$8 Billion in Liberty University Debt: Engaging a Faith-Driven Constituency

More than 290,000 Liberty University borrowers owe over $8 billion in federal student loans, yet most remain politically disengaged. Many are veterans or enrolled in accelerated master’s programs often criticized as “robocolleges.” What sets this population apart is not just the size of their debt, but their faith and social conservatism—a demographic frequently overlooked by traditional student debt advocacy.

For unions and nonprofit organizations committed to civic engagement and economic justice, this represents a unique opportunity: mobilize borrowers in ways that align with their values, rather than against them. Messaging that highlights fairness, personal responsibility, and stewardship—core Christian principles—can resonate deeply while framing student debt as a challenge to both economic and moral accountability.

These borrowers are approaching peak voting age, meaning that engagement now could influence local and national politics in the coming election cycles. Institutions like the University of Phoenix show the scale of the opportunity: over one million borrowers owe more than $21 billion nationwide, suggesting that faith-aligned organizing strategies could have broad impact.

The strategy is clear: educate borrowers about their rights, expose predatory practices, and organize them into civic action, all while respecting their values and beliefs. Done thoughtfully, this approach can build trust and spur meaningful participation in democracy, turning a population long overlooked into an informed, motivated constituency.

The coming years will test whether unions and nonprofits seize this moment. Hundreds of thousands of conservative, Christian borrowers could become a powerful force for accountability and change—but only if engagement is value-driven, strategic, and timely.

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Sources:

• Higher Education Inquirer, More than 290,000 Liberty University student loan debtors owe more than $8 Billion

• Higher Education Inquirer, Liberty University Targeting Vets for Robocollege Master's Degrees

• Higher Education Inquirer, New Data Show Nearly a Million University of Phoenix Debtors Owe $21.6 Billion Dollars

• Higher Education Inquirer, Fraud Claims Against University of Phoenix Continue to Grow

• U.S. Department of Education, Federal Student Aid Data Center

• National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS)

How Demographics Could Elevate the Political Stakes of Student Loan Debt in 2028 and Beyond

Student loan debt has been a defining economic and political issue in the United States for over a decade. As of 2025, Americans owe nearly $1.8 trillion in student loans, with roughly 42–45 million borrowers carrying federal debt and average balances exceeding $39,000 per borrower. Delinquency rates have surged since repayment reporting resumed, with more than one in five borrowers behind on payments, and millions at risk of default. These financial pressures are now rippling through credit markets and household budgets, especially for younger, middle-aged, and lower-income borrowers. While student debt already garners public attention, shifting demographic trends and mounting economic pressures promise to reshape its political weight in the coming years unless comprehensive changes are enacted.

The largest cohort of student borrowers today consists of Millennials and older members of Generation Z, many aged between 25 and 45. These are prime years for political engagement, as individuals are more likely to vote, form households, buy homes, and shape community priorities. In 2028, this group will be even more politically active, navigating careers, families, and fiscal pressures that student debt directly influences. As borrowers age into life stages where financial stability becomes paramount, their appetite for political solutions — including forgiveness, refinancing, and more manageable repayment structures — is likely to intensify.

Student loan debt also affects communities differently. Black and Latinx borrowers are disproportionately burdened, with Black borrowers often owing more and struggling with repayment longer due to structural inequities in income and wealth. These disparities will continue to grow unless systemic reforms address not just debt levels but the economic systems that compound them over time. Communities of color are projected to constitute a larger share of the eligible electorate by 2030, and when a disproportionate share of voters in a given demographic faces an issue like unsustainable debt, it naturally becomes central to their political priorities and shapes the platforms of candidates seeking their support.

Older Americans are impacted by student loan dynamics not necessarily as borrowers themselves, but as co-signers, parents, or caregivers helping children or grandchildren manage debt. With the U.S. population aging, the 65+ age group is expected to grow as a portion of the electorate, and those over 80 will increasingly drive Medicaid and healthcare costs, adding strain to federal and state budgets. Older voters tend to vote at higher rates than younger voters, and as more families find multigenerational debt obligations weighing on retirement savings, caregiving responsibilities, and healthcare needs, the political urgency around student loan reform may expand beyond traditional “student” demographics and into older voters’ policy concerns.

Geographic and economic shifts also shape the political significance of student debt. States with high education costs, and correspondingly high average debt loads, may see student loan issues become central to local and statewide elections. Migration patterns bringing younger, more diverse populations to new regions — including parts of the South and Midwest — will likely influence electoral alignments and policy debates in competitive districts. Meanwhile, national concerns such as the growing federal debt, ongoing military engagements abroad, and rising costs associated with healthcare for an aging population amplify the stakes, creating competing pressures on policymakers who must balance debt relief against broader fiscal challenges.

Economic inequality further complicates the picture. The concentration of wealth among the richest Americans continues to grow, giving this group greater political influence and shaping policy priorities in ways that often conflict with the needs of student borrowers and middle-class families. As wealth and power accumulate at the top, voters carrying student debt may increasingly perceive systemic unfairness, heightening the political salience of debt relief and broader structural reforms. The interaction of these factors — persistent debt, rising national obligations, ongoing conflict, and economic inequality — suggests that student loans will remain intertwined with larger national debates over fiscal responsibility, social safety nets, and the distribution of economic power.

Student loan debt has already become a wedge issue in national politics, especially within Democratic primaries. The demographic shifts of the late 2020s, rising diversity, coupled economic pressures, and growing awareness of wealth inequality could make it a central concern for a broader slice of the electorate. Policymakers who ignore student debt risk alienating key voter blocs: younger voters whose turnout matters in swing states, communities of color with growing electoral influence, and middle-class families navigating financial strain alongside broader economic and geopolitical uncertainties.

The economic impact of outstanding student loan debt, from delayed homeownership to depressed small business formation, carries demographic implications that feed back into the political sphere. If current trends continue, the cost of inaction will not just be political but economic, affecting national growth rates, tax revenue, social programs, and inequality metrics that in turn shape voter sentiment and policy priorities.

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Student Debt and the Shifting Political Landscape

By 2028 and into the 2030s, demographic change is poised to elevate student loan debt from a pressing public concern to a core political battleground unless policymakers act proactively. With more borrowers entering key voting blocs, disproportionate impacts across racial and economic lines, and economic consequences rippling through communities of all ages, student loan debt is more than a financial issue: it is a demographic reality shaping the future of American politics.

Sadly, the Higher Education Inquirer will not be around to cover these developments as they unfold. HEI has made predictions about student debt and its political consequences in the past, and while nothing is set in stone, the combination of rising demographics, persistent economic inequality, the mounting national debt, ongoing war-related obligations, and pressures from an aging population does not paint a promising picture. Without major policy reforms — such as targeted debt relief, changes to repayment systems, or broader higher education financing reforms — the political salience of student debt is likely to intensify, influencing campaigns, elections, and national discourse for years to come.

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Sources

Education Data Initiative, “Student Loan Debt Statistics 2025,” educationdata.org
TransUnion, “May 2025 Student Loan Update,” newsroom.transunion.com
Forbes, “Student Loans for 64 Million Borrowers Are Heading Toward a Dangerous Cliff,” forbes.com
College Board, “Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2025,” research.collegeboard.org
LendingTree, “Student Loan Debt Statistics by State,” lendingtree.com
NerdWallet, “Student Loan Debt Statistics 2025,” nerdwallet.com

Forecasting the U.S. College Meltdown: How Higher Education Inquirer’s 2016 Warnings Played Out, 2016–2025 (Glen McGhee)

In December 2016, the Higher Education Inquirer published a set of 18 predictions warning of an ongoing “U.S. College Meltdown.” At the time, these warnings ran counter to the dominant narrative promoted by university leaders, accreditation agencies, Wall Street analysts, and much of the higher education press. College, readers were assured, remained a sound investment. Institutional risks were described as isolated, manageable, or limited to a small number of poorly run schools.

Nearly nine years later, that confidence has collapsed.

A comprehensive review of publicly available data, investigative journalism, court records, and government reports shows that 17 of the Higher Education Inquirer’s 18 predictions—94.4 percent—have been fully or partially confirmed. What was once framed as speculation now reads as an early diagnosis of a system already in advanced decline.

This article is not a victory lap. It is an accounting—of warnings ignored, of structural failures compounded, and of a higher education system reshaped less by learning than by debt, austerity, and financial engineering.

The Growth of Student Debt

In 2016, total student loan debt stood at approximately $1.4 trillion. By 2025, it had surpassed $1.8 trillion, despite repeated claims that the crisis was stabilizing. Millions of borrowers cycled in and out of forbearance, delinquency, and default, often unaware of the long-term consequences of capitalization, interest accrual, and damaged credit.

Temporary relief programs—pandemic pauses, income-driven repayment plans, and selective forgiveness—offered short-term breathing room while failing to address the underlying cost structure of higher education. Legal challenges and administrative reversals further destabilized borrower expectations, reinforcing the sense that student debt had become a permanent feature of American life rather than a transitional burden.

The Higher Education Inquirer warned in 2016 that student loans would increasingly function as a disciplinary mechanism, constraining career choice, delaying family formation, and suppressing economic mobility. That warning has proven prescient.

Graduate Underemployment and the Erosion of the Degree Premium

Another core prediction concerned the labor market. While headline unemployment numbers often appeared strong, the quality of employment deteriorated. By the early 2020s, a majority of recent four-year college graduates were underemployed—working in jobs that did not require a degree or offered limited advancement.

Wages stagnated even as credential requirements rose. Employers demanded more education for the same roles, while offering less stability in return. The result was a generation of graduates caught between rising expectations and diminishing returns.

This shift exposed a contradiction at the heart of the modern university: institutions continued to market degrees as pathways to prosperity, even as internal data increasingly showed that outcomes varied dramatically by institution, major, race, and class.

Enrollment Decline and the Demographic Cliff

The enrollment downturn predicted in 2016 arrived in waves. First came post–Great Recession skepticism. Then demographic decline reduced the number of traditional college-age students. Finally, the pandemic accelerated distrust, remote learning fatigue, and financial strain.

By the mid-2020s, enrollment losses were no longer cyclical. They were structural.

Colleges responded not by rethinking pricing or mission, but by cutting costs. Programs were eliminated, faculty positions left unfilled, and student services hollowed out. In rural and working-class regions, entire communities lost anchor institutions that had served as employers, cultural centers, and pathways to upward mobility.

Institutional Debt, Financialization, and Risk Shifting

One of the most underreported developments has been the rise of institutional debt. Facing declining tuition revenue, many colleges turned to bond markets to finance operations, capital projects, or refinancing. This strategy delayed collapse but increased long-term vulnerability.

The Higher Education Inquirer warned that debt-financed survival strategies would transfer risk downward—onto students through higher tuition, onto staff through layoffs, and onto local governments when institutions failed. That pattern has repeated itself across the country.

Meanwhile, elite universities with massive endowments continued to expand, insulate themselves from risk, and benefit from tax advantages unavailable to less wealthy institutions.

Closures, Mergers, and Asset Stripping

Since 2016, well over one hundred colleges have closed, merged, or been absorbed. Many closures were preceded by years of warning signs: declining enrollment, deferred maintenance, accreditation scrutiny, and emergency fundraising campaigns.

In some cases, institutions sold land, buildings, or entire campuses to survive. In others, boards pursued mergers that preserved branding while eliminating local governance and jobs.

These were not isolated failures. They were the predictable outcome of a system that prioritized growth, prestige, and financial metrics over resilience and public accountability.

The Limits of Reform and the Failure of Oversight

Perhaps the most sobering confirmation of the 2016 analysis is not any single data point, but the broader failure of reform. Despite abundant evidence of harm, regulatory responses remained fragmented and reactive. Accreditation agencies rarely intervened early. Federal enforcement was inconsistent. Media coverage often framed crises as unfortunate anomalies rather than systemic outcomes.

The Higher Education Inquirer argued in 2016 that the greatest risk was not collapse itself, but normalization—the slow acceptance of dysfunction as inevitable. That normalization is now visible in policy debates that treat mass underemployment, lifelong debt, and institutional instability as the cost of doing business.

A Crisis Foretold

The U.S. college meltdown did not arrive as a single dramatic event. It unfolded slowly, unevenly, and predictably—through spreadsheets, bond prospectuses, enrollment dashboards, and borrower accounts.

The accuracy of these forecasts underscores a deeper truth: the crisis was foreseeable. It was documented. It was warned about. What was missing was the willingness to act.

The Higher Education Inquirer published its predictions in 2016 not to provoke fear, but to provoke accountability. Nine years later, the record is clear. The meltdown was not an accident. It was a choice—made repeatedly, by institutions and policymakers who believed the system could absorb unlimited strain.

It could not.

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Sources
LendingTree; EducationData; Inside Higher Ed; Higher Ed Dive; Forbes; NPR; Brookings Institution; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

College Meltdown 2026 (Glen McGhee)

As the United States moves deeper into the 2020s, the College Meltdown is no longer a speculative concept but a structural reality. The crisis touches nearly every part of the system: enrollment, finances, labor, governance, and the perceived value of a college degree itself. The forces fueling this meltdown are not sudden shocks but accumulated pressures — demographic contraction, policy failures, privatization schemes, student debt burdens, and decades of mission drift — that now converge in 2026 with unprecedented intensity.

The Waning of College Mania

For decades, higher education sold an uncomplicated dream: go to college, get ahead, and move securely into the middle class. This college mania was promoted by policymakers, corporate interests, university marketers, and a compliant media ecosystem. But the spell is breaking. Students at elite universities are skipping classes, disillusioned not only by campus turmoil but by the reality that a degree, even from a prestigious institution, no longer guarantees a stable future. Employers increasingly question the value of credentials that have become inflated, inconsistent, and disconnected from workplace needs.

Yet paradoxically, many jobs still require degrees — not because the work demands them, but because credentialing has become a screening mechanism. The U.S. has built a system in which people must spend tens of thousands of dollars for access to a job that may not even require the knowledge their degree supposedly certifies. This contradiction lies at the heart of the meltdown.

Moody’s Confirms the Meltdown: A Negative Outlook for 2026

The financial rot is now too deep to ignore. Moody’s Investors Service recently issued a negative outlook for all of U.S. higher education for FY2026, confirming what researchers, debtors, and frontline faculty have been warning for years. Demographic decline continues to shrink the pool of traditional college-age students, leaving hundreds of institutions with no plausible path to enrollment stability.

Moody’s expects expenses to grow 4.4% in 2026, while revenues will grow only 3.5% — and for small tuition-dependent institutions, revenue growth may fall to 2.5–2.7%. In other words, the business model simply no longer works. Institutions are already turning to hiring freezes, early retirements, shared services, layoffs, and mergers. These austerity strategies hit labor and students hardest while preserving administrative bloat at the top, mirroring broader patterns of inequality across the U.S. economy.

Compounding the problem, federal loan reforms — particularly the elimination or capping of Grad PLUS loans — threaten universities that rely on overpriced master’s programs as revenue engines. Many of these programs were built during the boom years as financial lifelines, not academic commitments. The bottom is falling out of that model too.

[Image: HEI's baseline model shows steady losses between 2026 and 2036. And it could get much worse].  

White-Collar Unemployment and the Broken Value Proposition

A new generation is confronting economic realities that undermine the old promise of higher education. Recent data show that college graduates now make up roughly 25% of all unemployed Americans, a startling indicator of white-collar contraction. The unemployment rate for bachelor’s degree holders rose to 2.8%, up half a point in a year.

If higher education was once treated as an automatic economic escalator, it is now a much riskier gamble — often with a lifetime of debt attached.

Demographic Collapse and Institutional Failures

The so-called “demographic cliff” is no longer a future event; colleges in the Midwest, Northeast, and South are already competing for shrinking numbers of high-school graduates. Some institutions have resorted to predatory recruitment, deceptive marketing, and desperate discounting — the same tactics that fueled the for-profit college boom and collapse.

Meanwhile, the FAFSA disaster, mismanagement at the Department of Education, and the chaos surrounding federal financial aid verification have caused enrollment delays and intensified uncertainty. Institutions like Phoenix Education Partners (PXED) are already trying to shift blame for their own recruitment failures and history of fraud onto the federal government, signaling a new round of accountability evasion reminiscent of the Corinthian Colleges and ITT Tech eras.

Student Debt, Inequality, and Loss of Legitimacy

Student debt remains above $1.7 trillion, reshaping the life trajectories of millions and reinforcing racial and class disparities. Black borrowers, first-generation students, and low-income communities bear the heaviest burdens. Many institutions — especially elite medical centers and flagship universities — are simultaneously cash-rich and inequality-producing, perpetuating the dual structure of American higher education: privilege for the few, precarity for the many.

Faculty and staff face their own meltdown. Contingent labor now constitutes the majority of the instructional workforce, while administrators grow more numerous and more insulated from accountability. Shared governance is weakened, academic freedom is eroding, and political interference is rising, particularly in states targeting DEI programs, history curricula, and dissent.

The Road Ahead: Contraction, Consolidation, and Possibility

The College Meltdown will continue in 2026. More closures are coming, especially among small private colleges and underfunded regional publics. Mergers will be framed as “strategic realignments,” but for many communities — especially rural and historically marginalized ones — they will represent the loss of an anchor institution.

Yet contraction also opens space for reimagining. The United States could choose to rebuild higher education around equity, public purpose, and social good, rather than market metrics and debt financing. That would require:

• substantial public reinvestment,

• free or low-cost pathways for essential programs,

• accountability for predatory institutions,

• democratized governance, and

• a commitment to racial and economic justice.

Whether the nation takes this opportunity remains unclear. What is certain is that the system built on college mania, easy credit, and limitless expansion is collapsing — and Moody’s latest warning simply confirms what students, workers, and communities have felt for years.

The College Meltdown is here. And it’s reshaping the future of higher education in America.

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

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

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

The OPM Machine and Private Equity Consolidation

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

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

Hyper-Deregulation and the Dismantling of ED

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

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

Servicers, Contractors, and Tech Platforms Feeding on Borrowers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robocolleges, Robostudents, Roboworkers: The AI Cascade

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

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

FAFSA Meltdowns, Fraud, and Academic Cheating

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

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

Advertising and the Manufacture of “College Mania”

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

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

A Media Coverage Vacuum

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

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

The Emerging Picture

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

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

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

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Sources (Selection)

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

Pyrrhic Defeat and the Student Loan Portfolio: How a Managed Meltdown Enables Unauthorized Asset Sales

In classical history, a Pyrrhic victory refers to a win so costly that it undermines the very cause it was meant to advance. Less discussed, but increasingly relevant to modern governance, is the inverse strategy: the Pyrrhic defeat. In this model, short-term failure is tolerated—or even cultivated—because it enables outcomes that would otherwise be politically, legally, or institutionally impossible. When applied to public finance, pyrrhic defeat theory helps explain how the apparent collapse of a system can be leveraged to justify radical restructuring, privatization, or liquidation of public assets.

Nowhere is this framework more relevant than in the management of the federal student loan portfolio.

The federal student loan portfolio, totaling roughly $1.6 to $1.7 trillion, is not merely an accounting entry. It is one of the largest consumer credit systems in the world and functions simultaneously as a public policy tool, a long-term revenue stream, a data infrastructure, and a political liability. It shapes who can access higher education, how risk is distributed across generations, and how the federal government exerts leverage over the postsecondary sector. Precisely because of its scale and visibility, the portfolio is uniquely vulnerable to narrative reframing.

That vulnerability was not accidental. It was constructed over decades through a series of policy decisions that stripped borrowers of normal consumer protections while preserving the financial attractiveness of student debt as an asset. Chief among these decisions was the gradual removal of bankruptcy protections for student loans. By rendering student debt effectively nondischargeable except under the narrow and punitive “undue hardship” standard, lawmakers transformed education loans into a uniquely durable financial instrument. Unlike mortgages, credit cards, or medical debt, student loans could follow borrowers for life, enforced through wage garnishment, tax refund seizure, and Social Security offsets.

This transformation made student loans exceptionally attractive for securitization. Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities, or SLABS, flourished precisely because the underlying loans were shielded from traditional credit risk. Investors could rely not on educational outcomes or borrower prosperity, but on the legal certainty that the debt would remain collectible. Even during economic downturns, SLABS were marketed as relatively stable instruments, insulated from the discharge risks that plagued other forms of consumer credit.

Private banks once dominated this market. Sallie Mae, originally a government-sponsored enterprise, became a central player in both originating and securitizing student loans, while Navient emerged as a major servicer and asset manager. Yet as Higher Education Inquirer documented in early 2025, banks ultimately lost control of student lending. Rising defaults, public outrage, state enforcement actions, and mounting evidence of predatory practices made the sector politically radioactive. The federal government stepped in not as a reformer, but as a backstop, absorbing the portfolio and stabilizing a system private finance could no longer manage without reputational and regulatory risk.

That history reveals a recurring pattern. When student lending fails in private hands, it becomes public. When the public system is allowed to fail, it becomes ripe for re-privatization.

A portfolio does not need to collapse to be declared unmanageable. It only needs to appear dysfunctional enough to justify extraordinary intervention.

The post-pandemic repayment restart, persistent servicing failures, legal challenges to income-driven repayment plans, and widespread borrower confusion have all contributed to a growing narrative of systemic breakdown. Servicers such as Maximus, operating under the Aidvantage brand, MOHELA, and others have struggled to process payments accurately, manage forgiveness programs, and provide reliable customer service. These failures are often framed as bureaucratic incompetence rather than as predictable consequences of outsourcing public functions to private contractors whose incentives are misaligned with borrower welfare.

Navient’s exit from federal servicing did not mark a retreat from the student loan ecosystem so much as a repositioning, as it continued to benefit from private loan portfolios and legacy SLABS exposure. Sallie Mae, rebranded and fully privatized, remains deeply embedded in the private student loan market, which continues to rely on the same nondischargeability framework that props up federal lending.

Crucially, these servicing failures cannot be separated from the earlier elimination of bankruptcy as a safety valve. In normal credit markets, distress is resolved through restructuring or discharge. In student lending, distress accumulates. Borrowers remain trapped, servicers remain paid, and policymakers are confronted with a swelling mass of unresolved debt that can be labeled a crisis at any politically convenient moment.

Under pyrrhic defeat theory, such a crisis is not merely tolerated. It is useful.

Once the federal portfolio is framed as broken beyond repair, the range of acceptable solutions expands. What would be politically impossible in a stable system becomes plausible in an emergency. Asset transfers, securitization of federal loans, expansion of SLABS-like instruments backed by government guarantees, or long-term conveyance of servicing and collection rights can be presented as pragmatic fixes rather than ideological choices.

A Trump administration would be particularly well positioned to exploit this dynamic. Skeptical of debt relief, hostile to administrative governance, and ideologically aligned with privatization, such an administration could recast the portfolio as a failed public experiment inherited from predecessors. In that framing, selling or offloading the portfolio is not an abdication of responsibility but an act of fiscal discipline.

Importantly, this need not take the form of an explicit, congressionally authorized sale. Risk can be shifted through securitization. Revenue streams can be monetized. Servicing authority can be extended indefinitely to private firms. Data control can migrate outside public oversight. Over time, these steps amount to de facto privatization, even if the loans remain nominally federal. The infrastructure, incentives, and profits move outward, while the political blame remains with the state.

This is where earlier McKinsey & Company studies reenter the conversation. Long before the current turmoil, McKinsey analyses identified high servicing costs, fragmented contractor oversight, weak borrower segmentation, and low political returns on administrative complexity. While framed as efficiency critiques, these studies implicitly favored market-oriented restructuring. In a crisis environment, such recommendations become blueprints for divestment.

The danger of a pyrrhic defeat strategy is that it delivers a short-term political win at the cost of long-term public capacity. Selling or functionally privatizing the student loan portfolio may improve fiscal optics, but it permanently weakens democratic control over higher education finance. Borrowers, already stripped of bankruptcy protections, lose what remains of public accountability. Policymakers lose leverage over tuition inflation and institutional behavior. The federal government relinquishes a powerful counter-cyclical tool. What remains is a debt regime optimized for extraction, enforced by servicers, securitized for investors, and detached from educational outcomes.

The defeat is real. It is borne by students, families, and future generations. The victory belongs to those who acquire distressed public assets and those who benefit ideologically from shrinking the public sphere.

Pyrrhic defeat theory reminds us that collapse is not always accidental. In the case of the federal student loan portfolio, what appears to be dysfunction or incompetence may instead be strategic surrender: a willingness to let a public system deteriorate so that it can be sold off, securitized, or outsourced under the banner of necessity. If that happens, it will not be remembered as a policy error, but as a deliberate transfer of public wealth and power—made possible by decades of legal engineering that began when bankruptcy protection was taken away and ended with student debt transformed into a permanent financial asset.

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Sources

Higher Education Inquirer. “When Banks Lost Control of Student Loan Lending.” January 2025.
https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2025/01/when-banks-lost-control-of-student-loan.html

U.S. Department of Education, Federal Student Aid. FY 2024 Annual Agency Performance Report. January 13, 2025.

U.S. Department of Education, Federal Student Aid. Federal Student Loan Portfolio Data and Statistics, various years.

Government Accountability Office. Student Loans: Key Weaknesses in Servicing and Oversight, multiple reports.

Congressional Budget Office. The Federal Student Loan Portfolio: Budgetary Costs and Policy Options.

U.S. Congress. Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 and prior amendments affecting student loan dischargeability.

Pardo, Rafael I., and Michelle R. Lacey. “The Real Student-Loan Scandal: Undue Hardship Discharge Litigation.” American Bankruptcy Law Journal.

Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission materials on asset-backed securities and consumer credit markets.

McKinsey & Company. Student Loan Servicing, Portfolio Optimization, and Risk Management Analyses, prepared for federal agencies and financial institutions, 2010s–early 2020s.

Higher Education Inquirer archives on SLABS, servicers, privatization, deregulation, and student loan policy.

University of Phoenix, Oracle, and the Russian Cybercrime Crisis That Should Never Have Been Allowed to Happen

The University of Phoenix breach is more than another entry in the long list of attacks on higher education. It is the clearest evidence yet of how private equity, aging enterprise software, and institutional neglect have converged to create a catastrophic cybersecurity landscape across American colleges and universities. What happened in the summer of 2025 was not an unavoidable act of foreign aggression. It was the culmination of years of cost-cutting, inadequate oversight, and a misplaced faith in legacy vendors that no longer control their own risks.

The story begins with the Russian-speaking Clop cyber-extortion group, one of the most sophisticated data-theft organizations operating today. In early August, Clop quietly began exploiting a previously unknown vulnerability in Oracle’s E-Business Suite, a platform widely used for payroll, procurement, student employment, vendor relations, and financial aid administration. Oracle’s EBS system, decades old and deeply embedded across higher education, was never designed for modern threat environments. As soon as Clop identified the flaw—later assigned CVE-2025-61882—the group launched a coordinated campaign that compromised dozens of major institutions before Oracle even acknowledged the problem.

Among the most heavily affected institutions was the University of Phoenix. Attackers gained access to administrative systems and exfiltrated highly sensitive data: names, Social Security numbers, bank accounts, routing numbers, vendor records, and financial-aid related information belonging to students, faculty, staff, and contractors. The breach took place in August, but Phoenix did not disclose the incident until November 21, and only after Clop publicly listed the university on its extortion site. Even after forced disclosure, Phoenix offered only vague assurances about “unauthorized access” and refused to provide concrete numbers or a full accounting of what had been stolen.

Phoenix was not alone. Harvard University confirmed that Clop had stolen more than a terabyte of data from its Oracle systems. Dartmouth College acknowledged that personal and financial information for more than a thousand individuals had been accessed, though the total is almost certainly much higher. At the University of Pennsylvania, administrators said only that unauthorized access had occurred, declining to detail the scale. What links these incidents is not prestige, geography, or mission. It is dependency on Oracle’s aging administrative software and a sector-wide failure to adapt to a threat environment dominated by globally coordinated cybercrime operations.

But Phoenix stands apart from its peers because Phoenix, Apollo Global Management, and The Vistria Group should have known better. This institution has long operated at a scale more comparable to a financial-services company than a school. It handles vast volumes of sensitive data connected to federal student aid, identity verification, private loans, tuition reimbursement programs, and employer partnerships. A university with this profile should have been treating cybersecurity as a core institutional function, not an afterthought.

Apollo Global Management, which owned Phoenix during a period of enrollment decline and regulatory exposure, was fully aware of the vulnerabilities associated with online enrollment, financial-aid processing, and aging ERP infrastructure. Apollo’s business model is built on risk analysis and mitigation, yet it consistently underinvested in sustainable IT modernization while focusing on financial engineering and cost extraction. Phoenix emerged from Apollo’s ownership with significant technical debt and a compliance culture centered on limiting institutional liability rather than strengthening institutional defenses.

When The Vistria Group, through Phoenix Education Partners, acquired the university, it promised a new era of stability and digital transformation. Instead, it delivered a familiar private-equity formula: leaner operations, staff reductions, increased reliance on contractors, and deferred infrastructure investment. All of this occurred as ransomware groups such as Clop, LockBit, BlackCat, and Vice Society were escalating attacks on universities. The MOVEit crisis, the Accellion breach, and dozens of ransomware incidents had already demonstrated that higher education was an increasingly profitable target. Vistria had every signal necessary to understand the stakes, yet Phoenix entered the summer of 2025 with outdated Oracle systems, slow patch deployment, inadequate monitoring, and minimal segmentation between financial-aid and general administrative systems.

The breach was not a surprise. It was an inevitability. A university holding the sensitive financial and identity data of hundreds of thousands of current and former students, staff, and vendors cannot protect itself with minimal investment and outdated architecture. When Clop exploited Oracle’s flaw, Phoenix lacked the tools to detect lateral movement early, the expertise to identify unusual activity quickly, and the governance structure to respond decisively. The institution did not discover the breach on its own; it reacted only when a criminal syndicate announced its presence to the world.

This incident exposes a broader truth about higher education infrastructure in the United States. Universities have grown dependent on enterprise vendors whose systems are increasingly brittle and whose security models no longer meet contemporary requirements. Meanwhile, private-equity owners emphasize cost containment and short-term returns over long-term stability. The University of Phoenix breach is the result of those conditions converging with a global cybercrime ecosystem that is more organized, better funded, and more technically agile than the institutions it targets.

Students, faculty, staff, and vendors will bear the consequences for years. Many will face identity theft, fraudulent activity, and the lingering fear that their most sensitive information is circulating indefinitely on criminal marketplaces. Phoenix, like other affected institutions, will offer credit monitoring and generic assurances. But the public disclosures arrived too late, and the underlying failures were years in the making.

Phoenix should have known better.
Apollo Global Management should have known better.
The Vistria Group should have known better.
And American higher education should finally recognize that it can no longer treat cybersecurity as a line-item expense. It is now one of the central pillars of institutional survival.

Sources
Bleeping Computer
Security Affairs
The Register
CPO Magazine
The Record
University of Phoenix breach notifications
Clop leak site monitoring data

He Helped Run Some of the Worst For-Profit Colleges. The Trump Team Just Picked Him to Oversee College Quality. (David Halperin)

On the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday, when most people are focused on travel plans and food preparation, the Trump administration released a list of its four nominees for open slots on the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI). That is the panel of outside experts that advises the U.S. Department of Education on whether to approve or reject the accrediting bodies that serve as gatekeepers for federal student financial aid. Amid five candidates picked by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon — representatives from conservative think tanks and universities, and a student member — one name stands out: Robert Eitel, a senior education department official in the first Trump administration, and before that — which the Department’s press release does not mention at all — a senior executive at two of the most deceptive and abusive companies in the history of U.S. for-profit higher education.

Eitel, who had served as the Department of Education’s deputy general counsel during the George W. Bush administration, joined Career Education Corporation (CEC) in 2013 as a vice president of regulatory operations. In 2015, Eitel left CEC to join Bridgepoint Education as vice president of regulatory legal services. He remained in that role through April 2017, the last three months on leave of absence while serving as an advisor to Trump Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Eitel then resigned from Bridgepoint and was senior counsel to DeVos through Trump’s first term.

The first of Eitel’s corporate employers, Career Education Corp., which changed its name in 2020 to Perdoceo, has faced multiple law enforcement investigations for predatory conduct.

In 2013, soon after Eitel joined CEC, the company agreed to a $10.25 million settlement with the New York state attorney general over charges that it had exaggerated job placement rates for graduates of its schools.

In 2019, after Eitel’s departure, the company entered into a $494 million settlement with 48 state attorneys general, plus the District of Columbia, over an investigation, launched in 2014, that for years it had engaged in widespread deceptive practices against students.

Later that same year, Perdoceo agreed to pay $30 million to settle charges brought by the Federal Trade Commission that its schools, at least since 2012, had recruited students through deceptive third-party lead generation operations.

In each case, the company did not admit guilt.

Misconduct at CEC/Perdoceo continued well past Eitel’s departure, suggesting the rot at the company’s core. In this decade, Perdoceo employees told media outlets USA Today and Capitol Forum, as well as Republic Report, that company recruiters have continued to feel pressure to make misleading sales pitches and to enroll low-income people into programs that aren’t strong enough to help them succeed. Some of those former employees also spoke with federal investigators. USA Today reported in 2022 that the U.S. Department of Education, in December 2021, requested information from Perdoceo; the Department also asked Perdoceo to retain records regarding student recruiting, marketing, financial aid practices, and more. Perdoceo confirmed the probe, while seeming to minimize its significance, in a February 2022 SEC filing. Perdoceo also acknowledged in May 2022 that it received a request for documents and information from the U.S. Justice Department.

The Department of Education has provided CEC/Perdoceo schools — with current brand names including American Intercontinental University and Colorado Technical University and demised brands including Brooks Institute and Sanford-Brown College — with billions of dollars over the years. American Intercontinental University and Colorado Technical University have at times received as much as 97 percent of their revenue from taxpayer dollars in the form of federal student grants and loans.

But data released by the Department in 2023 showed that the Perdoceo schools deliver poor results for students, with low graduation rates and graduate incomes and high levels of student debt.

Meanwhile, the company Eitel left CEC to join, Bridgepoint Education, compiled its own record of predatory abuses. At a 2011 investigative hearing, then-Senate HELP committee chair Tom Harkin (D-IA) called Bridgepoint’s main school, Ashford University, “an absolute scam”; the hearing highlighted the company’s deceptive advertising, predatory recruiting, high prices, and weak educational offerings. Bridgepoint used false promises to purchase in 2005 a small college in Iowa and used that school’s accreditation to build a giant, mostly online school whose attendance peaked in 2012 at around 77,000 students and received billions from taxpayers.

Bridgepoint/Ashford deceived, crushed the dreams of, and buried in debt veterans, single moms, and others across the country, and put the company in jeopardy with law enforcement multiple times. In 2022, justice finally caught up with the company, which by that time had changed its name to Zovio. Following a trial where the California attorney general’s office presented extensive evidence of deceptive practices by the school, a state judge ruled that the company “violated the law by giving students false or misleading information about career outcomes, cost and financial aid, pace of degree programs, and transfer credits, in order to entice them to enroll at Ashford.” An appeals court subsequently upheld the verdict.

Zovio tried to launder its bad reputation by selling Ashford in 2020 to the public University of Arizona, while maintaining a lucrative service contract to run the school. After the California verdict, Zovio was pushed out of the deal, and the troubled school operation was folded into U. of Arizona, creating more controversy and turmoil at that school; the deceptive practices have continued.

After his revolving door journey through the Department of Education, two predatory college companies, and back to a Trump education department that repeatedly used its regulatory and enforcement powers to make it easier for predatory schools to prosper, Robert Eitel co-founded and became president of the Defense of Freedom Institute, a well-funded think tank dedicated at its outset to fighting the Biden administration’s education agenda through lawsuits and “vigorous oversight” of the regulatory process and advocating for public money for religious schools. It also has aggressively opposed the rights of transgender students.

In July, the Trump administration, in another effort to bulldoze laws and norms to get the personnel it wants, declared after the fact that the appointment earlier this year of Zakiya Smith Ellis, a Democratic appointee, as chair of NACIQI was “erroneous.” Accordingly, as far as the Trump administration is concerned, NACIQI currently has no chair. Don’t be surprised if, at the next NACIQI meeting, set for December 16, Trump officials maneuver to make Bob Eitel, a former top executive of some of the worst colleges in America, the head of the committee that is supposed to guard against college failures and abuses. Responsible NACIQI members should pick someone else as chair.

David Halperin
Attorney and Counselor
Washington, DC

[Editor's note: This article originally appeared on Republic Report.]

Extending Gainful Employment to All Institutions—Without Diluting Its Urgent Purpose

The debate over Gainful Employment (GE) regulations is once again heating up, and as usual, the loudest noise doesn’t come from the students who have been harmed, but from the institutions and lobbyists who fear accountability. The GE rule—originally crafted to curb abuses in the for-profit sector—evaluates whether programs leave their students with earnings high enough to reasonably repay the loans pushed onto them. It is, at its core, a consumer-protection regulation intended to protect the people higher education is supposed to serve.

A growing chorus now argues that Gainful Employment should apply to all types of schools, not just vocational programs and for-profit institutions. In principle, that argument is not wrong. Accountability should not be selective. Tuition-driven public universities, prestige-obsessed private nonprofits, elite medical centers with shadowy revenue streams, religious institutions, and wealthy flagships all participate in federal student aid programs. They all receive taxpayer money. They all should have to answer the question: Do your students earn enough to justify the debt you load onto them?

But here is where the trap lies. Expanding GE to all institutions should not become a tactic to delay, dilute, or derail Gainful Employment’s implementation. Too often, calls for “fairness” mask efforts by industry groups and establishment-aligned lobbyists to sidestep regulation altogether. The for-profit sector has used this move for more than a decade. When faced with sanctions after years of deceptive recruiting, falsified job-placement rates, and sky-high default rates, the response was always: “Why us? If GE is good policy, make everyone do it.” It is a clever pivot—not toward accountability, but away from it.

The Department of Education has long understood where the worst abuses lie. Corinthian Colleges, ITT Tech, Education Management Corporation, Career Education Corporation, and dozens more left hundreds of thousands of borrowers financially ruined. Many of these systems were sustained by federal aid despite evidence of fraud; many operated with political cover provided by well-paid lobbyists and deregulation-friendly lawmakers. GE was designed to stop the bleeding—to prevent an industry already steeped in predation from reinventing itself yet again.

Extending GE to all institutions is a worthy goal, but the immediate necessity is to enforce the rule where the risks are greatest. The fact that certain nonprofit and public institutions also produce poor outcomes does not negate the catastrophic harm of the for-profit sector. It simply means that any expansion of GE must follow, not precede, robust implementation.

Moreover, GE should be understood in the broader context of how the higher education finance system evolved. For decades, policymakers outsourced accountability to market forces—encouraging tuition hikes, aggressive lending through the FFEL program, and eventually the widespread securitization of student debt. When cracks began to show in the 1990s and 2000s, the establishment response was not structural reform but technical tinkering. GE was one of the first serious attempts to measure whether federally funded education delivered an actual public benefit. That is precisely why it has been so aggressively contested.

And the truth is, higher education’s accountability debate has always been a history of delay. Institutions insist they need “more data,” “more nuance,” “more consultation,” or “more time,” even as predatory practices continue to metastasize. Expanding GE is necessary. But using expansion as a pretext to stall action only reinforces a system where institutions externalize risk and students internalize debt.

What students and taxpayers deserve today is twofold:
First, a strong GE rule applied immediately to the programs with the highest risk of abuse.
Second, a parallel policy process—transparent, public, and insulated from institutional lobbying—to develop an expansion of GE-style metrics across all schools.

This is not an either-or choice. It is a matter of sequencing and political honesty.

If higher education leaders want GE applied to everyone, they should welcome its implementation in the sectors with the longest record of fraud. If lawmakers want accountability to be universal, they should commit to expanding the regulation—after the current version is enforced, not instead of it. And if critics want fairness, they should start by acknowledging the vast inequities that made GE necessary in the first place.

We cannot pretend that all institutions pose equal risk. But neither can we pretend that only one sector deserves scrutiny. The student debt crisis—forty years in the making—demands real enforcement today and a broader structural fix tomorrow.

Anything less is not reform. It is evasion.

Sources
U.S. Department of Education, Gainful Employment Rulemaking Documentation
Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges
Ben Miller, “Asleep at the Switch: How the Department of Education Failed to Police the For-Profit College Industry,” Center for American Progress
Jordan Matsudaira, research on postsecondary accountability metrics
The Century Foundation, reports on proprietary higher education and oversight failures

Same Predators, New Logo: PXED — A $22 Billion Student‑Debt Gamble Investors Should Beware

Warning to Investors: Phoenix Education Partners (PXED) may present itself as a cutting‑edge solution in career-focused higher education, but it’s built on the same extractive infrastructure that powered the University of Phoenix. With nearly a million students still owing an estimated $22 billion in federal loans, backing PXED isn’t just a financial bet — it’s a moral and reputational risk.

PXED’s leadership includes powerful private-equity players: Martin H. Nesbitt (Co‑CEO of Vistria, PXED trustee, and friend of Barak Obama), Adnan Nisar (Vistria), and Theodore Kwon and Itai Wallach (Apollo Global Management). Also in the mix is Chris Lynne, PXED’s president and a former Phoenix CFO intimately familiar with UOP’s controversial enrollment and marketing strategies. These are not educational reformers — they are dealmakers aiming to extract value from a student-debt pipeline.

[Image: Power Player Marty Nesbitt]

Higher Education Inquirer’s College Meltdown Index highlights how PXED fits into a broader financialization of higher education. Rather than reforming the University of Phoenix, its backers have resurrected it under a new brand — one that continues to enroll vulnerable adult learners, harvest federal aid, and operate with considerably less public oversight. 

Whistleblowers previously documented that Phoenix pressured recruitment staff to falsify student credentials, enrolling people who wouldn’t otherwise qualify for federal aid. Courses were allegedly kept deliberately easy — not to teach, but to keep students “active” enough to trigger aid disbursements. Internal marketing also exaggerated job prospects and corporate partnerships (e.g., with Microsoft and AT&T) to entice students. 

PXED may lean on a three‑year default rate (often cited around 12–13%), but that number is deeply misleading. Many UOP students stay stuck in deferment, forbearance, or income-driven repayment, masking the real long-term risk of non-payment. This is not just a short-term liability — it’s a potentially massive, multiyear financial exposure for PXED’s backers.

There was a significant FTC settlement that canceled $141 million in student debt and refunded $50 million to some students. But the scale of harm far exceeds that payout. Untold numbers of borrowers still have unresolved Borrower Defense claims, and the reputational risk remains profound.

Beyond financial concerns, there’s a major ethical dimension. HEI’s Divestment from Predatory Education argument makes a compelling case that investing in companies like PXED — or in loan servicers that profit from student debt — is not just risky, but morally indefensible. According to HEI, institutional investors (including university endowments, pension funds, and foundations) are complicit in a system that monetizes students’ aspirations and perpetuates financial harm. 

For investors, the message is clear: Phoenix is not merely an education play — it’s a high-stakes, ethically fraught extraction machine built on a legacy of indebtedness and regulatory vulnerability.

Unless PXED commits to real transparency, independent reporting on student outcomes, and accountability mechanisms — including reparations or debt relief — it should be approached not as a social-growth story, but as a dangerous gamble.

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Sources

• HEI. “Divestment from Predatory Education Stocks: A Moral Imperative.” Higher Education Inquirer

• HEI. “The College Meltdown Index: Profiting from the Wreckage of American Higher Education.” Higher Education Inquirer

• HEI. “What Do the University of Phoenix and Risepoint Have in Common? The Answer Is a Compelling Story of Greed and Politics.” Higher Education Inquirer

• HEI. “University of Phoenix Uses ‘Sandwich Moms’ to Sell a Debt Trap.” Higher Education Inquirer

• HEI. “New Data Show Nearly a Million University of Phoenix Debtors Owe $21.6 Billion.” Higher Education