Neoliberalism and the Global College Meltdown

Over the past four decades, neoliberalism has reshaped higher education into a market-driven enterprise, producing what can only be described as a global College Meltdown. Once envisioned as a public good—a tool for civic empowerment, social mobility, and national progress—higher education in the United States, the United Kingdom, and China has been transformed into a competitive market system defined by privatization, debt, and disillusionment.

The United States: From Public Good to Profit Engine

Nowhere has neoliberal ideology had a more devastating effect on higher education than in the United States. Beginning in the 1980s, with the Reagan administration’s cuts to federal grants and the expansion of student loans, higher education funding shifted from public investment to individual burden. Universities adopted corporate governance models, hired armies of administrators, and marketed education as a private commodity promising personal enrichment rather than collective advancement.

The results are visible everywhere: tuition inflation, student debt exceeding $1.7 trillion, and the proliferation of predatory for-profit colleges. Elite universities transformed into financial behemoths, hoarding endowments while relying on contingent faculty. Meanwhile, working-class and minority students were lured into debt traps by institutions that promised upward mobility but delivered unemployment and despair.

The U.S. College Meltdown—a term that describes the system’s moral and financial collapse—is a direct consequence of neoliberal policies: deregulation, privatization, and austerity disguised as efficiency. The profit motive replaced the public mission, and the casualties include students, adjuncts, and the ideal of education as a democratic right.

The United Kingdom: Marketization and Managerialism

The United Kingdom followed a similar trajectory under Margaret Thatcher and her successors. The introduction of tuition fees in 1998 and their tripling in 2012 marked the formal triumph of neoliberal logic over public investment. British universities became quasi-corporate entities, obsessed with league tables, branding, and global rankings.

The result has been mounting student debt, declining staff morale, and a hollowing out of intellectual life. Faculty strikes over pensions and pay disparities underscore a deeper crisis of purpose. Universities now function as rent-seeking landlords—building luxury dorms for international students while cutting humanities departments. The logic of “student-as-customer” has reduced education to a transaction, and accountability has been redefined to mean profit margin rather than social contribution.

The UK’s College Meltdown mirrors that of the U.S.—a story of financialization, precarious labor, and the erosion of public trust.

China: Neoliberalism with Authoritarian Characteristics

At first glance, China seems to defy the Western College Meltdown. Its universities have expanded rapidly, producing millions of graduates and investing heavily in research. But beneath this apparent success lies a deeply neoliberal structure embedded in an authoritarian framework.

Since the 1990s, China’s higher education system has embraced competition, rankings, and market incentives. Universities compete for prestige and funding; families invest heavily in private tutoring and overseas degrees; and graduates face a saturated labor market. The result is mounting anxiety and unemployment among young people—known online as the “lying flat” generation, disillusioned with promises of meritocratic success.

The Chinese model fuses state control with neoliberal marketization. Education serves as both an instrument of national power and a mechanism of social stratification. In this sense, China’s version of the College Meltdown reflects a global truth: the commodification of education leads to alienation, regardless of political system.

A Global System in Crisis

Whether in Washington, London, or Beijing, the pattern is strikingly similar. Neoliberalism treats education as an investment in human capital, reducing learning to a financial calculation. Universities compete like corporations; students borrow like consumers; and knowledge becomes a tool of capital accumulation rather than liberation.

This convergence of economic and ideological forces has created an unsustainable higher education bubble—overpriced, overcredentialized, and underdelivering. Across continents, graduates face debt, underemployment, and despair, while universities chase rankings and revenue streams instead of justice and truth.

Toward a Post-Neoliberal Education

Reversing the College Meltdown requires more than reform; it demands a new philosophy. Public universities must reclaim their civic mission. Education must once again be understood as a human right, not a private investment. Debt forgiveness, reinvestment in teaching, and democratic governance are essential first steps.

Neoliberalism’s greatest illusion was that markets could produce wisdom. The College Meltdown proves the opposite: when education serves profit instead of people, it consumes itself from within.

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Sources:

• Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos (2015)

• David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005)

• Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed (2017)

• The Higher Education Inquirer archives on the U.S. College Meltdown

• BBC, “University staff strikes and student debt crisis,” 2024

• Caixin, “China’s youth unemployment and education anxiety,” 2023

Generation Z and the Fractured American Dream: Class Divide, Debt, and the Search for a Future

For Generation Z, the old story of social mobility—study hard, go to college, work your way up—has lost its certainty. The class divide that once seemed bridgeable through education now feels entrenched, as debt, precarious work, and economic volatility blur the promise of progress.

The new economy—dominated by artificial intelligence, speculative assets like cryptocurrency, and inflated housing markets—has not delivered stability for most. Instead, it’s widened gaps between those who own and those who owe. Many young Americans feel locked out of wealth-building entirely. Some have turned to riskier bets—digital assets, gig work, or start-ups powered by AI tools—to chase opportunities that traditional institutions no longer provide. Others have succumbed to despair. Suicide rates among young adults have climbed sharply in recent years, correlating with financial stress, debt, and social isolation.

And echoing through this uncertain landscape is a song that first rose from the coalfields of Kentucky during the Great Depression—Florence Reece’s 1931 protest hymn, “Which Side Are You On?”

Come all you good workers,
Good news to you I’ll tell,
Of how the good old union
Has come in here to dwell.

Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?

Nearly a century later, those verses feel newly urgent—because Gen Z is again being forced to pick a side: between solidarity and survival, between reforming a broken system or resigning themselves to it.

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The Class Divide and the Broken Ladder
Despite record levels of education, Gen Z faces limited social mobility. College remains a class marker, not an equalizer. Students from affluent families attend better-funded universities, graduate on time, and often receive help with housing or job placement. Working-class and first-generation students, meanwhile, navigate under-resourced campuses, heavier debt, and weaker professional networks.

The Pew Research Center found that first-generation college graduates have nearly $100,000 less in median wealth than peers whose parents also hold degrees. For many, the degree no longer guarantees a secure foothold in the middle class—it simply delays financial independence.

They say in Harlan County,
There are no neutrals there,
You’ll either be a union man,
Or a thug for J. H. Blair.

The metaphor still fits: there are no neutrals in the modern class struggle over debt, housing, and automation.

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Debt, Doubt, and the New Normal
Gen Z borrowers owe an average of around $23,000 in student loans, a figure growing faster than any other generation’s debt load. Over half regret taking on those loans. Many delay buying homes, having children, or even seeking medical care. Those who drop out without degrees are burdened with debt and little to show for it.

The debt-based model has become a defining feature of American life—especially for the working class. The price of entry to a better future is borrowing against one’s own.

Don’t scab for the bosses,
Don’t listen to their lies,
Us poor folks haven’t got a chance
Unless we organize.

If Reece’s song once called miners to unionize against coal barons, its spirit now calls borrowers, renters, adjuncts, and gig workers to collective resistance against financial systems that profit from their precarity.

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AI and the Erosion of Work
Artificial intelligence promises efficiency, but it also threatens to hollow out the entry-level job market Gen Z depends on. Automation in journalism, design, law, and customer service cuts off rungs of the career ladder just as young workers reach for them.

While elite graduates may move into roles that supervise or profit from AI, working-class Gen Zers are more likely to face displacement. AI amplifies the class divide: it rewards those who already have capital, coding skills, or connections—and sidelines those who don’t.

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Crypto Dreams and Financial Desperation
Locked out of traditional wealth paths, many young people turned to cryptocurrency during the pandemic. Platforms like Robinhood and Coinbase promised quick gains and independence from the “rigged” economy. But when crypto markets crashed in 2022, billions in speculative wealth evaporated. Some who had borrowed or used student loan refunds to invest lost everything.

Online forums chronicled not only the financial losses but also the psychological fallout—stories of panic, shame, and in some tragic cases, suicide. The new “digital gold rush” became another mechanism for transferring wealth upward.

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The Real Estate Wall
While digital markets rise and fall, real estate remains the ultimate symbol of exclusion. Home prices have climbed over 40 percent since 2020, while mortgage rates hover near 8 percent. For most of Gen Z, ownership is out of reach.

Older generations built equity through housing; Gen Z rents indefinitely, enriching landlords and institutional investors. Without intergenerational help, the “starter home” has become a myth. In America’s new class order, those who inherit property inherit mobility.

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Despair and the Silent Crisis
Behind the data lies a mental health emergency. The CDC reports that suicide among Americans aged 10–24 has risen nearly 60 percent in the past decade. Economic precarity, debt, housing insecurity, and climate anxiety all contribute.

Therapists describe “financial trauma” as a defining condition for Gen Z—chronic anxiety rooted in systemic instability. Universities respond with mindfulness workshops, but few confront the deeper issue: a society that privatized risk and monetized hope.

They say in Harlan County,
There are no neutrals there—
Which side are you on, my people,
Which side are you on?

The question lingers like a challenge to policymakers, educators, and investors alike.

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A Two-Tier Future
Today’s economy is splitting into two distinct realities:

• The secure class, buffered by family wealth, education, AI-driven income, and real estate assets.

• The precarious class, burdened by loans, high rents, unstable work, and psychological strain.

The supposed democratization of opportunity through technology and education has in practice entrenched a new feudalism—one coded in algorithms and contracts instead of coal and steel.

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Repairing the System, Not the Student
For Generation Z, the American Dream has become a high-interest loan. Education, technology, and financial innovation—once tools of liberation—now function as instruments of control.

Reforming higher education is necessary, but not sufficient. The deeper work lies in redistributing power: capping predatory interest rates, investing in affordable housing, curbing speculative bubbles, ensuring that AI’s gains benefit labor as well as capital, and confronting the mental health crisis that shadows all of it.

Florence Reece’s song endures because its question has never been answered—only updated. As Gen Z stands at the intersection of debt and digital capitalism, that question rings louder than ever:

Which side are you on?

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Sources

• Florence Reece, “Which Side Are You On?” (1931).

• Pew Research Center, “First-Generation College Graduates Lag Behind Their Peers on Key Economic Outcomes,” 2021.

• Dēmos, The Debt Divide: How Student Debt Impacts Opportunities for Black and White Borrowers, 2016.

• EducationData.org, “Student Loan Debt by Generation,” 2024.

• Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Gen Z Student Debt and Wealth Data Brief, 2022.

• CNBC, “Gen Z vs. Their Parents: How the Generations Stack Up Financially,” 2024.

• WUSF, “Generation Z’s Net Worth Is Being Undercut by College Debt,” 2024.

• Newsweek, “Student Loan Update: Gen Z Hit with Highest Payments,” 2024.

• The Kaplan Group, “How Student Debt Is Locking Millennials and Gen Z Out of Homeownership,” 2024.

• CDC, Suicide Mortality in the United States, 2001–2022, National Center for Health Statistics, 2023.

• Brookings Institution, “The Impact of AI on Labor Markets: Inequality and Automation,” 2024.

• CNBC, “Crypto Crash Wipes Out Billions in Investor Wealth, Gen Z Most Exposed,” 2023.

• Zillow, “U.S. Housing Affordability Reaches Lowest Point Since 1989,” 2024.

Divestment from Predatory Education Stocks: A Moral Imperative

Calls for divestment from exploitative industries have long been part of movements for social and economic justice—whether opposing apartheid, fossil fuels, or private prisons. Today, another sector demands moral scrutiny: the network of for-profit education corporations and student loan servicers that have turned higher learning into a site of mass indebtedness and despair. From predatory colleges to the companies that profit from collecting on student debt, the system functions as a pipeline of extraction. For those who believe education should serve the public good, the issue is not merely financial—it is moral.

The Human Cost of Predatory Education

For decades, for-profit college chains such as Corinthian Colleges, ITT Tech, the University of Phoenix, DeVry, and Capella targeted low-income students, veterans, single parents, and people of color with high-pressure marketing and promises of career advancement. These institutions, funded primarily through federal student aid, often charged premium tuition for substandard programs that left graduates worse off than when they began.

When Corinthian and ITT Tech collapsed, they left hundreds of thousands of students with worthless credits and mountains of debt. But the collapse did not end the exploitation—it simply shifted it. The business model has re-emerged in online form through education technology and “online program management” (OPM) firms such as 2U, Coursera, and Academic Partnerships. These firms, in partnership with elite universities like Harvard, Yale, and USC, replicate the same dynamics of inflated costs, opaque contracts, and limited accountability.

The Servicing of Debt as a Business Model

Beyond the schools themselves, student loan servicers and collectors—Maximus, Sallie Mae, and Navient among them—have built immense profits from managing and pursuing student debt. Sallie Mae, once a government-sponsored enterprise, was privatized in the 2000s and evolved into a powerful lender and loan securitizer. Navient, its spinoff, became notorious for deceptive practices and aggressive collections that trapped borrowers in cycles of delinquency.

Maximus, a major federal contractor, now services defaulted student loans on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education. These companies profit directly from the misery of borrowers—many of whom are victims of predatory schools or structural inequality. Their incentive is not to liberate students from debt, but to sustain and expand it.

The Role of Institutional Investors

The complicity of institutional investors cannot be ignored. Pension funds, endowments, and major asset managers have consistently financed both for-profit colleges and loan servicers, even after repeated scandals and lawsuits. Public sector pension funds—ironically funded by educators—have held stock in Navient, Maximus, and large for-profit college operators. Endowments that pride themselves on ethical or ESG investing have too often overlooked education profiteering.

Investment firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street collectively hold billions of dollars in these companies, stabilizing an industry that thrives on the financial vulnerability of students. To profit from predatory education is to participate, however indirectly, in the commodification of aspiration.

Divestment as a Moral and Educational Act

Divesting from predatory education companies and loan servicers is not just an act of conscience—it is an educational statement in itself. It affirms that learning should be a vehicle for liberation, not a mechanism of debt servitude. When universities, pension boards, and faith-based investors divest from corporations like Maximus, Navient, and 2U, they are reclaiming education’s moral purpose.

The divestment movement offers a broader civic lesson: that profit and progress are not synonymous, and that investment must align with justice. Faith communities, student debt activists, and labor unions have made similar stands before—against apartheid, tobacco, and fossil fuels. The same principle applies here. An enterprise that depends on deception, coercion, and financial harm has no place in a socially responsible portfolio.

A Call to Action

Transparency is essential. Pension boards, university endowments, and foundations must disclose their holdings in for-profit education and student loan servicing companies. Independent investigations should assess the human consequences of these investments, particularly their disproportionate impact on women, veterans, and people of color.

The next step is moral divestment. Educational institutions, public pension systems, and religious organizations should commit to withdrawing investments from predatory education stocks and debt servicers. Funds should be redirected to debt relief, community college programs, and initiatives that restore trust in education as a public good.

The corporate education complex—spanning recruitment, instruction, lending, and collection—has monetized both hope and hardship. The time has come to sever public and institutional complicity in this cycle. Education should empower, not impoverish. Divestment is not merely symbolic—it is a declaration of values, a demand for accountability, and a reaffirmation of education’s original promise: to serve humanity rather than exploit it.

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Sources:

• U.S. Department of Education, Borrower Defense to Repayment Reports

• Senate HELP Committee, For Profit Higher Education: The Failure to Safeguard the Federal Investment and Ensure Student Success (2012)

• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) enforcement actions against Navient and Sallie Mae

• The Century Foundation, Online Program Managers and the Public Interest

• Student Borrower Protection Center, Profiting from Pain: The Financialization of the Student Debt Crisis

• Higher Education Inquirer archives

US Senate Reopens the Government—But Leaves the Working Class Behind

The U.S. Senate’s vote to reopen the federal government on Sunday will likely end a painful 40-day shutdown, but it does so at a cost that goes far beyond missed paychecks and delayed services. The deal, driven by pressure to restore “normalcy,” comes with an implicit betrayal: millions of Americans who rely on Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies are being left in limbo.

Those subsidies—lifelines for low- and middle-income Americans—are now set to expire at the end of the year. The so-called “continuing resolution” passed the Senate with bipartisan relief, but no guarantee that these critical supports will continue. In practical terms, Congress chose to reopen the government by walking away from those who most need its help.

A Shutdown Ends, but the Austerity Logic Continues

The 2025 shutdown was the longest in modern U.S. history, the result of partisan fights over spending and political maneuvering around health care. During that time, millions of Americans faced uncertainty: furloughed workers, delayed SNAP benefits, shuttered Head Start centers, and frozen federal contracts.

Now that the government is back in business, the same austerity logic remains intact. While defense spending and tax breaks for the wealthy are protected, basic supports like subsidized health insurance are treated as optional. It’s a familiar story—one that echoes through higher education, housing, and labor markets.

The End of ACA Subsidies Means a New Working-Class Squeeze

The ACA subsidies that expanded during the pandemic allowed millions of Americans—often those working multiple jobs without employer coverage—to afford health care for the first time. With their expiration looming, premiums are expected to skyrocket. For some, costs could double or triple.

This isn’t just about “health care.” It’s about how the American system continually shifts burdens downward. Families will make impossible choices: health coverage or rent, insulin or food, doctor visits or student loan payments.

At the same time, Senate Republicans have embraced Donald Trump’s renewed call to “replace Obamacare”—a move that could dismantle what’s left of the safety net altogether. 

The Broader Pattern: Abandoning the Working Class

The Senate’s actions fit a larger pattern of bipartisan neglect. Each “deal” that avoids short-term crisis seems to deepen long-term inequity.

• In health care: subsidies expire, Medicaid rolls shrink, and hospital mergers raise costs.

• In higher education: student debtors are promised relief but face new barriers, while for-profit and “online program management” companies continue to profit.

• In housing: low-income tenants are told to prove future earnings or risk eviction, even as rent outpaces inflation.

• In labor: wage stagnation persists, union power declines, and automation and AI make employment more precarious.

For Generation Z and millennials—already burdened with debt, low job security, and unaffordable housing—the message is consistent: you’re on your own.

Health and Education: Two Fronts of the Same Struggle

Health and education are supposed to be public goods, but both have become profit centers managed by corporate intermediaries and politicians chasing donors.

In health care, private insurers dominate ACA marketplaces. In higher ed, the same dynamic exists: online program managers (OPMs) and corporate lenders extract money while students shoulder debt. The government’s role becomes one of stabilizing markets—not stabilizing lives.

And when the working class pushes back—through union drives, debt strikes, or demands for universal health care—they’re met with the same refrain: “We can’t afford it.”

Austerity in a Time of Plenty

What’s striking is that this “fiscal responsibility” always targets the vulnerable. There’s no serious debate about clawing back corporate tax breaks or limiting Pentagon contracts. But when it comes to healthcare subsidies or student loan forgiveness, the belt suddenly tightens.

The working class subsidizes the rich, while being told that government aid is an indulgence. This political economy of scarcity has consequences—measured in bankruptcies, untreated illness, and despair.

Which Side Are You On?

When Woody Guthrie’s generation faced inequality, they had a rallying cry:

“Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?”

That question remains as urgent as ever. The Senate’s decision to reopen government while discarding health care protections for millions tells us whose side Washington is on—and it’s not the side of the working class.

Until policymakers see health, housing, and education as human rights rather than bargaining chips, “reopening government” will be little more than a hollow ritual of restoration—for a system that keeps leaving its people behind.

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Sources:

• Time: “What to Know About the Deal to End the Shutdown” (Nov. 2025)

• Al Jazeera: “US Senate nears vote on bill to end 40-day government shutdown” (Nov. 2025)

• Financial Times: “Senators take first step to end US government shutdown” (Nov. 2025)

• The Guardian: “Senate Republicans embrace Trump’s call to replace Obamacare” (Nov. 2025)

• Detroit Free Press: “Michigan's U.S. senators reject deal to end shutdown” (Nov. 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

Should Elites Get Bailed Out Again?

In 1929, when the stock market crashed, millions of Americans were plunged into unemployment, hunger, and despair. Yet the elites of Wall Street—whose reckless speculation fueled the disaster—often landed softly. By 1933, as the Great Depression deepened, nearly a quarter of the U.S. workforce was unemployed, thousands of banks had failed, and working families bore the brunt of the collapse. Ordinary people endured soup lines, Dust Bowl migration, and generational poverty. The government of Franklin D. Roosevelt eventually stepped in with reforms and safeguards like the FDIC and Glass-Steagall, but not before working-class Americans had paid the heaviest price.

Fast forward to 2008, when the global financial system once again teetered on collapse. This time, instead of letting the failures run their course, the U.S. government rushed to bail out Wall Street banks, auto manufacturers, and other corporate giants deemed “too big to fail.” Banks survived, CEOs kept their bonuses, and investors were shielded. Meanwhile, millions of working-class families lost their homes, jobs, and savings. Student loan borrowers, particularly those from working-class and minority backgrounds, never got a bailout. Adjunct faculty, contract workers, and gig laborers were left to navigate economic insecurity without systemic relief.

The pandemic brought the same story in a new form. Corporate bailouts, Federal Reserve interventions, and stimulus packages stabilized markets far more effectively than they stabilized households. Wall Street bounced back faster than Main Street. By 2021, the wealth of America’s billionaires had surged by more than $1.8 trillion, while ordinary workers struggled with eviction threats, childcare crises, and medical debt.

But the stakes are even higher today. U.S. elites are not only repeating past mistakes—they are doubling down on mass speculation across crypto, real estate, and equity markets. The rise and collapse of speculative cryptocurrencies revealed how wealth can be created and destroyed almost overnight, with everyday investors bearing the losses while venture capitalists and insiders cashed out early. Real estate speculation has driven housing prices beyond the reach of millions of working families, fueling homelessness and displacement. Equity markets, inflated by cheap debt and stock buybacks, have become disconnected from the real economy, rewarding executives while leaving workers behind.

This speculative frenzy is not just an economic issue—it is an environmental one. Fossil fuel corporations and their financiers continue to reap profits from industries that accelerate climate change, deforestation, and resource depletion. The destruction of ecosystems, the intensification of climate disasters, and the burden of environmental cleanup all fall disproportionately on working-class and marginalized communities. Yet when markets wobble, it is these same polluting elites who position themselves first in line for government protection.

The Federal Reserve has played a decisive role in this cycle. By keeping interest rates artificially low for years, it fueled debt-driven speculation in housing, equities, and corporate borrowing. When inflation spiked, the Fed shifted gears, raising rates at the fastest pace in decades. This brought pain to households through higher mortgage costs, rising credit card balances, and job insecurity—but banks and investment firms continued to receive lifelines through emergency lending facilities. The Fed’s interventions have too often prioritized elite stability over working-class survival.

Political leadership has compounded the problem. Under Donald Trump's first term, deregulation accelerated, with key provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act rolled back in 2018. Banks gained greater leeway to take risks, and oversight of mid-sized institutions weakened—a decision that later contributed to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023. Trump’s tax cuts overwhelmingly favored corporations and the wealthy, further concentrating wealth at the top while leaving the federal government less able to respond to future crises. In his second term, Trump and his allies signal that they would pressure the Fed to prioritize markets over workers and strip down remaining regulatory guardrails.

The logic of endless bailouts assumes that the survival of elites ensures the survival of the economy. But history proves otherwise. Whether in 1929, 2008, or 2020, the repeated subsidization of corporations and financial elites entrenches inequality, fuels reckless risk-taking, and leaves working families with the bill. The banks, crypto funds, and private equity firms that profit most during boom times rarely share their gains, yet they demand protection in busts.

And the problem is no longer just domestic—it is geopolitical. While U.S. elites depend on bailouts, rival powers are recalibrating. China is building alternative banking systems through the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Belt and Road Initiative. Russia, sanctioned by the West, is tightening its economic ties with China and other non-Western states. India and Brazil, key players in the BRICS bloc, are exploring alternatives to U.S. dollar dominance. If the U.S. continues to subsidize private failure with public money, it risks undermining its own global credibility and ceding economic leadership to rivals.

National security is directly tied to economic and environmental stability. A U.S. that repeatedly bails out elites while leaving ordinary citizens vulnerable erodes trust not only at home but abroad. Allies may question American leadership, while adversaries see opportunity in its fragility. If the U.S. financial system is perceived as permanently rigged—propping up elites while disempowering its workforce—it will accelerate the shift of global influence toward China, Russia, India, and Brazil.

Perhaps it’s time to let the system fail—not in the sense of mass suffering for ordinary people, but in the sense of refusing to cushion elites from the consequences of their own decisions. If banks gamble recklessly, let them face bankruptcy. If private equity firms strip-mine industries, let them collapse under their own weight. If universities chase speculative growth with predatory lending and overpriced credentials, let them answer for it in the courts of law and public opinion.

Failure, though painful, can also be cleansing. Without bailouts, institutions would be forced to reckon with structural flaws instead of papering them over. Alternatives could emerge: community-based credit unions, worker-owned cooperatives, public higher education funded for the public good rather than private profit, and serious investment in green energy and sustainable development.

The real question is not whether elites deserve another bailout. The real question is whether the United States can afford to keep subsidizing them while undermining its working class, its environment, and its national security. For too long, workers, students, and families have shouldered the costs of elite failure. The survival of the U.S. economy—and its place in the world—may depend not on saving elites, but on building something stronger and fairer in their place.

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Sources:

• Congressional Budget Office, The 2008 Financial Crisis and Federal Response

• Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Bank Failures During the Great Depression

• Institute for Policy Studies, Billionaire Wealth Surge During COVID-19

• Federal Reserve, Monetary Policy and Emergency Lending Facilities

• Brookings Institution, Bailouts and Moral Hazard

• BRICS Policy Center, Alternative Financial Governance Structures

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2023 Synthesis Report

• National Association of Realtors, Housing Affordability Data

• Public Law 115-174, Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act (2018)

The Ghosts Are Real: Savage Inequalities and the Shadow Lives of American Education (Glen McGhee)

The ghosts that haunt our classrooms, our campuses, and our collective conscience are not fictional. They are the very real psychological, social, and structural consequences of a rigged system—one that begins sorting children before they can even read, and never stops. In the United States, your ZIP code can predict your future better than your talents, your effort, or your dreams. These are not just policy outcomes—they are hauntings.

In Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol exposed a brutal truth that remains largely unchanged decades later: the American education system is a machine for manufacturing inequality. It is not broken. It is working exactly as designed.

Savage Inequalities as the Origin of the Ghosts

Kozol’s investigation of urban and suburban schools across the country uncovers a tale of two Americas. In some districts, students attend pristine campuses with swimming pools, art rooms, and science labs outfitted with modern equipment. In others—often Black, brown, and low-income neighborhoods—children cram into overcrowded, crumbling buildings with outdated textbooks, uncertified teachers, and toxic air. These are not outliers. These are the norm in a country that funds schools based on property taxes and then feigns surprise when the poor get less.

Kozol’s work reveals a 25% funding gap between the wealthiest and the poorest school districts. But this statistic only scratches the surface. What’s more disturbing is how these inequalities shape what children are prepared to become. As Kozol puts it, affluent children are educated to govern; the rest are trained to be governed. The ladder of opportunity is not just tilted—it’s a false metaphor altogether. In reality, it’s a labyrinth, its exits marked only for a privileged few.

The Doppelgänger as Social Reality

Kozol’s work makes this painfully clear: for every student who climbs the ladder of social mobility, there are countless others whose paths were blocked before they even began.

This “other self” haunts not only those who never had a chance, but also those who succeed. Elite college students from privileged backgrounds carry, consciously or not, the knowledge that their success is not purely meritocratic. For those who beat the odds and "make it out," there is often survivor’s guilt, a gnawing doubt that they belong, and an awareness of the parallel life they might have lived had luck not intervened.

In this way, every story of success is shadowed by the lives of those excluded. Every degree earned in privilege echoes the silent absence of another that could have been.

The Emotional and Ontological Toll

Kozol’s most powerful moments are not found in statistics, but in the voices of children. These children understand their disadvantage. They do not need scholars or officials to explain that they have been given less. They live it. This awareness fosters a quiet despair—a sense that they are “less than,” that the system is indifferent to their suffering.

This is where the ghosts become most palpable: in the trauma of unrealized potential, in the emotional residue of knowing that your future was narrowed before it began. For those who do succeed, the haunting takes the form of imposter syndrome, alienation, and a fractured sense of identity. For those left behind, the haunting is more visceral—resignation, defiance, or a hard-earned wisdom forged in adversity.

Systemic Labyrinth, Not a Ladder

American education pretends to be a ladder of opportunity, but in reality, it is a maze designed to preserve the status quo. Kozol shows that race, class, and geography—not effort or talent—determine the outcomes for millions. The system gaslights its victims by preaching meritocracy while practicing exclusion.

The labyrinth is not neutral. It favors white, wealthy, suburban students and punishes poor, Black, brown, and immigrant students. Its traps are numerous: underfunded schools, racist disciplinary practices, biased testing, and the school-to-prison pipeline. Those who navigate this maze without losing their way are the exception, not the rule.

Haunting as Political and Ethical Reality

The ghosts Kozol uncovers are not figments of imagination. They are real people—real children—whose lives were shaped by arbitrary forces long before they had a voice. These ghosts do not simply disappear. They persist into adulthood, into the workforce, into our democracy—or lack thereof.

As one scholar noted, these hauntings “carry profound political and ethical stakes.” They force us to reckon with our collective failure to create a just society. They ask us: What do we owe to Eli and the millions like him? How can we live ethically in a system that continues to destroy futures?

These questions are not academic. They are existential. They shape how we define citizenship, democracy, and justice.

The Moral of the Story 

The ghosts of American education are not metaphors. They are structural, psychological, and moral realities born of savage inequalities that begin in childhood and persist across lifetimes. Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities forces us to confront a society that prepares one child to lead and another to obey—based on nothing more than the location of their birth.

Until we confront this systemic cruelty, every success story will be haunted by the shadow of a life unrealized. The doppelgänger, the lost self, is not a ghost story. It is the story of America.

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Sources:

• Kozol, Jonathan. Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. Crown Publishing, 1991.

• Carter, Prudence L. Keepin’ It Real: School Success Beyond Black and White. Oxford University Press, 2005.

• Anyon, Jean. Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform. Teachers College Press, 1997.

• Reay, Diane. Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Classes. Policy Press, 2017.

• The Education Trust. “Funding Gaps 2022.” https://edtrust.org.

Throwing the Flag for the Fourth Time: U.S. College Students Are Still Gambling with Student Aid

In this fourth installment of our continuing investigation into student gambling, one issue looms larger than ever: the misuse of student financial aid to fund risky betting behavior. This is not an isolated anomaly or a cautionary footnote. It is a widespread and worsening crisis that reveals the vulnerabilities in a higher education system increasingly entangled with digital addiction and financial exploitation.

An estimated one in five U.S. college students has used student aid—whether federal loans, Pell Grants, or other education funds—to place bets, often through mobile sports betting platforms. These findings, confirmed in recent surveys by Intelligent.com and state gambling councils, expose a troubling truth: higher education is not just failing to prevent this behavior; it may be silently enabling it.

Since the 2018 Supreme Court decision that overturned the federal ban on sports betting, online gambling has exploded in popularity. Students can now place bets with a few taps on their phones, often encouraged by targeted promotions, social media ads, and campus culture. A 2023 NCAA survey showed that nearly 60 percent of 18- to 22-year-olds had engaged in sports betting, with as many as 41 percent betting on their own school’s teams. What was once considered deviant is now normalized.

Financial aid, originally intended to help students pay for tuition, housing, and books, has become a silent reservoir for gambling losses. Students who misuse these funds often do so quietly, making it easy for the behavior to go undetected until academic or financial disaster strikes. This is not only a matter of personal irresponsibility but of systemic neglect. With little oversight of how aid money is spent after disbursement, students can easily divert those funds toward high-risk activities without triggering institutional red flags.

The consequences are severe. Students who gamble with loan money frequently fall behind on rent and tuition. Some accumulate additional credit card debt. Many report heightened levels of anxiety, depression, and academic disengagement. A subset drops out entirely—often with thousands of dollars in nondischargeable debt and no degree to show for it. What we’re witnessing is the transformation of long-term educational debt into a form of speculative entertainment, with young people bearing the cost and the state underwriting the risk.

Colleges and universities, for the most part, have done little to stop this. Fewer than a quarter have any formal gambling policy in place. Counseling centers are often underfunded and untrained in gambling-specific treatment. Awareness campaigns are limited and usually reactive. Meanwhile, the gambling industry continues to rake in profits and expand its reach on college campuses, sometimes through sponsorship deals or targeted advertisements that blur the lines between athletics, student identity, and wagering.

The NFL Foundation’s $600,000 commitment to gambling awareness may be well-intentioned, but it’s woefully insufficient when compared to the scale of the problem and the profits at stake. While a handful of schools have taken steps to limit advertising or incorporate gambling risk into financial literacy programs, these measures remain the exception rather than the rule.

This is not a moral panic. It is a public health crisis driven by the same factors that have fueled other digital addictions: rapid technological change, corporate lobbying, student precarity, and institutional inaction. It is part of a broader shift toward what we’ve described in previous articles as “digital dope”—a system in which tech companies engineer compulsive behaviors for profit, and colleges quietly adjust to a reality where student attention, money, and mental health are fair game.

The normalization of gambling, especially among male students, mirrors other troubling trends we’ve reported: rising alcohol abuse, declining classroom engagement, and growing alienation from educational institutions. Many of these students are not just gambling because it’s fun—they are using it to escape a deeper sense of disconnection, uncertainty, and despair.

To meaningfully address this crisis, institutions must confront the uncomfortable truth that financial aid is being used to subsidize digital addiction. That means enforcing clear restrictions on gambling app promotions, integrating gambling screening into student health protocols, rethinking how aid is distributed and monitored, and establishing formal policies that treat gambling risk with the same urgency as alcohol or drug abuse.

In publishing our fourth report on student gambling, The Higher Education Inquirer again asks: how many warnings are needed before the problem is acknowledged at scale? How many more students must drop out, spiral into debt, or fall into addiction before administrators, lawmakers, and the Department of Education take this seriously?

The answers are not hard to find. What’s missing is the will to act.

Sources:
Intelligent.com (2022, 2023), College Student Gambling Surveys
NCAA (2023), Sports Betting Participation Data
Nevada Council on Problem Gambling (2024)
Florida Council on Compulsive Gambling (2023)
CollegeGambling.org
Time Magazine (2024), “An Explosion in Sports Betting Is Driving Gambling Addiction Among College Students”
Kindbridge (2025), “Is America in the Middle of a College Student Gambling Addiction Crisis?”
Addiction.Rutgers.edu (2024), “The Rise of Sports Betting Among College Students”
HigherEducationInquirer.org (2025), “Student Aid and Student Gambling: Risky Connection”

Iron Cage or Golden Handcuffs? (Glen McGhee and Dahn Shaulis)

Max Weber’s “iron cage” described a world where bureaucratic rationality and capitalist structures governed life so thoroughly that individuality and freedom were diminished. Today, Americans still live in that cage, bound by debt, hierarchy, and rules that channel human energy into impersonal systems. Alongside the cage sits another metaphor: the “golden handcuffs.” Unlike the coercion of bureaucracy, golden handcuffs represent the comfort and stability of jobs, mortgages, and benefits that discourage mobility. Taken together, iron and gold shape a society increasingly stuck in place.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the experience of younger generations. Student loan debt has become one of the most powerful bars of the iron cage. For decades, policymakers sold higher education as the ticket to mobility, yet the financing model has left tens of millions of Americans burdened with obligations that stretch across lifetimes. Parents still paying their own loans now watch their children borrow again, creating a cycle of indebtedness that limits family formation, delays homeownership, and stifles geographic mobility. College graduates often cannot take risks—whether by starting a business, moving to a new city, or pursuing meaningful but lower-paid work—because debt service makes such choices impossible. The American promise of education as liberation has become, for many, education as shackles.

Layered onto this cage is the massive growth of what anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”—roles that exist less to create value than to maintain bureaucratic appearance and control. Whole sectors of the economy are filled with paper-pushers, compliance officers, middle managers, and customer service agents who know that their work adds little or nothing to society. Yet these jobs proliferate because they keep the system running, providing salaries and benefits that workers can’t easily abandon. Here lie the golden handcuffs: people remain in unfulfilling work not because they love it, but because the alternative—losing health insurance, defaulting on loans, or risking homelessness—is too dangerous. In effect, workers trade freedom for security, their ambitions dulled by the constant calculation of what can be risked and what cannot.

The Wall Street Journal recently documented how job-switching and geographic mobility have fallen to historic lows. For many, the causes are high housing costs, limited relocation packages, and rising mortgage rates. But behind those immediate factors lie deeper structures. Student loan debt reduces the willingness to gamble on uncertain opportunities. Bullshit jobs, however empty, offer just enough stability to keep people locked in place. Older generations, insulated by home equity or pensions, may experience the golden handcuffs as a form of protection, but their children and grandchildren feel more of the iron cage, inheriting debts and diminished opportunities while being funneled into roles that drain meaning from their labor.

The intergenerational effect is stark. Families once imagined that each generation would surpass the last, but mounting evidence shows downward mobility as the norm. Debt and immobility mean that the youngest workers face worse prospects than their parents, often despite higher levels of formal education. The cage has become hereditary, reinforced by golden handcuffs that reward those already inside while barring others from entry.

The consequences reach far beyond individual frustration. A society of debt-burdened, risk-averse workers chained to meaningless jobs loses dynamism, creativity, and the possibility of real progress. Economic innovation falters when people cannot afford to move, switch jobs, or challenge existing hierarchies. Civic life suffers when millions are too tired or precarious to participate fully. What Weber described as the cold rationality of bureaucracy now fuses with financialization and corporate incentives to produce both stagnation and quiet despair.

The question is not only whether Americans are trapped in iron cages or bound by golden handcuffs, but who profits from these arrangements. Student loan servicers, corporate employers, and real estate interests all benefit from a population too indebted, too constrained, and too risk-averse to push back. Unless there is structural change—through debt relief, meaningful labor reform, and a housing policy that restores mobility—the chains will only tighten, passed from one generation to the next.

The iron cage and the golden handcuffs are not metaphors in tension; they are metaphors in partnership, binding Americans simultaneously by force and by comfort. Together they describe a society that promises freedom while delivering entrapment, and a generation that is learning the hard way that education, work, and home are less ladders to opportunity than carefully designed systems of control.

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Sources

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905).
“Understanding Max Weber’s Iron Cage,” ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/understanding-max-webers-iron-cage-3026373
“Nobody’s Buying Homes, Nobody’s Switching Jobs—and America’s Mobility Is Stalling,” Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2025. https://www.wsj.com/economy/american-job-housing-economic-dynamism-d56ef8fc
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018).
Steven J. Davis and John Haltiwanger, “Dynamism Diminished: Housing Markets and Business Formation,” AEA Research (2024). https://www.aeaweb.org/research/charts/dynamism-diminished-housing-markets
“The Intergenerational Burden of Student Loan Debt,” Brookings Institution, October 2021. https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-intergenerational-burden-of-student-loan-debt/

Music as Medicine

American life demands constant productivity, endless credentialing, and the ability to “push through” mental and physical exhaustion. In this kind of system, the healing power of music often gets overlooked. But for students drowning in debt and anxiety, and for workers scraping by on insecure jobs, music is not a luxury—it’s medicine.

Not the kind prescribed in a bottle, or preached from a wellness seminar, but the kind that gets passed around like food among the hungry. The kind that makes survival just a little more possible.

Rhythm as Resistance

Punk delivers a pulse. Hip hop confronts. Lo-fi offers stillness. Soul mourns and uplifts. Gospel affirms. Cumbia moves bodies and memory alike. Every genre has a place in the emotional survival kit. Music provides what many institutions will not: solace, solidarity, self-definition, and release.

In moments of despair or burnout, songs become tools. They make it easier to study through pain, to organize in the face of injustice, or to get through another shift when the body wants to quit.

Music isn’t an escape—it’s a way through.

Crisis of Mind and Spirit

The student mental health crisis isn’t new, but it’s getting worse. Depression, anxiety, panic attacks, and burnout are rising, especially among working-class students, queer students, first-generation students, and students of color. Most colleges still underfund counseling centers while promoting toxic grind culture as “excellence.”

The workforce behind higher ed—adjunct professors, custodians, food service workers, library aides—faces its own mental and physical toll. Poverty wages, no benefits, unpredictable schedules. Institutions offer self-care slogans but rarely structural care.

Music fills that gap. It helps people regulate, reflect, and remember who they are beyond their role as a debtor, a grade, or a disposable employee.

Better Than Drugs. Better Than Casual Sex.

Music can do what substances and momentary escapes can’t. It doesn’t just numb. It heals. It doesn’t demand something in return. It gives freely.

It’s better than drugs. Better than casual sex. Not because it replaces pleasure or distraction—but because it doesn’t disappear when the high fades or the night ends. Music stays. It strengthens memory. It affirms identity. It provides both an outlet and a connection.

One song can bring someone back from the edge. One mixtape can hold together a semester of struggle. One shared playlist can spark a sense of belonging in a student who otherwise feels invisible.

Soundtrack to Survival

Labor movements have always known this. Music builds morale, strengthens solidarity, and carries memory. From protest anthems to spoken word to DIY tracks shared over group chats, students and workers use sound as shield and weapon.

A cafeteria worker begins a shift with cumbia in their ears. A grad student blocks out burnout with jazz. An adjunct powers through grading with Nina Simone. A student protester blasts Kendrick Lamar from a portable speaker before a sit-in. These are not just habits. These are survival strategies.

Political Practice in Every Note

Songs carry more than rhythm. They carry critique, hope, rebellion, and care. They are blueprints for a world where people matter more than profits. Music doesn’t just reflect the present—it helps imagine the future.

In the face of debt peonage, student surveillance, and wage theft, music reminds people of their worth. The right track becomes a reminder: You are not what the system says you are. You are not alone.

Music doesn’t require a login, a tuition payment, or a therapist’s referral. It’s available on bus rides, late nights, walkouts, break rooms, and dorm corners. It teaches without condescension. It organizes without hierarchy. It heals without permission.

The HEI Perspective

Most discussions of education policy focus on financial models, enrollment trends, or test scores. But we believe emotional and cultural survival matters just as much. Especially when institutions are failing those they claim to serve.

At the Higher Education Inquirer, we listen to what gets students and workers through the day. Not because it’s trendy—but because it’s urgent.

Music keeps people going when systems fail. That makes it a public good. A political force. And yes, a kind of medicine.

Healing begins when people feel heard. Rhythm helps carry the weight.

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The Higher Education Inquirer
Coming soon: Soundtrack for Resistance – curated by students and workers.

“We Can’t Make It Here Anymore” Still Rings True

More than twenty years after James McMurtry released We Can’t Make It Here Anymore, the song’s haunting verses continue to echo across the American landscape. Originally written during the early 2000s under the weight of offshoring, union busting, and post-9/11 disillusionment, McMurtry’s protest ballad has aged not with irrelevance but with renewed urgency.

McMurtry wrote about Vietnam veterans pushed aside by a society eager to forget its mistakes. Today, those veterans have been replaced by men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan—some with missing limbs, some with invisible wounds, many with few job prospects. The system still tells them “thanks for your service” while it sends their factories overseas, their benefits into the shredder, and their children into debt servitude at for-profit colleges or underfunded public universities.

The song’s refrain—“And the banks run the loan game, and the dollar jumps the track”—has only deepened in meaning in the era of trillion-dollar student loan burdens and the financialization of everything from housing to higher education. Entire zip codes have been gutted by opioid overdoses, job loss, and rising suicide rates. The technology is flashier now, but the despair McMurtry chronicled feels even more entrenched. The “big boys” still “don't like to lose,” and the factories are still “boarded up,” not just in Michigan and West Virginia, but now in the shadows of elite universities, where campuses flourish while surrounding communities falter.

Higher education, the supposed equalizer, has played its own part in this disillusionment. Where once it held the promise of upward mobility, it now too often offers low-wage adjunct jobs, debt without degrees, and institutions more concerned with branding and endowments than student welfare. McMurtry sings, “The doctor can't be reached, he has moved back to LA,” and in 2025, that’s still true—except now the doctor’s been replaced by a telehealth AI, and the local hospital has been bought out by a hedge fund.

We Can’t Make It Here Anymore is not nostalgia. It is indictment. It is reportage. It is prophecy. And like Woody Guthrie before him, McMurtry tells a story corporate media would rather ignore.

The song’s last verse ends not with hope, but with observation:
“Will work for food, will die for oil, will kill for power and to us the spoils.”
Two decades later, the empire has not changed course. It has just changed spokespeople.

The names may change—NAFTA to USMCA, Halliburton to BlackRock—but the machinery grinds on. And McMurtry’s anthem remains a soundtrack for those who never made it out of the wreckage, for the veterans of war and labor still trying to make it here.

Sources

• James McMurtry, We Can’t Make It Here Anymore, 2004

• U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics

• U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

• National Student Legal Defense Network

• Higher Education Inquirer archives

The New York City Midtown Shooting, CTE, and the Cult of Football

On Monday evening, violence erupted at 345 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, a sleek tower that houses the offices of private equity giant Blackstone and the National Football League. Just before 6:30 p.m., a 27-year-old man named Shane Devon Tamura walked into the building’s lobby carrying an M4-style assault rifle. Within minutes, he had killed four people and injured a fifth before taking his own life. Among the victims was NYPD officer Didarul Islam, who had been working a private security detail, and Wesley LePatner, a senior Blackstone executive. The shock of the event was compounded by what Tamura left behind—a three-page note referencing the NFL, the dangers of brain injury, and an eerie final request: “Study my brain. I’m sorry.”

Tamura, who had driven from Las Vegas across the country, appeared obsessed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease associated with repeated head trauma. Whether Tamura actually played football, or merely saw himself as part of the broader culture shaped by it, his writings expressed a sense of betrayal. He accused the NFL of hiding the truth about brain injuries and framed his act of violence, disturbingly, as a kind of vengeance or warning.

This incident would be troubling in any context, but its location—inside a building that symbolizes the merger of capital and American sports mythology—demands closer scrutiny. It touches the raw nerve of a national cult that HEI has investigated before.

In October 2024, we published The Cult of NCAA Football and the Destruction of Young Men, an examination of how Division I college football programs systematically exploit young athletes. These programs market dreams of glory, mobility, and masculinity, only to discard players whose bodies or minds no longer serve the machine. We reported on the toll this system takes—not just in physical injuries, but in suicides, depression, substance abuse, and post-collegiate disillusionment. The culture around football demands pain and silence, while the profits flow to coaches, administrators, and television executives.

That investigation built on earlier work, including The Tragedy of NCAA Athletes Who Died Young, which chronicled the stories of former college athletes who died early—some by suicide, others from heart conditions, overdoses, or unexplained circumstances. These deaths were not random. They were systemic, the result of intense physical demands, inadequate medical oversight, and emotional isolation within a culture that worships toughness and punishes vulnerability.

The broader evidence around CTE has grown increasingly clear. As of 2023, researchers at Boston University had identified CTE in 345 of 376 former NFL players studied after death—an astonishing 91.8 percent. A 2024 study by Mass General Brigham found that one in three former NFL players surveyed—approximately 35 percent—believed they were experiencing symptoms of CTE, such as memory loss, depression, or emotional instability. Even among those who had never been officially diagnosed with a concussion, symptoms were common. Scientists now argue that it is not concussions alone, but repetitive sub-concussive impacts—those hits that don’t cause symptoms but still jostle the brain—that pose the greatest long-term threat.

The crisis starts early. A study funded by the CDC found that youth tackle football players aged 6 to 14 sustained 15 times more high-magnitude head impacts than flag football players. Despite the NFL’s public safety campaigns and rule modifications, many of these reforms have not trickled down to college, high school, or youth programs. Guardian Caps—foam covers placed over helmets to reduce head impacts—are now standard in NFL practices but remain optional or absent in amateur leagues.

Tamura’s final request to have his brain studied postmortem mirrors the last acts of former football players like Junior Seau, Tyler Hilinski, and Phillip Adams, who took their own lives and were later confirmed to have suffered from CTE. The difference here is that Tamura reportedly had no known football career. His identification with CTE suggests something darker—a cultural proximity to violence and despair reinforced by football’s influence on masculinity, toughness, and worth.

Football is not just a sport in the United States; it is an institution that binds masculinity to sacrifice and identity to violence. It teaches boys to ignore pain, suppress fear, and prove their value through physical domination. For those who succeed, there are scholarships and contracts. For those who don’t, there are broken bodies and forgotten names. And for a growing number, there are stories ending in suicide, addiction, or in this case, public violence.

The NFL has the resources to protect its players. Universities have the responsibility to care for their students. But what remains in question is whether either institution has the will to do so. HEI has chronicled the recurring patterns—of exploitation, denial, and silence—in both sports and education. We have seen young athletes discarded after injury, whistleblowers ignored, and mental health support offered only when it serves branding or liability defense.

Monday’s shooting was not simply a tragedy—it was a mirror held up to a society that profits from physical destruction while ignoring psychological harm. It reminded us that the myth of football’s nobility has a human cost. And that silence, whether in locker rooms or corporate boardrooms, is not safety. It is complicity.

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Sources
Higher Education Inquirer. "The Tragedy of NCAA Athletes Who Died Young." April 2025. https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2025/04/the-tragedy-of-ncaa-athletes-who-died.html
Higher Education Inquirer. "The Cult of NCAA Football and the Destruction of Young Men." October 2024. https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2024/10/the-cult-of-ncaa-football-and.html
Boston University CTE Center. "BU CTE Diagnoses in NFL Players." Updated 2023. https://www.bu.edu/cte/
Mass General Brigham. “One in Three Former NFL Players Believe They Have CTE.” 2024. https://www.massgeneralbrigham.org/en/about/newsroom/press-releases/study-finds-1-in-3-former-nfl-players-believe-they-have-cte
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Comparing Head Impacts in Youth Football.” 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/traumatic-brain-injury/data-research/comparing-head-impacts
ABC News. “Shooter’s Note Referenced NFL, CTE.” July 29, 2025. https://abcnews.go.com/US/midtown-shooting-suspect-left-note-mentioning-nfl-cte/story?id=124163966
People. “Blackstone Executive Killed in NYC Shooting.” July 29, 2025. https://people.com/blackstone-executive-wesley-lepatner-new-york-city-mass-shooting-victim-11780775