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Monday, August 25, 2025

Can College Presidents Tell Us the Truth?

“Truth? You can’t handle the truth!” Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men captures the tension at the heart of American higher education: can college presidents confront veritas—the deep, sometimes uncomfortable truths about their institutions—or will they hide behind prestige, endowments, and comforting illusions?

At the foundation of academia lies veritas, Latin for truth or truthfulness, derived from verus, “true” or “trustworthy.” Veritas is not optional decoration on a university crest; it is a moral and intellectual obligation. Yet 2025 reveals a system where veritas is too often sidelined: institutions obscure financial mismanagement, exploit adjunct faculty, overburden students with debt, and misrepresent outcomes to the public.

The Higher Education Inquirer (HEI) embodies veritas in action. In “Ahead of the Learned Herd: Why the Higher Education Inquirer Grows During the Endless College Meltdown,” HEI demonstrates that truth-telling can thrive outside corporate funding or advertising. By reporting enrollment collapses, adjunct exploitation, and predatory for-profit practices, HEI holds institutions accountable to veritas, exposing what many university leaders hope will remain invisible.

Leadership failures are a direct affront to veritas. “Scam Artist or Just Failed CEO?” scrutinizes former 2U CEO Christopher “Chip” Paucek, revealing misleading enrollment tactics and financial mismanagement that serve elite universities more than consumers. These corporate-style decisions in a higher education setting betray the very principle of veritas, prioritizing appearance and profit over educational integrity and human outcomes.

Student journalism amplifies veritas further. Through Campus Beat, student reporters uncover tuition hikes, censorship, and labor abuses, demonstrating that veritas does not belong only to administrators—it belongs to those who seek to document reality, often at personal and professional risk.

Economic and political realities also test veritas. In “Trumpenomics: The Emperor Has No Clothes,” HEI exposes how hollow economic reforms enrich a few while leaving the majority behind. Academia mirrors this pattern: when prestige is elevated over substance, veritas is discarded in favor of illusion, leaving students and faculty to bear the consequences.

Structural crisis continues. In “College Meltdown Fall 2025,” HEI documents federal oversight erosion, AI-saturated classrooms with rampant academic misconduct, rising student debt, and mass layoffs. To honor veritas, leaders would confront these crises transparently, but too often they choose comforting narratives instead.

Debt remains one of the clearest tests of institutional veritas. HEI’s “The Student Loan Mess: Next Chapters” shows how trillions in student loans have become instruments of social control. The Sweet v. McMahon borrower defense cases illustrate bureaucratic inertia and opacity, directly challenging the principles of veritas as thousands of debtors await relief that is slow, incomplete, and inconsistently applied.

Predatory enrollment practices further undermine veritas. Lead generators, documented by HEI, exploit student information to drive enrollment into high-cost, low-value programs, prioritizing revenue over truth, clarity, and student welfare. “College Prospects, College Targets” exposes how prospective students are commodified, turning veritas into a casualty of marketing algorithms.

Through all of this, HEI itself stands as a living testament to veritas. Surpassing one million views in July 2025, it proves that the public demands accountability, clarity, and honesty in higher education. Veritas resonates—when pursued rigorously, it illuminates failures, inspires reform, and empowers communities.

The question remains: can college presidents handle veritas—the unflinching truth about student debt, labor exploitation, mismanagement, and declining institutional legitimacy? If they cannot, they forfeit moral and public authority. Veritas is not optional; it is the standard by which institutions must be measured, defended, and lived.

Sources

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HEI Resources Fall 2025

 [Editor's Note: Please let us know of any additions or corrections.]

Books

  • Alexander, Bryan (2020). Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education. Johns Hopkins Press.  
  • Alexander, Bryan (2023).  Universities on Fire. 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. and Feldman, D. (2017). The Road Ahead for America's Colleges & Universities. Oxford University Press.
  • Armstrong, E. and Hamilton, L. (2015). Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality. Harvard University Press.
  • Arum, R. and 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.  
  • Bennett, W. and Wilezol, D. (2013). Is College Worth It?: A Former United States Secretary of Education and a Liberal Arts Graduate Expose the Broken Promise of Higher Education. Thomas Nelson.
  • Berg, I. (1970). "The Great Training Robbery: Education and Jobs." Praeger.
  • Berman, Elizabeth P. (2012). Creating the Market University.  Princeton University Press. 
  • Berry, J. (2005). Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education. Monthly Review Press.
  • Best, J. and Best, E. (2014) The Student Loan Mess: How Good Intentions Created a Trillion-Dollar Problem. Atkinson Family Foundation.
    • Bledstein, Burton J. (1976). The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America. Norton.
  • Bogue, E. Grady and Aper, Jeffrey.  (2000). Exploring the Heritage of American Higher Education: The Evolution of Philosophy and Policy. 
  • Bok, D. (2003). Universities in the Marketplace : The Commercialization of Higher Education.  Princeton University Press. 
  • Bousquet, M. (2008). How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low Wage Nation. NYU Press.
  • Brennan, J & Magness, P. (2019). Cracks in the Ivory Tower. Oxford University Press. 
  • Brint, S., & Karabel, J. The Diverted Dream: Community colleges and the promise of educational opportunity in America, 1900–1985. Oxford University Press. (1989).
  • Cabrera, Nolan L. (2024) Whiteness in the Ivory Tower: Why Don't We Notice the White Students Sitting Together in the Quad? Teachers College Press.
  • Cabrera, Nolan L. (2018). White Guys on Campus: Racism, White Immunity, and the Myth of "Post-Racial" Higher Education. Rutgers University Press.
  • Caplan, B. (2018). The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money. Princeton University Press.
  • Cappelli, P. (2015). Will College Pay Off?: A Guide to the Most Important Financial Decision You'll Ever Make. Public Affairs.
  • Cassuto, Leonard (2015). The Graduate School Mess. Harvard University Press. 
  • Caterine, Christopher (2020). Leaving Academia. Princeton Press. 
  • Carney, Cary Michael (1999). Native American Higher Education in the United States. Transaction.
  • Childress, H. (2019). The Adjunct Underclass: How America's Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission University of Chicago Press.
  • Cohen, Arthur M. (1998). The Shaping of American Higher Education: Emergence and Growth of the Contemporary System. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
  • Collins, Randall. (1979/2019) The Credential Society. Academic Press. Columbia University Press. 
  • Cottom, T. (2016). Lower Ed: How For-profit Colleges Deepen Inequality in America
  • Domhoff, G. William (2021). Who Rules America? 8th Edition. Routledge.
  • Donoghue, F. (2008). The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities.
  • Dorn, Charles. (2017) For the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in America Cornell University Press.
  • Eaton, Charlie.  (2022) Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education. University of Chicago Press.
  • Eisenmann, Linda. (2006) Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945–1965. Johns Hopkins U. Press.
  • Espenshade, T., Walton Radford, A.(2009). No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life. Princeton University Press.
  • Faragher, John Mack and Howe, Florence, ed. (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.
  • Ginsberg, B. (2013). The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All Administrative University and Why It Matters
  • Gleason, Philip. Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century. Oxford U. Press, 1995.
  • Golden, D. (2006). The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys its Way into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates.
  • Goldrick-Rab, S. (2016). Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream.
  • Graeber, David (2018) Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Simon and Schuster. 
    • Groeger, Cristina Viviana (2021). The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston. Harvard Press.
  • Hamilton, Laura T. and Kelly Nielson (2021) Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities
    • Hampel, Robert L. (2017). Fast and Curious: A History of Shortcuts in American Education. Rowman & Littlefield.
  • Johnson, B. et al. (2003). Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement
  • Keats, John (1965) The Sheepskin Psychosis. Lippincott.
  • Kelchen, R. (2018). Higher Education Accountability. Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Kezar, A., DePaola, T, and Scott, D. The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University. Johns Hopkins Press. 
  • Kinser, K. (2006). From Main Street to Wall Street: The Transformation of For-profit Higher Education
  • Kozol, Jonathan (2006). The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Crown. 
  • Kozol, Jonathan (1992). Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. Harper Perennial.
  • Labaree, David F. (2017). A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Labaree, David (1997) How to Succeed in School without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education, Yale University 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: A Memoir.  Thomas Dunne Books. 
  • Lucas, C.J. American higher education: A history. (1994).
  • Lukianoff, Greg and Jonathan Haidt (2018). The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Penguin Press.
  • Maire, Quentin (2021). Credential Market. Springer.
  • Mandery, Evan (2022) . Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us. New Press. 
  • Marti, Eduardo (2016). America's Broken Promise: Bridging the Community College Achievement Gap. Excelsior College Press. 
  • Mettler, Suzanne 'Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream. Basic Books. (2014)
  • Newfeld, C. (2011). Unmaking the Public University.
  • Newfeld, C. (2016). The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them.
  • Paulsen, M. and J.C. Smart (2001). The Finance of Higher Education: Theory, Research, Policy & Practice.  Agathon Press. 
  • Rosen, A.S. (2011). Change.edu. Kaplan Publishing. 
  • Reynolds, G. (2012). The Higher Education Bubble. Encounter Books.
  • Roth, G. (2019) The Educated Underclass: Students and the Promise of Social Mobility. Pluto Press
  • Ruben, Julie. The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality. University Of Chicago Press. (1996).
  • Rudolph, F. (1991) The American College and University: A History.
  • Rushdoony, R. (1972). The Messianic Character of American Education. The Craig Press.
  • Selingo, J. (2013). College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students.
  • Shelton, Jon (2023). The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy. Cornell University Press. 
  • Simpson, Christopher (1999). Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War. New Press.
  • Sinclair, U. (1923). The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education.
  • Stein, Sharon (2022). Unsettling the University: Confronting the Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education, Johns Hopkins Press. 
  • Stevens, Mitchell L. (2009). Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites. Harvard University Press. 
  • Stodghill, R. (2015). Where Everybody Looks Like Me: At the Crossroads of America's Black Colleges and Culture. 
  • Tamanaha, B. (2012). Failing Law Schools. The University of Chicago Press. 
  • Tatum, Beverly (1997). Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria. Basic Books
  • Taylor, Barret J. and Brendan Cantwell (2019). Unequal Higher Education: Wealth, Status and Student Opportunity. Rutgers University Press.
  • Thelin, John R. (2019) A History of American Higher Education. Johns Hopkins U. Press.
  • Tolley, K. (2018). Professors in the Gig Economy: Unionizing Adjunct Faculty in America. Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Twitchell, James B. (2005). Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld. Simon and Schuster.
  • Vedder, R. (2004). Going Broke By Degree: Why College Costs Too Much.
  • Veysey Lawrence R. (1965).The emergence of the American university.
  • Washburn, J. (2006). University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education
  • Washington, Harriet A. (2008). Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Anchor. 
  • Whitman, David (2021). The Profits of Failure: For-Profit Colleges and the Closing of the Conservative Mind. Cypress House.
  • Wilder, C.D. (2013). Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities. 
  • Winks, Robin (1996). Cloak and Gown:Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961. Yale University Press.
  • Woodson, Carter D. (1933). The Mis-Education of the Negro.  
  • Zaloom, Caitlin (2019).  Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost. Princeton University Press. 
  • Zemsky, Robert, Susan Shaman, and Susan Campbell Baldridge (2020). The College Stress Test:Tracking Institutional Futures across a Crowded Market. Johns Hopkins University Press. 

Activists, Coalitions, Innovators, and Alternative Voices

 College Choice and Career Planning Tools

Innovation and Reform

Higher Education Policy

Data Sources

Trade publications
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Sunday, August 24, 2025

We Are Students First

At the Higher Education Inquirer, we don’t chase prestige. We don’t cater to elite donors, corporate sponsors, or political kingmakers. We don’t worship at the altar of endowments, football stadiums, or shiny branding campaigns. Our compass is set firmly toward truth, justice, and equity—guided by one unwavering principle: we are students first.

We are students of systems—unraveling the machinery of higher education that too often works against the very people it claims to serve. We study the credential mills, the loan sharks in nonprofit clothing, the unaccountable university bureaucracies, and the hollow promises of prosperity dangled before vulnerable populations. We investigate how institutions extract billions from working-class families while underpaying adjuncts and laying off staff. And we do it without fear or favor.

But we are also students in the human sense. We learn from whistleblowers, from former for-profit enrollees drowning in debt, from adjuncts scraping by without healthcare, and from young people who’ve had to abandon their dreams because the system was never built for them in the first place. We seek out the voices that elite media too often ignore—because those voices contain the lessons worth learning.

Unlike many outlets that write about students as case studies or marketing tools, we stand with them. We ask: Who gets excluded from access and opportunity? Who profits from their debt? Who benefits when college becomes more about brand than learning, more about sorting than liberating?

When we say we are students first, we mean we are always learning—about how inequality is produced and reproduced through policy, through finance, and through institutional neglect. We mean we are always listening—especially to those who’ve been burned by the system. And we mean we are always questioning—especially the orthodoxy that says “college equals success,” no matter the cost.

Being students first also means accountability. To ourselves, and to those we cover. We don’t pretend to have all the answers. We don't hide behind false neutrality. But we do our homework. We cite our sources. We follow the money. And we take sides—on the side of debtors, exploited workers, and the people pushed to the margins.

So when others ask where we stand in the crumbling landscape of higher education, our answer is simple:


At HEI, we are students first. And we stand with those the system has left behind.

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Saturday, August 23, 2025

Education Not Incarceration

For decades, activists, educators, and reformers have argued that the United States invests far too much in cages and not enough in classrooms. The slogan “Education Not Incarceration” has its roots in civil rights and prison abolition movements, and it continues to resonate as the U.S. struggles with the dual crises of mass incarceration and student debt.

A Tale of Two Investments

From the mid-20th century through the 1970s, states expanded public colleges alongside the GI Bill, and tuition at flagship universities was often negligible. But by the 1980s, under austerity politics and “tough on crime” policies, that trajectory shifted.

State budgets began to favor prisons over universities. Between 1980 and 2013, state spending on corrections ballooned by 89 percent, while higher education spending inched up just 5 percent. In several states—California being the most notable—new prison construction far outpaced new campus building.

This was not accidental. The War on Drugs, mandatory minimum sentencing, and “three strikes” laws filled prisons, while tuition hikes and declining aid shifted the cost of higher education onto families. Mass incarceration and the privatization of higher ed became two parallel pillars of neoliberal America.

The School-to-Prison Pipeline

The connection begins early. Underfunded K–12 schools, especially in Black and Latino neighborhoods, often act as feeders to juvenile justice and adult prison systems. Harsh disciplinary policies, zero-tolerance rules, and the presence of police in schools contribute to what is known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

Students pushed out of schools rarely end up in selective universities. Instead, they face a narrow track: low-wage work, unemployment, incarceration—or enrollment in predatory for-profit colleges, where they are saddled with debt and worthless credentials.

Education Behind Bars

The fight for “Education Not Incarceration” has also taken place inside prisons. In the 1960s and 1970s, incarcerated people at Attica, San Quentin, and other facilities demanded access to higher education as part of broader calls for human dignity. College-in-prison programs once flourished, supported by federal Pell Grants.

That changed in 1994, when Congress banned incarcerated students from receiving Pell funding. Prison higher education programs collapsed overnight. For nearly 30 years, most incarcerated people were locked out of college classrooms, even as study after study showed that education reduces recidivism.

In 2023, Pell access was finally restored. Advocates estimate that up to 760,000 incarcerated people may benefit, though challenges remain: limited program availability, predatory institutions, and ongoing stigma.

Barriers After Release

Even after incarceration, the barriers persist. College applications often include “the box” asking about criminal records. Financial aid restrictions, housing discrimination, and employment bans make reintegration extraordinarily difficult. Education, while potentially transformative, is often blocked at every stage.

Why the Divide Matters

The U.S. now spends roughly $80 billion annually on prisons, compared to $70 billion on higher education. The balance between these investments reflects a broader choice: do we build a society where opportunity is expanded, or one where inequality is locked in?

At its core, the idea of “Education Not Incarceration” challenges the logic of punishment over opportunity. It argues that every dollar spent on prisons without addressing education is a dollar spent on perpetuating inequality.

A Continuing Struggle

From the Black Panther Party’s community schools to today’s college-in-prison advocates, generations have demanded a shift in priorities. Yet higher education itself is fractured—plagued by student debt, adjunct labor, and corporate capture. Without structural reform, the danger remains that higher education will not be a true alternative to incarceration, but simply another system of exploitation.

Still, the vision remains powerful: a nation that builds universities, not prisons; classrooms, not cages.

Sources

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Changing Priorities: State Criminal Justice Reforms and Investments in Education (2014).

RAND Corporation, Evaluating the Effectiveness of Correctional Education (2013).

U.S. Department of Education, Pell Grants for Incarcerated Students (2023).

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (2010).

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag (2007).
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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”

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Friday, August 22, 2025

The Right-Wing Roots of EdTech

The modern EdTech industry is often portrayed as a neutral, innovative force, but its origins are deeply political. Its growth has been fueled by a fusion of neoliberal economics, right-wing techno-utopianism, patriarchy, and classism, reinforced by racialized inequality. One of the key intellectual architects of this vision was George Gilder, a conservative supply-side evangelist whose work glorified technology and markets as liberating forces. His influence helped pave the way for the “Gilder Effect”: a reshaping of education into a market where technology, finance, and ideology collide, often at the expense of marginalized students and workers.

The for-profit college boom provides the clearest demonstration of how the Gilder Effect operates. John Sperling’s University of Phoenix, later run by executives like Todd Nelson, was engineered as a credential factory, funded by federal student aid and Wall Street. Its model was then exported across the sector, including Risepoint (formerly Academic Partnerships), a company that sold universities on revenue-sharing deals for online programs. These ventures disproportionately targeted working-class women, single mothers, military veterans, and Black and Latino students. The model was not accidental—it was designed to exploit populations with the least generational wealth and the most limited alternatives. Here, patriarchy, classism, and racism intersected: students from marginalized backgrounds were marketed promises of upward mobility but instead left with debt, unstable credentials, and limited job prospects.

Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn of Harvard Business School popularized the concept of “disruption,” providing a respectable academic justification for dismantling public higher education. Their theory of disruptive innovation framed traditional universities as outdated and made way for venture-capital-backed intermediaries. Yet this rhetoric concealed a brutal truth: disruption worked not by empowering the disadvantaged but by extracting value from them, often reinforcing existing inequalities of race, gender, and class.

The rise and collapse of 2U shows how this ideology plays out. Founded in 2008, 2U promised to bring elite universities online, selling the dream of access to graduate degrees for working professionals. Its “flywheel effect” growth strategy relied on massive enrollment expansion and unsustainable spending. Despite raising billions, the company never turned a profit. Its high-profile acquisition of edX from Harvard and MIT only deepened its financial instability. When 2U filed for bankruptcy, it was not simply a corporate failure—it was a symptom of an entire system built on hype and dispossession.

2U also became notorious for its workplace practices. In 2015, it faced a pregnancy discrimination lawsuit after firing an enrollment director who disclosed her pregnancy. Women workers, especially mothers, were treated as expendable, a reflection of patriarchal corporate norms. Meanwhile, many front-line employees—disproportionately women and people of color—faced surveillance, low wages, and impossible sales quotas. Here the intersections of race, gender, and class were not incidental but central to the business model. The company extracted labor from marginalized workers while selling an educational dream to marginalized students, creating a cycle of exploitation at both ends of the pipeline.

Financialization extended these dynamics. Lenders like Sallie Mae and Navient, and servicers like Maximus, turned students into streams of revenue, with Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities (SLABS) trading debt obligations on Wall Street. Universities, including Purdue Global and University of Arizona Global, rebranded failing for-profits as “public” ventures, but their revenue-driven practices remained intact. These arrangements consistently offloaded risk onto working-class students, especially women and students of color, while enriching executives and investors.

The Gilder Effect, then, is not just about technology or efficiency. It is about reshaping higher education into a site of extraction, where the burdens of debt and labor fall hardest on those already disadvantaged by patriarchy, classism, and racism. Intersectionality reveals what the industry’s boosters obscure: EdTech has not democratized education but has deepened inequality. The failure of 2U and the persistence of predatory for-profit models are not accidents—they are the logical outcome of an ideological project rooted in conservative economics and systemic oppression.

Sources

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Thursday, August 21, 2025

From Philosophy to Sophistry: Why Critical Thinking Matters More Than Ever

Today, we are witnessing a troubling inversion in thought: philosophy—the love of wisdom—is increasingly being displaced by sophistry, rhetoric, and propaganda. What once served as tools for deeper understanding are now too often harnessed to manipulate opinion, defend entrenched power, and obscure reality.

The ancients recognized this danger. Socrates warned against the sophists who sold clever arguments as if they were wisdom itself, teaching young men how to win debates regardless of truth. Plato cautioned that rhetoric untethered from philosophy could become nothing more than flattery and deception. Aristotle, while systematizing rhetoric, insisted it must remain tied to logic and ethics if it was to serve the public good.

But today, these warnings are largely ignored. Rhetoric, unmoored from philosophical foundations, has become a weapon of politics, commerce, and even academia. Universities that once defended philosophy departments as central to a liberal education now shrink or eliminate them, replacing courses in logic and ethics with training in “communications,” “branding,” or “leadership.” The point is no longer truth, but persuasion—often persuasion in service of profit or political expediency.

Propaganda in Higher Education: Then and Now

The problem is not new. During the Cold War, elite universities like Harvard and Stanford became entangled in government propaganda and intelligence work. Research contracts from the Department of Defense and the CIA shaped entire fields, from area studies to behavioral psychology, with the aim of waging ideological war against communism. At Stanford, the Hoover Institution served as a pipeline between academia and Washington, producing research tailored to reinforce Cold War orthodoxy. Students were often unaware that their “objective” curricula were saturated with political agendas.

Corporate influence has also long steered academic knowledge. At the University of Chicago and Harvard Business School, neoliberal economics became dominant not because it was the most rigorous or humane, but because it was well-funded and aligned with Wall Street interests. Entire generations of business leaders were trained to see deregulation, privatization, and financialization as common sense. Meanwhile, corporations like ExxonMobil and Philip Morris poured millions into universities to shape research downplaying the harms of fossil fuels and tobacco—turning respected labs into propaganda mills under the guise of scientific inquiry.

In the for-profit sector, the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University demonstrated how higher education could be weaponized into pure marketing. Phoenix perfected the art of recruiting vulnerable students with glossy advertising campaigns while leaving many graduates with crushing debt and worthless credentials. Sophistry was not the byproduct of the system; it was the business model.

The Debt Machine as Propaganda

The rise of mass student debt in the U.S. is perhaps the clearest example of sophistry in action. For decades, policymakers, banks, and university leaders insisted that loans were an “investment” in the future. Billions of dollars in advertising, recruitment pitches, and presidential speeches told working-class families that debt was the price of opportunity, mobility, and the American Dream.

The rhetoric was powerful—but it was also false. Instead of producing universal prosperity, student loans created a new form of indenture, locking tens of millions of Americans into decades of repayment. Behind every slogan of “access” and “opportunity” was a reality of wage garnishment, ruined credit, and even Social Security checks seized from retirees.

Universities—public, private, and for-profit alike—benefited from this propaganda system. Administrators justified tuition hikes by pointing to the availability of federal loans, while politicians masked austerity and disinvestment by praising the “resilience” of students who borrowed. Sophistry covered over what philosophy might have revealed: that a system built on lifelong debt was neither just nor sustainable.

Contemporary Battles

Today, propaganda saturates every corner of higher education. Corporate partnerships with edtech firms like 2U, Coursera, and Pearson promise “innovation” while shifting costs and risks onto students and contingent faculty. DEI initiatives, while sometimes earnest, are often reduced to branding campaigns that distract from rising tuition, underfunded support services, and administrative bloat. On the other side, anti-DEI crusades, most visibly in Florida under Governor Ron DeSantis, have transformed universities like the University of Florida and New College into battlegrounds where rhetoric substitutes for governance.

Even the managerial language of “student success,” “excellence,” and “resilience” functions as propaganda. At Arizona State University, marketed as the “New American University,” branding and performance metrics often obscure deep reliance on adjunct labor and the struggles of students who leave with debt but no degree.

Why Critical Thinking Matters

In this environment, the ability to distinguish reason from sophistry is not just an academic exercise—it is essential for democratic survival. Critical thinking, logical reasoning, and ethical reflection must not be treated as luxuries reserved for philosophy majors. They are skills every student—and every citizen—requires to navigate a world saturated with propaganda.

If education has any remaining claim to a higher purpose, it is this: to cultivate minds capable of questioning, analyzing, and resisting manipulation. A society that abandons philosophy leaves itself at the mercy of those who wield rhetoric without conscience. But one that revives philosophy as a living practice of inquiry and critique can resist the slide into sophistry and reclaim some measure of truth, justice, and freedom.

The future of higher education, and perhaps democracy itself, depends on whether we choose philosophy or propaganda. The stakes could not be clearer.

Sources

– Christopher Simpson, Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War (1999)
– Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988)
– Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (2003)
– David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)
– Michael Hudson, The Destiny of Civilization (2022)
– Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man (2012)
– William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite (2014)
– Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (2017)

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Monday, August 18, 2025

Tattoo Regret

For millions of Americans, tattoos were meant to be personal landmarks—bold, permanent declarations of identity. For college students, the decision to get one often happens in the whirlwind of new freedom, campus culture, and peer influence. But as years pass and the ink fades, many find themselves with more than just a physical reminder—they face a costly, time-consuming process of erasure.

The scale of regret is hard to ignore. Surveys suggest that about one in four Americans with tattoos regret at least one of them. That’s roughly 20 million people, and among those aged 18 to 30—prime college years—the number climbs closer to one in three. A dermatology study found that 26 percent of tattooed patients expressed regret, with over 40 percent of them seeking removal or cover-ups. Regret is especially common when tattoos are obtained in late adolescence, when judgment is less mature, or when they are done cheaply, hastily, or in highly visible areas like the forearms, neck, or face.

The economic fallout is familiar to anyone who has studied the for-profit college industry. Just as private lenders profit from the desperation of indebted graduates, the tattoo removal industry thrives on the emotional and professional consequences of youthful decisions. In 2024, the global tattoo removal market was worth more than $1.1 billion and is projected to triple by 2032. In the U.S., the market has ballooned from $65.9 million in 2023 to a forecast of more than $400 million by 2033. Clinics report surges in demand, with some chains—like Removery—expanding to over 150 locations worldwide. Their marketing often mirrors higher education’s own slogans of transformation and reinvention.

The drivers of removal are telling. A tattoo might commemorate a relationship that ended badly, reflect a political or cultural affiliation that’s become toxic, or simply be a relic of a passing trend. Others are driven to removal for professional survival. While tattoos have become more acceptable in creative fields and service work, they can still derail opportunities in education, law, finance, healthcare, and parts of the military. For some, removal is less about a paycheck and more about reclaiming a sense of self from a younger, more impulsive version of themselves.

What higher education often fails to admit is that it plays a role in this cycle. Universities spend heavily on branding campaigns that tell students to “make their mark,” “be fearless,” or “define your identity.” In campus environments where these messages blend with alcohol, peer pressure, and instant access to tattoo parlors, the permanence of a decision is rarely emphasized. Just as with signing loan papers, the cost comes later—often at a time when money is tight and options are few.

The irony is that both industries—higher education and tattoo removal—present themselves as pathways to a better self. One promises the power to transform your future; the other promises to erase your past. And in both cases, it is the young, the inexperienced, and the financially vulnerable who pay the highest price.

Tattoos are not inherently mistakes. They can be art, heritage, or deeply personal affirmations. But when permanence meets the fluid identity of early adulthood, the risk of regret is real. If universities truly see themselves as guiding students toward informed choices, they might start by being honest about the permanence—not just of ink, but of all life decisions made in the shadow of campus marketing campaigns.

Sources:
Fortune Business Insights, Tattoo Removal Market Size, Share, Trends (2024)
GQ, “Why Is Everyone Getting Their Tattoos Removed?” (2024)
WiFi Talents, Tattoo Regret Statistics (2024)
ZipDo, Tattoo Regret Statistics (2024)
NCBI, “Tattoo Removal and Regret: A Cross-Sectional Analysis” (2023)
Allied Market Research, Tattoo Removal Market (2024)
IMARC Group, Tattoo Removal Market Report (2024)
The Times (UK), “Confessions of the Tattoo Removers” (2024)
Herald Sun, “Why Tattoo Removal Is Soaring” (2024)

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Sunday, August 17, 2025

College Prospects, College Targets

In the old American dreambook, a “college prospect” was a young person with ambition and promise—a student looking for a campus where they could grow intellectually, socially, and economically. But in today’s reality, “prospect” is an industry term, a sales category. In enrollment management suites across the country, prospective students aren’t just applicants; they’re targets.


[Image from Brown University, August 2025]

Higher education—whether elite, public, or for-profit—now runs on sophisticated marketing pipelines. The same predictive analytics used by corporations, political campaigns, and even law enforcement are deployed to track, segment, and convert students into paying customers. Colleges buy and sell student data from standardized test companies, online lead generators, and high school surveys. They follow “prospects” through their clicks, their campus visits, their FAFSA submissions—nudging them toward a deposit with personalized emails, algorithmically timed text messages, and calculated financial aid offers.

This is not about education first. It’s about yield rates, tuition revenue, and net tuition per student. For working-class families, first-generation students, and those from marginalized backgrounds, this targeting can be especially dangerous. The glossy brochures and “student success” slogans conceal the hard realities: inflated tuition, debt burdens that can last decades, and career outcomes far less rosy than advertised.

The for-profit sector perfected this playbook. Schools like Corinthian Colleges, ITT Tech, and the Art Institutes honed high-pressure recruiting scripts, built massive lead databases, and saturated social media feeds with ads promising quick career training and big paydays. When many of these institutions collapsed under federal scrutiny, their tactics didn’t disappear—they spread. Today, public universities and elite private schools use their own version of the same system, dressed up in more respectable branding.

At the top end of the prestige ladder, “targets” have a different profile. Elite schools scout “development prospects”—wealthy families whose applications are accompanied by the potential for multimillion-dollar gifts. The student is both a potential enrollee and a future donor pipeline. Recruitment here is less about financial aid and more about legacy admissions, networking dinners, and quiet tours with the president.

What all this targeting has in common is an imbalance of information. Colleges know almost everything about their prospects—income bands, likely majors, ability to pay—while students and families often have only the marketing copy and a sticker price. In this environment, independent, transparent information is a rare form of defense.

That’s where tools like TuitionFit and the CollegeViability app come in—not as recruitment aids, but as counterintelligence for families.

  • TuitionFit collects and shares real financial aid offers from students across the country. This allows families to see what schools are actually charging students with similar academic and financial profiles—not just the “average” cost schools advertise. By revealing the hidden discounting game, TuitionFit helps families avoid overpaying and resist the psychological pressure of “limited-time offers” from admissions officers.

  • The CollegeViability app compiles public financial data from the U.S. Department of Education and other sources to create an at-a-glance picture of an institution’s fiscal health. It tracks enrollment trends, tuition dependency, debt loads, and other risk factors—warning signs that a college might be on the verge of closing or slashing programs. Families who use it can see trouble coming long before the next headline about a sudden campus shutdown.

These are not small benefits. Every year, thousands of students are lured into institutions that overpromise and underdeliver. Some are blindsided by mid-program closures. Others graduate into underemployment with six figures of debt. Without tools like TuitionFit and CollegeViability, many would walk into these situations blind.

The troubling truth is that higher education’s recruitment machine treats students the same way a corporate sales funnel treats customers—and sometimes the way a military intelligence operation treats enemy assets. Prospects are acquired, qualified, engaged, and converted. They are ranked by “propensity to enroll,” courted by carefully timed contact, and celebrated in quarterly revenue reports.

The people making the targeting decisions rarely bear the costs of a bad outcome. If a student drops out with debt and no degree, it’s a personal tragedy, not a liability on the college’s balance sheet. If a school shutters with no warning, students and their families are left scrambling while administrators move on to new posts elsewhere.

College should be more than a precision-marketed capture. It should be a transparent, good-faith exchange where both sides have access to the same essential facts. Right now, that balance doesn’t exist—and the gap is being exploited.

Families who want to survive the recruitment gauntlet must treat it for what it is: a sales process backed by data analytics, designed to maximize institutional revenue, not student outcomes. That means using every independent resource available, asking hard questions, and refusing to be rushed into decisions.

In the end, the difference between being a college prospect and a college target might be whether you’re armed with real information—or just hope.

Sources:

  • The Century Foundation, College Admissions and the Business of Enrollment Management

  • U.S. Senate HELP Committee, For Profit Higher Education: The Failure to Safeguard the Federal Investment and Ensure Student Success

  • The Hechinger Report, How Colleges Use Big Data to Target Students

  • TuitionFit, About

  • CollegeViability, Institutional Health Indicators

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