternative systems is not an intellectual deficiency but the logical outcome of an education designed to reproduce power, not challenge it.

Meanwhile, those most affected by global crises—workers, migrants, debtors, students, the poor—are told to adapt, innovate, or sacrifice. They are bombarded with entrepreneurial rhetoric and resilience talk while their material conditions worsen. Political leaders lament social fragmentation but continue to funnel wealth upward. University administrators speak of inclusion while expanding administrative hierarchies and outsourcing labor. Energy executives promise transitions while drilling new pipelines. Tech CEOs warn about misinformation while building the infrastructure that spreads it.

The result is a world where the legitimacy of elites is evaporating. From Santiago to Paris, Lagos to Minneapolis, Delhi to London, mass movements are demanding accountability from institutions that have proven incapable of self-reform. The global backlash against inequality, authoritarianism, and corporate hegemony is not a misunderstanding—it is a recognition that the systems run by elites have failed.

If there is to be a better world, the mis-education of elites must be confronted directly. That means transforming the mission of universities from prestige accumulation to public purpose; replacing managerialism with democratic governance; centering histories of resistance rather than merely histories of empire; teaching economic justice instead of market worship; and training leaders who measure success not by shareholder value or rankings but by human flourishing.

Elites have long claimed exclusive expertise in solving the world’s problems. They have had centuries—and trillions—to prove it. They have failed miserably. A new generation of thinkers, activists, workers, and communities is already building the alternatives. Whether global elites choose to learn from them—or continue along their well-worn path of extraction and denial—will determine the next century.

For now, the record is clear: the institutions that shaped the world’s most powerful people were never designed to create justice. And they haven’t.

Academic Sources

Baldwin, Davarian L. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. Bold Type Books, 2021.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Stanford University Press, 1996.
Giroux, Henry A. Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education. Haymarket Books, 2014.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Khan, Shamus Rahman. Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. Princeton University Press, 2011.
Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. Oxford University Press, 1956.
Mkandawire, Thandika. “Institutional Monocropping and Monotasking in Africa.” UNRISD, 2007.
Piketty, Thomas. Capital and Ideology. Harvard University Press, 2020.
Saul, John Ralston. Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. Free Press, 1992.
Sklair, Leslie. The Transnational Capitalist Class. Wiley-Blackwell, 2000.
Stiglitz, Joseph E. Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited. W.W. Norton, 2017.
Woodson, Carter G. The Mis-education of the Negro. Associated Publishers, 1933.

Posted by at 3 comments:

Thursday, November 6, 2025

Hyper Credentialism and the Neoliberal College Meltdown (Glen McGhee and Dahn Shaulis)

In the neoliberal era, higher education has become less a public good and more a marketplace of promises. The ideology of “lifelong learning” has been weaponized into an endless treadmill of hyper-credentialism — a cycle in which students, workers, and institutions are trapped in perpetual pursuit of new degrees, certificates, and micro-badges.


From Education to Signaling

Once, a college degree was seen as a path to citizenship and critical thought. Today, it’s a market signal — and an increasingly weak one. The bachelor’s degree no longer guarantees stable employment, so the system produces ever-more credentials: master’s programs, micro-certificates, “badges,” and other digital tokens of employability.

This shift doesn’t solve economic precarity — it monetizes it. Workers internalize the blame for their own stagnating wages, believing that the next credential will finally make them “market ready.” Employers, meanwhile, use credential inflation to justify low pay and increased screening, outsourcing the costs of training onto individuals.

A Perfect Fit for Neoliberalism

Hyper-credentialism is not a side effect; it’s a feature of the neoliberal education economy. It supports four pillars of the model:

Privatization and Profit Extraction – Public funding declines while students pay more. Each new credential creates a new revenue stream for universities, online program managers (OPMs), and ed-tech corporations.

Individual Responsibility – The structural causes of unemployment or underemployment are reframed as personal failures. “You just need to upskill.”

Debt Dependency – Students and workers finance their “reskilling” through federal loans and employer-linked programs, feeding the student-debt industry and its servicers.

Market Saturation and Collapse – As more credentials flood the market, each becomes less valuable. Institutions respond by creating even more credentials, accelerating the meltdown.

The Education-Finance Complex

The rise of hyper-credentialism is inseparable from the growth of the education-finance complex — a web of universities, private lenders, servicers, and Wall Street investors.
Firms like 2U, Coursera, and Guild Education sell the illusion of “access” while extracting rents from students and institutions alike. University administrators, pressured by enrollment declines, partner with these firms to chase new markets — often by spinning up online master’s programs with poor outcomes.

The result is a debt-driven ecosystem that thrives even as public confidence collapses. The fewer good jobs there are, the more desperate people become to buy new credentials. The meltdown feeds itself.

Winners and Losers

Winners: Ed-tech executives, university administrators, debt servicers, and the politicians who promote “lifelong learning” as a substitute for wage growth or labor rights.

Losers: Students, adjunct faculty, working-class families, and the public universities hollowed out by austerity and privatization.

The rhetoric of “upskilling” and “personal growth” masks a grim reality: a transfer of wealth from individuals to financialized institutions under the guise of opportunity.

A System That Can’t Redeem Itself

As enrollment declines and public trust erodes, the industry doubles down on micro-credentials and “stackable” pathways — small fixes to a structural crisis. Each badge, each certificate, is sold as a ticket back into the middle class. Yet every new credential devalues the old, producing diminishing returns for everyone except those selling the product.

Hyper-credentialism thus becomes both the symptom and the accelerant of the college meltdown. It sustains the illusion of mobility in a collapsing system, ensuring that the blame never reaches the architects of austerity, privatization, and financialization.

Sources and Further Reading

Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution.

Giroux, Henry. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education.

Cottom, Tressie McMillan. Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy.

The Higher Education Inquirer archives on the college meltdown, OPMs, and the debt economy.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Thursday, October 30, 2025

When Parenthood Feels Like a Trap: Regret, Trumpism, and the Educated Underclass

The recent MSN article “I Regret Having Children — It Has Stripped My Life of Meaning” is not just a private confession. It is a mirror reflecting a collapsing social order — one where parenting, education, and labor are all defined by debt, exhaustion, and disillusionment.

In today’s America, the family, the school, and the workplace no longer promise progress; they reproduce precarity. The personal regret of parents becomes a collective symptom of a society that demands self-sacrifice but offers little reciprocity.

The Privatization of Care and the Myth of the “Good Parent”

Since the Reagan era, neoliberal ideology has reduced social problems to personal failures. Families are told to work harder, plan better, and be grateful — while the state retreats from childcare, healthcare, and education.

Parenting, once understood as a shared civic project, is now a private ordeal. The “good parent” myth demands endless self-denial while ignoring the structural forces that make family life unsustainable: stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, unaffordable education, and the erosion of community networks.

The parent who whispers, “I regret having children,” isn’t rejecting love — they are acknowledging betrayal. They were promised fulfillment through family, but abandoned by a system that commodifies care and isolates suffering.

The Dobbs Decision and the Politics of Coerced Parenthood

The 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling — which overturned Roe v. Wade — deepened this betrayal. By stripping away the constitutional right to abortion, the Supreme Court forced millions into unwanted pregnancies under conditions of economic and emotional strain.

This was no accident of jurisprudence. It was the political offspring of neoliberal neglect and Trump-era authoritarianism — a regime that exalts “family values” while defunding the social infrastructure that makes family life possible.

Dobbs represents coerced parenthood in a nation without paid leave, affordable childcare, or universal healthcare. It is the culmination of a system that insists on reproduction but refuses responsibility — transforming bodily autonomy into a political battleground while leaving families to fend for themselves.

Trumpism, Despair, and Manufactured Nostalgia

Trumpism feeds on the despair that neoliberalism creates. It promises to restore “traditional America” — stable jobs, strong families, obedient children — but it offers only resentment as consolation.

When exhausted parents or debt-ridden graduates look for meaning, Trumpian populism channels their frustration toward scapegoats: immigrants, educators, feminists, the poor. It converts structural despair into cultural war.

Trump’s America is a paradox: it glorifies the family while destroying the material base that sustains it. It preaches “Make America Great Again” while keeping its base desperate, indebted, and emotionally dependent on rage.

The Rise of the Educated Underclass

Nowhere is this contradiction clearer than in the making of the educated underclass — the millions of Americans who did everything “right” but found the social contract shredded beneath them.

They earned degrees, followed career advice, and invested in the myth of meritocracy. Yet decades of wage stagnation, precarious employment, and student debt have left them economically fragile and politically disoriented.

Many are parents who believed education would secure their children’s futures. Instead, they see their own children inheriting instability — locked out of homeownership, burdened with loans, and facing a world where credentials no longer guarantee dignity.

This educated underclass, spanning teachers, social workers, adjunct professors, nurses, and mid-level professionals, represents the human fallout of the neoliberal university and the marketized economy it feeds. Their disillusionment — like parental regret — is both personal and systemic.

Higher Education as a Debt Factory

Colleges once promised upward mobility; now they manufacture anxiety and debt. The family that sacrifices for tuition does so on faith that a degree still matters. But as corporate consolidation and automation erode stable work, that faith collapses.

Parents, particularly those from the working and lower-middle class, internalize this collapse as failure — not recognizing that the problem lies in a system that sells hope on credit. Their children, emerging into a gig economy with record debt, form the next generation of the educated underclass: credentialed, precarious, and politically volatile.

Regret as a Rational Response

In this context, parental regret is not deviance — it is rational. It reflects the exhaustion of trying to raise children, pay loans, and sustain meaning in a society where everything, including love, has been commodified.

It reflects the psychic cost of neoliberalism’s lie: that education, work, and family can still deliver self-realization without collective solidarity or public investment.

And it warns of what happens when a nation loses faith not only in its institutions but in the very act of reproduction itself.

Toward a Politics of Care and Repair

To break this cycle, we must confront the intertwined crises of reproduction, education, and inequality. A humane alternative would demand:

  • Universal reproductive freedom — protecting the right not to bear children, and the resources to raise them with dignity.

  • Tuition-free higher education and student debt relief — dismantling the educated underclass.

  • Guaranteed childcare, healthcare, and paid leave — treating parenting as collective labor, not private suffering.

  • Living wages and housing justice — reestablishing the economic base of real family life.

  • Democratized higher education — ending the capture of universities by finance and corporate boards.

Only by restoring care as a public good — not a private burden — can we move beyond regret toward renewal.

From Regret to Resistance

The parent who says, “I regret having children,” and the graduate who says, “My degree ruined my life,” are not failures. They are witnesses. Their grief exposes the moral bankruptcy of a system that exploits care, education, and aspiration for profit.

Trumpism thrives on that despair, offering nostalgia instead of justice. Neoliberalism rationalizes it, calling it “personal responsibility.”

But the truth is collective: meaning cannot survive where solidarity has been destroyed. The antidote to regret is not silence — it is organizing. It is rebuilding a society where care, education, and dignity are shared, not sold.

Sources

  • MSN News, “I Regret Having Children — It Has Stripped My Life of Meaning,” 2025.

  • Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. ___ (2022).

  • Donath, Orna. Regretting Motherhood: A Sociopolitical Analysis. North Atlantic Books, 2017.

  • Fraser, Nancy. Cannibal Capitalism. Verso, 2022.

  • Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos. Zone Books, 2015.

  • Giroux, Henry. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Haymarket, 2014.

  • Hochschild, Arlie. Strangers in Their Own Land. The New Press, 2016.

  • Shaulis, Dahn. The College Meltdown (Higher Education Inquirer archives).

Posted by at No comments:

Monday, October 27, 2025

The College Meltdown: A Retrospective

[In 2017, we collaborated with Crush the Street on a video describing the College Meltdown.]  

“Education is not merely a credentialing system; it is a humanizing act that fosters connection, purpose, and community.”

Origins

The College Meltdown began in the mid-2010s as a blog chronicling the slow collapse of U.S. higher education. Rising tuition, mounting student debt, and corporatization were visible signs, but the deeper crisis was structural: the erosion of public accountability and mission.

By 2015, the warning signs were unmistakable to us. On some campuses, student spaces were closed to host corporate “best practices” conferences. At many schools, adjunct instructors carried the bulk of teaching responsibilities, often without benefits, while administrators celebrated innovation. Higher education was quietly being reshaped to benefit corporations over students and communities — a true meltdown.

Patterns of the Meltdown

Enrollment in U.S. colleges began declining as early as 2011, reflecting broader demographic shifts: fewer children entering the system and a growing population of older adults. Small colleges, community colleges, and regional public universities were hardest hit, while flagship institutions consolidated wealth and prestige.

Corporate intermediaries known as Online Program Managers (OPMs) managed recruitment, marketing, and course design, taking large portions of tuition while universities retained risk. Fully automated robocolleges emerged, relying on AI-driven templates, predictive analytics, and outsourced grading. While efficient, these systems dehumanized education: students became data points, faculty became monitors, and mentorship disappeared.

“Robocolleges and AI-driven systems reduce humans to data points — an education stripped of connection is no education at all.”

Feeding the AI Beast

As part of our effort to reclaim knowledge and influence public discourse, we actively contributed to Wikipedia. Over the years, we made more than 12,000 edits on higher education topics, ensuring accurate documentation of predatory practices, adjunct labor, OPMs, and corporatization. These edits both informed the public and, inadvertently, fed the AI beast — large language models and AI systems that scrape Wikipedia for training data now reflect our work, amplifying it in ways we could never have predicted.

“By documenting higher education rigorously, we shaped both public knowledge and the datasets powering AI systems — turning transparency into a tool of influence.”

Anxiety, Anomie, and Alienation

The College Meltdown documented the mental health toll of these transformations. Rising anxiety, feelings of anomie, and widespread alienation were linked to AI reliance, dehumanized classrooms, insecure faculty labor, and societal pressures. Students felt like credential seekers; faculty suffered burnout.

“Addressing the psychological and social effects of dehumanized education is essential for ethical recovery.”

Trump, Anti-Intellectualism, and Fear in the Era of Neoliberalism

The project also addressed the broader political and social climate. The Trump era brought rising anti-intellectualism, skepticism toward expertise, and a celebration of market logic over civic and moral education. For many, it was an era of fear: fear of surveillance, fear of litigation, fear of being marginalized in a rapidly corporatized, AI-driven educational system. Neoliberal policies exacerbated these pressures, emphasizing privatization, metrics, and competition over community and care.

“Living under Trump-era neoliberalism, with AI monitoring, corporate oversight, and mass surveillance, education became a space of anxiety as much as learning.”

Quality of Life and the Call for Rehumanization

Education should serve human well-being, not just revenue. The blog emphasized Quality of Life and advocated for Rehumanization — restoring mentorship, personal connection, and ethical engagement.

“Rehumanization is not a luxury; it is the foundation of meaningful learning.”

FOIA Requests and Whistleblowers

From the start, The College Meltdown relied on evidence-based reporting. FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests were used to obtain internal communications, budgets, and regulatory filings, shining light on opaque practices. Whistleblowers, including adjunct faculty and staff at universities and OPMs, provided firsthand testimony of misconduct, financial malfeasance, and educational dehumanization. Their courage was central to the project’s mission of transparency and accountability.

“Insider testimony and public records revealed the hidden forces reshaping higher education, from corporate influence to predatory practices.”

Historical Sociology: Understanding the Systemic Collapse

The importance of historical sociology cannot be overstated in analyzing the decline of higher education. By examining the evolution of educational systems, we can identify patterns of inequality, the concentration of power, and the commodification of knowledge. Historical sociology provides the tools to understand how past decisions and structures have led to the current crisis.

“Historical sociology reveals, defines, and formulates patterns of social development, helping us understand the systemic forces at play in education.”

Naming Bad Actors: Accountability and Reform

A critical aspect of The College Meltdown was the emphasis on naming bad actors — identifying and holding accountable those responsible for the exploitation and degradation of higher education. This included:

  • University Administrators: Prioritizing profit over pedagogy.

  • Corporate Entities: Robocolleges and OPMs profiting at the expense of educational quality.

  • Political Figures and Ultraconservatives: Promoting policies that undermined public education and anti-intellectualism.

“Holding bad actors accountable is essential for meaningful reform and the restoration of education's ethical purpose.”


[In 2016, we called out several bad actors in for-profit higher education, including CEOs Jack Massimino, Kevin Modany, and Todd Nelson.] 

Existential Aspects of Climate Change

The blog also examined the existential dimensions of climate change. Students and faculty face a dual challenge: preparing for uncertain futures while witnessing environmental degradation accelerate. Higher education itself is implicated, both as a contributor through consumption and as a forum for solutions. The looming climate crisis intensifies anxiety, alienation, and the urgency for ethical, human-centered education.

“Climate change makes the stakes of education existential: our survival, our knowledge, and our moral responsibility are intertwined.”

Mass Speculation and Financialization

Another critical theme explored was mass speculation and financialization. The expansion of student debt markets, tuition-backed bonds, and corporate investments in higher education transformed students into financial instruments. These speculative dynamics mirrored broader economic instability, creating both a moral and systemic crisis for the educational sector.

“When education becomes a commodity for speculation, learning, mentorship, and ethical development are subordinated to profit and risk metrics.”

Coverage of Protests and Nonviolent Resistance

The College Meltdown documented student and faculty resistance: tuition protests, adjunct labor actions, and campaigns against predatory OPM arrangements. Nonviolent action was central: teach-ins, sit-ins, and organized campaigns demonstrated moral authority and communal solidarity in the face of systemic pressures, litigation, and corporate intimidation.

Collaboration and Resistance

Glen McGhee provided exceptional guidance, connecting insights on systemic collapse, inequality, and credential inflation. Guest authors contributed across disciplines and movements, making the blog a living archive of accountability and solidarity:

Guest Contributors:
Bryan Alexander, Ann Bowers, James Michael Brodie, Randall Collins, Garrett Fitzgerald, Erica Gallagher, Henry Giroux, David Halperin, Bill Harrington, Phil Hill, Robert Jensen, Hank Kalet, Neil Kraus, the LACCD Whistleblower, Wendy Lynne Lee, Annelise Orleck, Robert Kelchen, Debbi Potts, Jack Metzger, Derek Newton, Gary Roth, Mark Salisbury, Gary Stocker, Harry Targ, Heidi Weber, Richard Wolff, and Helena Worthen.

Lessons from the Meltdown

The crisis was systemic. Technology amplified inequality. Corporate higher education rebranded rather than reformed. Adjunctification and labor precarity became normalized. Communities of color and working-class students suffered disproportionately.

Dehumanization emerged as a central theme. AI, automation, and robocolleges prioritized efficiency over mentorship, data over dialogue, and systems over human relationships. Rising anxiety, anomie, and alienation reflected the human toll.

“Rehumanization, mentorship, community, transparency, ethical accountability, and ecological awareness are essential to restore meaningful higher education.”

Looking Forward

As higher education entered the Trump era, its future remained uncertain. Students, faculty, and communities faced fear under neoliberal policies, AI-driven monitoring, mass surveillance, litigation pressures, ultraconservative influence, climate crises, and financial speculation. Will universities reclaim their role as public goods, or continue as commodified services? The College Meltdown stands as a testament to those who resisted dehumanization and anti-intellectualism. It also calls for Quality of Life, ethical practice, mental well-being, environmental responsibility, and Rehumanization, ensuring education serves the whole person, not just the bottom line. 

Sources and References

  • Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid. Doubleday, 2006.

  • Rosenthal, Elisabeth. An American Sickness. Penguin, 2017.

  • Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Crown, 2010.

  • Nelson, Alondra. Body and Soul. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

  • Paucek, Chip. “2U and the Growth of OPMs.” EdSurge, 2021. link

  • Ravitch, Diane. The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Basic Books, 2010.

  • Alexander, Bryan. Academia Next. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020.

  • U.S. Department of Education. “Closed School Information.” 2016–2020. link

  • Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Student Debt Statistics, 2024. link

  • Wayback Machine Archive of College Meltdown Blog: link

Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)