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.

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).

DOL FUBAR: The One-Stop Mirage in Job Assistance

American Job Centers—once branded as One-Stop Career Centers—are touted as comprehensive solutions for job seekers. Yet in reality, they often fail to deliver. Procedural checkboxes have replaced meaningful employment outcomes, especially amid growing privatization, budgetary erosion, and ideological attacks on government itself.

The Illusion of Effectiveness

For decades, One-Stops have been propped up as a silver-bullet answer to unemployment. Gordon Lafer’s The Job Training Charade lays bare how misguided this is: “For twenty years, every jobs crisis—whether inner-city poverty, jobs lost due to the North American Free Trade Agreement, or loggers put out of work by the spotted owl—has been met with calls for retraining. … The only trouble is, it doesn’t work, and the government knows it.” Lafer makes it clear that the real issues are structural—job shortages, wage stagnation—not worker deficits. Training programs serve as “phantom policies” that manage public frustration without changing economic realities.

Reinvention Without Impact

The Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW) proposed bold reforms in 2012 and 2013, suggesting One-Stop centers evolve into dynamic hubs where “work and learning intersect,” and where job seekers and employers co-create career paths. These ideals, however, remain largely aspirational: fragmented implementation, siloed service delivery, and inflexible reporting requirements continue to dominate.

Benchmarking studies dating back to the 2000s distilled “critical success factors” for One-Stops—from employer outreach to data systems—yet local variations and a lack of integrated data have stymied widespread adoption.

Privatization and Erosion

The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) formalized the shift toward privatization. One-Stops—now often rebranded as American Job Centers—are now commonly run under competitive contracts via workforce boards, often fragmented in execution and skewed toward short-term metrics rather than long-term, holistic support.

Death by a Thousand Cuts—and a Bathtub

Underpinning these failures is a deliberate strategy of attrition and disinvestment. The Trump administration’s FY 2026 “skinny” budget proposed a staggering 35% cut to DOL funding—roughly $4.6 billion taken in one sweep—eliminating the Job Corps entirely and consolidating myriad workforce programs into a single “Make America Skilled Again” (MASA) grant framework with minimal oversight or protections. This proposal has drawn sharp criticism: the National Association of Workforce Boards (NAWB) warned it would devastate the backbone of workforce systems, and Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer confirmed the deep cuts and program eliminations—including Adult Education and Job Corps—during Senate testimony.

Within the department, attrition has compounded the crisis. Roughly 20% of DOL staff—around 2,700 employees—have departed through buyouts, retirements, and resignations in the wake of a reorganization push, leaving core functions like wage enforcement, safety, and civil rights enforcement dangerously understaffed. Meanwhile, $577 million in international labor grants were cut, and an additional $455 million in cost-saving measures implemented through Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) further gut the agency’s operational capacity. 

Grover Norquist’s infamous bathtub image—“I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub”—is no longer hyperbole. It’s become strategy: shrink the DOL to dysfunction, then use the failure to justify privatization and further austerity.

A System Hack, Not a Fix

The DOL’s One-Stop approach has turned into what we might call “FUBAR”: F—ed Up Beyond All Recognition. Understaffed and underfunded, the system still struggles to offer basic services—counseling, referrals, workshops—let alone structural support. Meanwhile, contractors may round up placements, but the quality of employment remains low and unstable.

Reboot, Not Reinvention

Restoring DOL means more than reinvention—it demands a full reboot. That means reversing staffing attrition, reestablishing specialized programs like Job Corps and Adult Education, and rebuilding robust, public-sector-run infrastructure—not contracting out to private operators. We need integrated data systems that track meaningful outcomes (wages, retention, mobility) rather than just outputs. And services must be co-designed with local labor markets, job seekers, and employers, not imposed top-down or under narrow political logic

From Bathtub Backdraft to Real Accountability

“Lafer concludes that job training functions less as an economic prescription aimed at solving poverty than as a political strategy aimed at managing the popular response to economic distress.” One-Stops crystallize that danger—well-intentioned conceptually, but defunded, privatized, and bureaucratically crippled. Unless DOL breaks free of the bathtub logic and reaffirms its public mandate, it will remain an empty promise to vulnerable workers, not a ladder to economic mobility.

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Sources

• Lafer, Gordon. The Job Training Charade. Cornell University Press, 2002.

• Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW). One-Stop Career Centers Must Be Reinvented to Meet Today’s Labor Market Realities, 2012.

• CSW. Reinventing One-Stop Career Centers (Version 2), 2013.

• CSW. One-Stop Center Reinvention Paper, 2014.

• CSW. Benchmarking One-Stop Centers, 2000.

• U.S. Department of Labor. Study of the Implementation of the WIOA American Job Center Systems, 2020.

• Bloomberg Law: DOL to see 35% funding cut under Trump budget plan.

• NAWB report on FY 26 budget cuts to DOL.

• Testimony by Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer, May 2025.

• Guardian: Mass resignations at DOL amid looming cuts.

• AP News: International labor grants axed under DOGE.

• NPR 2001 quote by Grover Norquist.

• ‘Starve the beast’ strategy and Norquist quote.

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”

Trumpenomics in Action: The Government Buys Big Tech Shares—And What It Means for Higher Education

In a striking display of economic interventionism, the U.S. government has recently purchased equity stakes in semiconductor giants Intel and NVIDIA. At first glance, this seems to contradict the free-market rhetoric championed under Trumpenomics, which is ostensibly about small government, deregulation, and letting corporations thrive on their own. But a closer look reveals that this move is entirely consistent with the logic of Trump-era economic strategy: nationalist, crony-driven, and theatrically populist.

Trumpenomics has never been a pure ideology of laissez-faire capitalism. It is, at its core, crony capitalism in nationalist drag. By choosing winners and funneling government resources toward them, Trump-style economic policy reinforces corporate concentration under the guise of protecting American interests. The decision to buy Intel and NVIDIA shares fits squarely into this pattern. Both companies are critical to U.S. technological sovereignty—chips power everything from personal computers to defense systems. Intervening in their fortunes is sold as a matter of national security, echoing Trump’s tariffs and subsidies justified as shields against China.

The intervention also highlights the performative aspect of Trumpenomics. Trump has long treated stock market indices as proxies for success; prop up a handful of mega-corporations, and the market—and by extension, the administration—looks strong. Buying corporate shares is a literal, direct method of doing just that. Meanwhile, the populist veneer—“saving American jobs and technology”—masks the reality: these are already elite companies benefiting from government support, reinforcing the system’s entrenched inequalities.

Impact on Higher Education

University endowments, many of which invest heavily in large-cap tech stocks including Intel and NVIDIA, are now directly affected by government intervention. Equity purchases by the Treasury can inflate stock prices artificially, benefiting wealthy universities and private institutions while leaving smaller colleges and public universities—often reliant on tuition revenue or modest endowments—behind.

This intervention exacerbates existing disparities in higher education funding. Elite institutions with large endowments gain an additional layer of protection and growth, further concentrating wealth and influence in a sector already criticized for inequality. Meanwhile, public colleges and universities face stagnating resources, rising costs, and growing reliance on contingent labor. The result is a two-tier system: a well-funded elite benefiting from both government intervention and market gains, contrasted with a struggling majority of institutions.

Historically, government-directed industrial support is not new. Wartime production and Cold War defense contracts offered similar interventions, though usually without the claim of free-market purity. What distinguishes this Trumpenomics iteration is the deliberate mixing of nationalist rhetoric, corporate favoritism, and market spectacle—a pattern that has repeated across tariffs, tax cuts, deregulation, and now, equity purchases.

For Americans hoping for a consistent ideology, this move is yet another contradiction. Trumpenomics markets itself as free enterprise but practices selective state intervention when politically and economically expedient. In doing so, it crystallizes the fusion of wealth, power, and nationalist ideology into a system that protects the elite while leaving the majority—including many students and educators—to navigate underemployment, stagnating wages, and an educated underclass.

LSAT Suspended in China (Derek Newton*)

A friend of The Cheat Sheet sent us this important development — delivery of the LSAT, the Law School Admissions Test — has been suspended in China.

Go ahead, guess why.

According to the announcement from the test provider:

We have been increasingly concerned about organized efforts by individuals and companies in mainland China to promote test misconduct.

They continue:

While security is always a concern, these enterprises are becoming increasingly aggressive.

Yup.

I don’t mean to single out China. It’s one of a handful of countries in which test fraud is incredibly common and incredibly profitable. It’s so bad that any test delivered online in China is, in my view, compromised beyond validity.

To be clear as well, this is not a new problem (see Issue 232). In Issue 137, we noted that organized criminal gangs in India were giving up selling drugs because selling test fraud was more profitable.

More from the announcement:

This type of [cheating] activity is not limited to the LSAT; these enterprises purport to offer cheating services for virtually every standardized test.

True. Again — this is not a China problem or an LSAT problem. But this is a gigantic problem.

The announcement again:

After careful consideration, we have decided to take the additional step of suspending online testing in mainland China following the upcoming October international administration of the LSAT. We will be taking a variety of steps to enhance the security of the October LSAT. Because we do not currently offer in-person testing in China, the October test will be the last LSAT administration in mainland China until further notice.

And — round of applause.

This was not an easy decision. The LSAT in China must be a cash machine. Pulling it off the shelves involves more than just money, it raises real questions of fairness and access. So, seeing a company put the validity of their assessment and the sanctity of its scores ahead of money and ahead of awkward questions, is great.

It’s great.

If people keep stealing your lunch money, quit carrying your lunch money until you can figure out a better way. Like this:

We will continue to monitor and respond to this situation and will continue to evolve our security measures and employ a wide range of tools to protect the integrity of the test both in the U.S. and internationally.

Integrity is not cheap. But it is worth more than whatever it costs. Good for LSAC, the test provider.

And I know this is crazy, but every standardized test ought to hold themselves to the same standard. Give a secure, valid assessment or don’t give one at all. Colleges and universities, I’m looking at you.

Anyway, this is big news, and I do hope that others recognize the leadership this takes.

*This article first appeared at The Cheat Sheet.  

Where Public Health Meets National Security: From Susan Monarez to Stanford’s Defense Nexus

In July 2025, Dr. Susan Monarez was confirmed as the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) following a narrow 51–47 Senate vote along party lines. Monarez, who had been serving as acting director since January, brings over two decades of experience in federal health agencies, including leadership roles at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), the Health Resources and Services Administration, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. Her career has also included positions in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Security Council, highlighting the growing intersection of health, technology, and national security.

Monarez’s confirmation occurs amid heightened scrutiny of CDC policies, vaccine skepticism, and substantial budgetary cuts proposed by the Trump administration. With a measles outbreak threatening public health and thousands of CDC positions eliminated or at risk, her leadership will be tested as she navigates the complex web of scientific integrity, political pressure, and resource constraints.

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Stanford University: Academia and Defense Converge

While Monarez represents a public health leadership deeply entangled with federal policy and security, Stanford University illustrates another side of the U.S. national security ecosystem: the academic and technological pipeline that fuels innovation for defense purposes. In Silicon Valley, Stanford has become a hub where academic research directly informs military and national security projects. Programs like Technology Transfer for Defense (TT4D) accelerate the movement of emerging technologies—ranging from AI and robotics to biotechnology and portable health diagnostics—into practical applications for the Department of Defense.

The Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation, established with support from the Office of Naval Research, further exemplifies Stanford’s role in bridging academia and defense. It integrates faculty expertise, student engagement, and Silicon Valley innovation to address pressing national security challenges. Through initiatives like the National Security Innovation Scholars program and Stanford DEFCON Student Network, students are empowered to contribute directly to actionable defense solutions.

Courses such as Hacking for Defense (H4D) demonstrate the university’s commitment to hands-on problem-solving, pairing students with military and intelligence agencies to address real-world national security issues using startup methodologies. Similarly, Stanford’s collaboration with the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School applies AI and machine learning expertise to advance aerospace testing and innovation. These programs reflect a growing trend among Stanford graduates pursuing careers in defense tech, joining companies such as Palantir, Anduril, and Shield AI.

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The Bio-Surveillance Nexus

As the Trump administration has spent its first few months in The White House constructing the physical and digital infrastructure required for a pre-crime, technocratic police state, little attention has been paid to the ways in which the institutions ostensibly dedicated to “public health” are helping build out this digital control grid. As Unlimited Hangout has been reporting for many years, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a prominent subgroup of the surveillance state has emerged at the intersection of Big Tech, Big Pharma, and the military-industrial complex—one that is laying the groundwork to implement the final frontier of mass surveillance: the bio-surveillance apparatus.

Dr. Monarez’s role at the CDC and Stanford’s defense-oriented research ecosystem exemplify how public health, technology, and national security are increasingly entangled. From AI-driven diagnostics and wearable health monitors to military-backed biomedical research, the convergence of these sectors is creating a powerful, largely invisible infrastructure that extends far beyond conventional healthcare, embedding surveillance, control, and national security capabilities into everyday life.

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The Bio Surveillance State 

The appointment of Susan Monarez and the rise of Stanford’s defense-academic initiatives illustrate a broader trend: the blurring of boundaries between public health, defense, and technological surveillance. While these programs are publicly framed as innovation and security measures, they also raise critical questions about the expansion of digital and bio-surveillance, the militarization of scientific research, and the role of universities in national security projects.

As the United States navigates public health crises, technological competition, and national security imperatives, these overlapping networks of government, academia, and industry illuminate a critical reality: the future of American innovation, public safety, and civil liberties depends not just on policy or technology alone, but on the careful scrutiny of the bridges between them.

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Sources:

• Unlimited Hangout: Meet Trump’s CDC Director Susan Monarez

• Reuters: Senate Confirms Trump Nominee Susan Monarez

• ABC News: Senate Confirms CDC Director

• Stanford TT4D

• Gordian Knot Center

• Stanford Hacking for Defense

• SF Standard: Stanford Students Enter Military Tech

Call for Authors: Writing on the Genocide in Palestine

The Higher Education Inquirer is calling on student journalists, college students, faculty, and independent writers to speak truth to power about the ongoing genocide in Palestine. At a time when universities, governments, and media outlets are complicit through silence, distortion, or outright propaganda, it is urgent that we create space for honest accounts, rigorous investigations, and unapologetic solidarity.

We are seeking pieces that uncover how campuses are responding—or refusing to respond—to the atrocities, that expose academic and financial ties between U.S. higher education and Israel, that highlight student and faculty resistance, and that reflect on the risks of teaching and speaking openly in an environment of censorship and fear. We are especially interested in writing that challenges media narratives, including the BBC’s deeply biased coverage of Gaza, which research shows privileges Israeli voices and humanizes Israeli deaths while erasing Palestinian suffering.

This is not a moment for neutrality. Higher education is entangled in global systems of power, and its students and workers bear both the weight of silence and the responsibility to resist. We welcome investigative reporting, personal testimony, analytical essays, and critical reflections. Because safety is a real concern, we will publish pieces anonymously if needed.

If you are ready to contribute, send a 2–3 sentence pitch to gmcghee@aya.yale.edu. The Higher Education Inquirer stands in the muckraking tradition: fearless, uncompromising, and committed to amplifying voices that others try to silence.

Sources:
Centre for Media Monitoring, “BBC on Gaza-Israel: One Story, Double Standards” (2024) https://cfmm.org.uk/bbc-on-gaza-israel-one-story-double-standards

Novara Media, “BBC Systematically Biased Against Palestinians in Gaza Coverage” (2025) https://novaramedia.com/2025/06/16/bbc-systematically-biased-against-palestinians-in-gaza-coverage

BRICUP, “Meticulous Analysis of BBC’s Systemic Bias on Israel-Palestine” (2025) https://www.bricup.org.uk/news-2/meticulous-analysis-of-bbcs-systemic-bias-on-israeli-palestine-confirms-its-link-to-the-deep-state

The Guardian, “The BBC Pulled My Gaza Documentary After It Was Approved” (2025) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/02/bbc-gaza-doctors-under-attack-documentary-israel-war

The Guardian, “The BBC Has Alienated Everyone on Gaza Bias” (2025) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/15/bbc-alienated-everyone-gaza-bias
Wikipedia, “Media Coverage of the Gaza War” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Gaza_war
Wikipedia, “South Africa’s Genocide Case Against Israel” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa%27s_genocide_case_against_Israel
Wikipedia, “International Criminal Court Arrest Warrants for Israeli Leaders” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court_arrest_warrants_for_Israeli_leaders

The Case Against Higher Education Reform (Glen McGhee)

For decades, critics and policymakers have argued that American higher education could be “fixed” through better management, new credentials, accountability systems, or market competition. But the evidence now points to a sobering reality: the time for meaningful reform has passed. What remains is a structurally inert system staggering toward collapse, incapable of adapting in ways that would meaningfully serve students, faculty, or the broader society.

Too Late: The System Has Already Crystallized

Sociologists Michael Hannan and John Freeman warned in 1984 that organizations often fall prey to “structural inertia,” creating a form of lock-in that makes real transformation virtually impossible. Today’s higher education sector exemplifies their theory.

Since 2010, undergraduate enrollment has declined by more than 15%, representing 2.7 million fewer students nationwide. The FAFSA fiasco of 2024–25 alone is expected to result in hundreds of thousands fewer freshmen, according to Brookings. This is not gradual adjustment but systemic breakdown occurring within institutions whose structures are too rigid to respond.

The so-called “demographic cliff” beginning in 2025 will accelerate these failures. The Philadelphia Federal Reserve predicts that 1 in 10 U.S. colleges faces “significant financial distress” in the next decade. Closures are already mounting: Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama shut its doors in 2024 after 168 years, despite political lobbying and emergency funding attempts. In Vermont, the Vermont State Colleges System closed three campuses in 2020, citing declining enrollment and unsustainable costs. In Massachusetts, Mount Ida College collapsed in 2018, leaving students stranded. These are not isolated cases—they are signs of a broader unraveling.

No Power, No Resources: Reform Advocates Lack Institutional Leverage

Those demanding reform—students burdened by debt, adjuncts trapped in precarity, or concerned citizens—lack meaningful power within entrenched governance structures. Administrative hierarchies create what organizational theorists call “hierarchical inertia”: resistance to bottom-up change.

Between 2010 and 2018, spending on administrative services grew by 25%, compared with only 16% growth in instructional spending. Administrative salaries rose faster than faculty pay, and presidents of elite private universities now routinely earn over $1 million annually, while the median adjunct pay per course hovers around $3,500.

Meanwhile, the faculty workforce has stratified into a rigid caste system: 48% of all faculty are adjuncts, compared with only 33% who are tenure-track. Nearly one in four adjuncts qualifies for some form of public assistance, according to the American Federation of Teachers.

Higher Education as a Caste System

The metaphor of higher education as a caste system is not rhetorical exaggeration—it is sociological description.

• Academic labor: Adjuncts teach 60–70% of all undergraduate courses at some public universities, yet lack benefits, job security, or office space.

• Institutional prestige: The top 20 U.S. universities control nearly $400 billion in endowment wealth, while the median endowment across all institutions is less than $200 million—a disparity that drives inequality in faculty hiring, research opportunities, and student aid.

• Student access: Federal data show that students from the top income quartile are five times more likely to attend a selective university than students from the bottom quartile.

As one adjunct professor bitterly described it: “I guess I am in the Sudra—servant—class.”

Path Dependence and the Logic of Lock-In

American higher education is path dependent: historical decisions have created self-reinforcing mechanisms that are now nearly impossible to undo.

The feedback loops are obvious. Average tuition has tripled (in real dollars) since 1980, while total student loan debt now exceeds $1.7 trillion, owed by more than 43 million borrowers. Tuition hikes fuel administrative growth, which requires even higher tuition. Federal student loans underwrite rising costs, which then justify further loan expansion.

Even when institutions attempt reform, history traps them. Consider New College of Florida, a small public liberal arts institution: under political pressure in 2023, its governance was remade to align with a conservative ideological agenda. The result has been turmoil, plummeting enrollment, and national headlines—but no structural fix to the deeper financial instability.

The sector has reached what economists call “quasi-irreversibility”: a point beyond which reform cannot meaningfully occur without collapse.

The Futility of Cosmetic Solutions

The reforms most commonly floated today—cost containment, program elimination, or alternative credentials—misunderstand structural inertia.

In 2025, West Virginia University cut 28 academic programs, including its entire foreign language department, as part of an effort to address a projected $45 million deficit. Dozens of other universities, from regional publics to small privates, have announced similar cuts. These moves balance budgets temporarily but hollow out educational missions.

Calls for universities to spend more of their endowments overlook the fact that even elite institutions already average spending rates around 4.5%, which is close to what financial managers consider sustainable. Meanwhile, 90% of U.S. colleges have endowments under $100 million, meaning they cannot rely on them for meaningful financial rescue.

Alternative credentials face similar structural limits. A 2022 SHRM survey found that while 48% of employers expressed interest in microcredentials, only 20% actually considered them in hiring decisions. Applicant tracking systems are built to screen for traditional degrees, not experimental certificates.

The Iron Law of Institutional Preservation

Sociologists describe “institutional isomorphism”—the tendency for organizations to mimic each other in ways that resist innovation. In higher education, this has created an “iron law” of institutional preservation.

When faced with crisis, universities respond with defensive maneuvers: hiring freezes, program eliminations, and lobbying for more federal support. In 2025 alone, more than 100 institutions announced cuts to majors, from classics to physics, while maintaining administrative and athletic spending.

The overriding purpose of universities is no longer the pursuit of knowledge or the education of students, but the preservation of their own bureaucratic forms.

Collapse Before Reform

The conclusion is stark but unavoidable: American higher education has passed the point of meaningful reform. Its rigid hierarchies, path dependence, and preservation instincts make internal change impossible. Demographic decline and financial pressures will likely force widespread collapse before adaptation occurs.

Hannan and Freeman’s theory predicted this outcome: organizational change is rarely the product of internal reform. Instead, it comes through environmental selection—the replacement of existing institutions by new ones better suited to survive.

The American university may not disappear entirely, but the form it has taken since the mid-20th century is unsustainable. Collapse is not only likely—it may already be underway.

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Sources:
Hannan & Freeman (1984); BestColleges (2025); Brookings (2025); Philadelphia Fed (2024); Forbes (2025); Inside Higher Ed (2023); Academe Blog (2013); Governing (2023); AFT (2020); SHRM (2022); Al Jazeera (2025); ERIC (2020); Birmingham-Southern (2024); WVU (2025); Mount Ida (2018); Vermont State Colleges (2020).

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.

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Sources

• EdSurge. “What a New Strategy at 2U Means for the Future of Online Higher Education.” August 5, 2022. https://www.edsurge.com/news/2022-08-05-what-a-new-strategy-at-2u-means-for-the-future-of-online-higher-education

• Newswire. “2U Faces Lawsuit for Pregnancy Discrimination.” June 2015. https://www.newswire.com/news/2u-faces-lawsuit-for-pregnancy-discrimination

• Christensen, Clayton M. and Michael B. Horn. Disrupting Class. McGraw-Hill, 2008.

• McMillan Cottom, Tressie. Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy. The New Press, 2017.

• Cellini, Stephanie Riegg. “For-Profit Higher Education: An Assessment of Costs and Benefits.” National Bureau of Economic Research, 2012.

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