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

Sunday, January 12, 2025

Higher Education and the American Empire

The Higher Education Inquirer has had the good fortune to include scholars like Henry Giroux, Gary Roth, Wendy Lynne Lee, Bryan Alexander and Richard Wolff.  And their work certainly informs us about higher education. With those authors and others from the past and present (like Upton Sinclair, Craig Steven Wilder, Davarian Baldwin, and Sharon Stein), we can better understand puzzling issues that are rarely pieced together.  

In 2023, we suggested that a People's History of US Higher Education be written. And to expand its scope, the key word "Empire" is essential in establishing a critical (and honest) analysis. Otherwise, it's tedious work that only serves to indoctrinate rather than educate its citizens--work that smart and diligent students will eventually know is untrue.  

A volume on Higher Education and the American Empire needs to explain how elite universities have worked for US special interests and the interests of wealthy people across the globe--often at the expense of folks in university cities and places around the world--and at the expense of the planet and its ecosystems. With global climate change in our face (and denied), and with the US in competition with China, India, Russia, in our face (and denied), this story cannot be ignored.

This necessary work on Higher Education and the US Empire needs to include detailed timelines, and lots of charts, graphs, and statistical analyses--as well as stories. Outstanding books and articles have been written over the decades, but they have not been comprehensive. And in many cases, there is little to be said about how this information can be used for reform and resistance. 

Information is available for those who are interested enough to dig. 

Understanding the efforts of the American Empire (and the wealthy and powerful who control it) is more important than ever. And understanding how this information can be used to educate, agitate, and organize the People is even more essential.  We hear there are such projects in the pipeline and look forward to their publication. We hope they don't pull punches and that the books do not gather dust on shelves, as many important books do. 

Key links:

The Best Classroom is the Struggle (Joshua Sooter)

Higher Education Must Champion Democracy, Not Surrender to Fascism (Henry Giroux)

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Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Economic Update: Capitalism and Culture, Their Connection in Crisis Now (Richard Wolff with Henry Giroux)

On this week’s episode of Economic Update, Professor Wolff provides updates on Medicare advantage and "pre-authorization" as a way to reduce Medicare payments, liberals and radicals split over Mamdani, Trump's current budget further deepens the inequality of wealth across the US, and Mexico attends the BRICS meeting in Rio de Janeiro. In the second part of today’s show, Professor Wolff interviews Professor Henry Giroux from McMaster University, Canada, on capitalism, culture, and fascism in the U.S. today.
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Sunday, January 4, 2026

Higher Education Inquirer Resources, Spring 2026

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

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











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

Activists, Coalitions, Innovators, and Alternative Voices

 College Choice and Career Planning Tools

Innovation and Reform

Higher Education Policy

Data Sources

Trade publications
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Saturday, December 20, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Monday, August 25, 2025

HEI Resources Fall 2025

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

Books

  • Alexander, Bryan (2020). Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education. Johns Hopkins Press.  
  • Alexander, Bryan (2023).  Universities on Fire. Johns Hopkins Press.  
  • Angulo, A. (2016). Diploma Mills: How For-profit Colleges Stiffed Students, Taxpayers, and the American Dream. Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Apthekar,  Bettina (1966) Big Business and the American University. New Outlook Publishers.  
  • Apthekar, Bettina (1969). Higher education and the student rebellion in the United States, 1960-1969 : a bibliography.
  • Archibald, R. and Feldman, D. (2017). The Road Ahead for America's Colleges & Universities. Oxford University Press.
  • Armstrong, E. and Hamilton, L. (2015). Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality. Harvard University Press.
  • Arum, R. and Roksa, J. (2011). Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. University of Chicago Press. 
  • Baldwin, Davarian (2021). In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. Bold Type Books.  
  • Bennett, W. and Wilezol, D. (2013). Is College Worth It?: A Former United States Secretary of Education and a Liberal Arts Graduate Expose the Broken Promise of Higher Education. Thomas Nelson.
  • Berg, I. (1970). "The Great Training Robbery: Education and Jobs." Praeger.
  • Berman, Elizabeth P. (2012). Creating the Market University.  Princeton University Press. 
  • Berry, J. (2005). Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education. Monthly Review Press.
  • Best, J. and Best, E. (2014) The Student Loan Mess: How Good Intentions Created a Trillion-Dollar Problem. Atkinson Family Foundation.
    • Bledstein, Burton J. (1976). The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America. Norton.
  • Bogue, E. Grady and Aper, Jeffrey.  (2000). Exploring the Heritage of American Higher Education: The Evolution of Philosophy and Policy. 
  • Bok, D. (2003). Universities in the Marketplace : The Commercialization of Higher Education.  Princeton University Press. 
  • Bousquet, M. (2008). How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low Wage Nation. NYU Press.
  • Brennan, J & Magness, P. (2019). Cracks in the Ivory Tower. Oxford University Press. 
  • Brint, S., & Karabel, J. The Diverted Dream: Community colleges and the promise of educational opportunity in America, 1900–1985. Oxford University Press. (1989).
  • Cabrera, Nolan L. (2024) Whiteness in the Ivory Tower: Why Don't We Notice the White Students Sitting Together in the Quad? Teachers College Press.
  • Cabrera, Nolan L. (2018). White Guys on Campus: Racism, White Immunity, and the Myth of "Post-Racial" Higher Education. Rutgers University Press.
  • Caplan, B. (2018). The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money. Princeton University Press.
  • Cappelli, P. (2015). Will College Pay Off?: A Guide to the Most Important Financial Decision You'll Ever Make. Public Affairs.
  • Cassuto, Leonard (2015). The Graduate School Mess. Harvard University Press. 
  • Caterine, Christopher (2020). Leaving Academia. Princeton Press. 
  • Carney, Cary Michael (1999). Native American Higher Education in the United States. Transaction.
  • Childress, H. (2019). The Adjunct Underclass: How America's Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission University of Chicago Press.
  • Cohen, Arthur M. (1998). The Shaping of American Higher Education: Emergence and Growth of the Contemporary System. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
  • Collins, Randall. (1979/2019) The Credential Society. Academic Press. Columbia University Press. 
  • Cottom, T. (2016). Lower Ed: How For-profit Colleges Deepen Inequality in America
  • Domhoff, G. William (2021). Who Rules America? 8th Edition. Routledge.
  • Donoghue, F. (2008). The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities.
  • Dorn, Charles. (2017) For the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in America Cornell University Press.
  • Eaton, Charlie.  (2022) Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education. University of Chicago Press.
  • Eisenmann, Linda. (2006) Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945–1965. Johns Hopkins U. Press.
  • Espenshade, T., Walton Radford, A.(2009). No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life. Princeton University Press.
  • Faragher, John Mack and Howe, Florence, ed. (1988). Women and Higher Education in American History. Norton.
  • Farber, Jerry (1972).  The University of Tomorrowland.  Pocket Books. 
  • Freeman, Richard B. (1976). The Overeducated American. Academic Press.
  • Gaston, P. (2014). Higher Education Accreditation. Stylus.
  • Ginsberg, B. (2013). The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All Administrative University and Why It Matters
  • Giroux, Henry (1983).  Theory and Resistance in Education. Bergin and Garvey Press
    • Giroux, Henry (2022). Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance. Bloomsbury Academic
  • Gleason, Philip (1995). Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century. Oxford U.
  • Golden, D. (2006). The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys its Way into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates.
  • Goldrick-Rab, S. (2016). Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream.
  • Graeber, David (2018) Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Simon and Schuster. 
    • Groeger, Cristina Viviana (2021). The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston. Harvard Press.
  • Hamilton, Laura T. and Kelly Nielson (2021) Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities
    • Hampel, Robert L. (2017). Fast and Curious: A History of Shortcuts in American Education. Rowman & Littlefield.
  • Johnson, B. et al. (2003). Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement
  • Keats, John (1965) The Sheepskin Psychosis. Lippincott.
  • Kelchen, Robert. (2018). Higher Education Accountability. Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Kezar, A., DePaola, T, and Scott, D. The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University. Johns Hopkins Press. 
  • Kinser, K. (2006). From Main Street to Wall Street: The Transformation of For-profit Higher Education
  • Kozol, Jonathan (2006). The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Crown. 
  • Kozol, Jonathan (1992). Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. Harper Perennial.
  • Labaree, David F. (2017). A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Labaree, David (1997) How to Succeed in School without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education, Yale University Press.
  • Lafer, Gordon (2004). The Job Training Charade. Cornell University Press.  
  • Loehen, James (1995). Lies My Teacher Told Me. The New Press. 
  • Lohse, Andrew (2014).  Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy: A Memoir.  Thomas Dunne Books. 
  • Lucas, C.J. American higher education: A history. (1994).
  • Lukianoff, Greg and Jonathan Haidt (2018). The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Penguin Press.
  • Maire, Quentin (2021). Credential Market. Springer.
  • Mandery, Evan (2022) . Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us. New Press. 
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Tuesday, December 30, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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