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.

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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.

The Brown University Killing, the Educated Underclass, and the Politics of Control

When a killing becomes associated with an elite institution such as Brown University, the public narrative hardens quickly. The event is framed as an unforeseeable rupture—either the product of individual pathology or evidence that universities have failed to control dangerous people in their midst. Missing from both accounts is a deeper examination of how elite higher education produces an educated underclass, how mental illness is managed rather than treated, how international students are uniquely exposed to risk, and how mass surveillance and reporting regimes increasingly substitute for care.

Elite universities project an image of abundance: intellectual freedom, global opportunity, and moral seriousness. Yet beneath that image lies a population living with chronic insecurity. Graduate students, adjuncts, postdoctoral researchers, and international students occupy a paradoxical position—highly educated, institutionally dependent, and structurally disposable. They are central to the university’s labor model and global prestige, yet peripheral to its safety nets and decision-making structures.

Mental illness must be addressed directly, but not in the reductive way it is often invoked after violence occurs. Campus mental health systems are overwhelmed, under-resourced, and shaped by liability concerns rather than therapeutic commitments. Students in severe psychological distress frequently encounter long waitlists, fragmented care, or administrative responses that blur the line between support and discipline. Crisis is managed, not resolved.

For international students, these failures are magnified. Visa status is typically contingent on continuous enrollment and academic performance. A mental health crisis can threaten not only a student’s education but their legal right to remain in the country. Seeking help may carry perceived—or real—risks: loss of funding, forced leaves of absence, housing instability, or immigration consequences. Cultural stigma, racism, language barriers, and social isolation further discourage engagement with already inadequate systems.

Rather than expanding care, universities have increasingly expanded surveillance. Elite campuses now operate dense ecosystems of monitoring: security cameras, access controls, data analytics, behavioral intervention teams, and anonymous “concerned citizen” tip lines. These systems are justified as preventative safety measures, but they often function as tools of social control. “Concerning behavior” is deliberately undefined, allowing subjective judgments to trigger institutional scrutiny.

Such systems disproportionately affect those who already stand out—students who are foreign, mentally ill, socially isolated, or racially marginalized. For international students in particular, being flagged by a tip or threat assessment process can escalate rapidly, drawing in campus police, local law enforcement, or federal immigration authorities. Surveillance does not replace care; it displaces it.

In the aftermath of violence, political responses tend to reinforce this displacement. Donald Trump’s reactions to campus-related violence and crime have followed a consistent pattern: emphasis on “law and order,” denunciations of universities as irresponsible or ideologically corrupt, and calls for stronger policing, harsher penalties, and increased monitoring. Mental illness is often invoked rhetorically, but rarely accompanied by proposals for expanded treatment, housing stability, or protections for vulnerable students—especially non-citizens.

This framing matters. When elite campus violence is interpreted through a punitive lens, it legitimizes further surveillance, broader reporting mandates, and closer coordination between universities and law enforcement. It shifts responsibility away from institutional structures and onto individuals deemed dangerous or deviant. For foreign students and members of the educated underclass, this environment deepens fear and discourages help-seeking, even as pressure intensifies.

The concept of the educated underclass helps explain why these dynamics are so volatile. Contemporary higher education produces vast numbers of highly trained individuals for a shrinking set of secure positions. International students are recruited aggressively, charged high tuition, and celebrated as evidence of global prestige, yet offered limited pathways to stable employment or belonging. Universities benefit enormously from this arrangement while externalizing its human costs.

None of this excuses violence. Accountability is essential, and the suffering of victims must remain central. But focusing exclusively on individual blame—or on punitive political responses—allows institutions to preserve comforting myths about themselves. It obscures how structural precarity, untreated mental illness, immigration vulnerability, and surveillance-based governance interact in predictable ways.

What incidents connected to elite universities ultimately reveal is not merely individual failure, but institutional contradiction. Universities claim to value diversity while subjecting foreign students to heightened scrutiny. They speak the language of wellness while expanding systems of monitoring and reporting. Political leaders denounce campuses while endorsing the very control mechanisms that exacerbate isolation and distress.

Until universities invest seriously in mental health care, protect international students from cascading penalties, and confront the harms of surveillance-first approaches—and until political leaders move beyond carceral reflexes—elite campuses will remain places where suffering is managed rather than addressed. When that management fails, the consequences can be catastrophic.

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Sources

American Psychiatric Association. Mental Health in College Students.
https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/college-students/mental-health-in-college

Eisenberg, D., et al. “Mental Health and Academic Success in College.” The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2009.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books.

Institute of International Education. Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange.
https://opendoorsdata.org

Lipson, S. K., & Eisenberg, D. “Mental Health and Academic Attitudes and Expectations in University Populations.” Journal of Adolescent Health, 2018.

Monahan, Torin. Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity. Rutgers University Press.

Newfield, Christopher. The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Johns Hopkins University Press.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security. SEVP Guidance for International Students.
https://www.ice.gov/sevis

Trump, Donald J. Public statements and campaign remarks on crime, universities, and law enforcement, 2016–2024.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs.

NCAA Football Is Dirty… And It Always Has Been

For more than a century, college football has wrapped itself in pageantry, school colors, marching bands, and the language of amateur virtue. It has sold itself as character-building, educational, and fundamentally different from professional sports. Yet from its earliest days to the present NIL era, NCAA football has been marked by exploitation, corruption, racial inequality, physical harm, and institutional hypocrisy. The truth is not that college football has recently become “dirty.” It has always been this way.

College football emerged in the late 19th century as a violent, chaotic game played almost exclusively by elite white men at private Northeastern universities. By the 1890s, dozens of players were dying each season from on-field injuries. In 1905 alone, at least 18 young men were killed. The brutality became so extreme that President Theodore Roosevelt summoned university leaders to the White House, demanding reforms to save the sport—or shut it down entirely. The NCAA’s predecessor organization was born not to protect players, but to protect football itself.

From the beginning, control and image management mattered more than athlete welfare.

As the sport spread nationally in the early 20th century, universities discovered football’s power as a marketing and fundraising engine. Gate receipts financed campuses, built stadiums, and elevated institutional prestige. With that money came cheating. Schools openly paid players under the table, provided fake jobs, and created academic loopholes to keep athletes eligible. The NCAA responded not by ending exploitation, but by codifying “amateurism”—a concept designed to deny players compensation while preserving institutional profit.

That amateur ideal was always selective. Coaches became highly paid public figures, administrators gained power and prestige, and universities used football to attract donors and students. Players, meanwhile, were expected to risk their bodies for scholarships that could be revoked, often steered into academic programs that prioritized eligibility over education. The system worked exactly as intended.

Race made the exploitation even starker. For much of the 20th century, Black athletes were excluded outright or limited by quotas, especially in the South. When integration finally occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, it did not bring equity. Black players disproportionately filled the most physically punishing positions, generated enormous revenue, and remained shut out of coaching, administrative leadership, and long-term financial benefit. The plantation metaphor—uncomfortable as it is—has endured because it fits.

Throughout the postwar era, scandals became routine. Academic fraud at powerhouse programs. Boosters laundering payments. Universities covering up recruiting violations while publicly moralizing about rules and integrity. The NCAA positioned itself as a regulator, but enforcement was inconsistent and often political. Blue-blood programs negotiated slaps on the wrist while smaller schools were hammered to make examples. Justice was never blind; it was strategic.

Meanwhile, the physical toll on players worsened. As athletes grew larger, faster, and stronger, the sport became more dangerous. Concussions were downplayed for decades. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) was ignored until it could no longer be denied. Players suffering brain injuries were dismissed as weak, while universities and conferences cashed ever-larger media checks. The NCAA claimed ignorance, even as evidence mounted and lawsuits piled up.

The television era transformed college football into a billion-dollar entertainment industry. Conference realignment chased broadcast revenue, not regional tradition or student well-being. Athletes were asked to travel cross-country on school nights, miss classes, and perform under relentless pressure—all while being told they were “students first.” The hypocrisy became harder to conceal.

By the early 21st century, the contradictions finally cracked. Legal challenges exposed the NCAA’s amateurism rules as a restraint of trade. Courts acknowledged what players had long known: universities were profiting massively from their labor while denying them basic economic rights. Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) was not a revolution—it was an overdue concession.

Yet even in the NIL era, the dirt remains. The system still lacks transparency. Booster-driven collectives operate in legal gray zones. Players are encouraged to chase short-term deals without long-term protections. There is no guaranteed healthcare beyond enrollment, no pension, no real collective bargaining for most athletes. Coaches can leave at will; players are scrutinized, transferred, or discarded.

The NCAA insists it is reforming. Conferences promise stability. Universities speak the language of athlete empowerment. But the underlying structure remains unchanged: unpaid or under-protected labor generating extraordinary wealth for institutions that claim educational mission while operating like entertainment corporations.

College football’s defenders often say, “It’s always been this way,” as if that excuses the harm. In reality, that phrase is an indictment. From the deadly fields of the 1900s to the concussion-ridden stadiums of today, from Jim Crow exclusion to modern NIL chaos, the sport has been built on control, denial, and profit.

The problem with NCAA football is not that it lost its way. It never had one.

What is new is not the dirt—but the visibility. Players now speak openly. Courts intervene. Fans question the myths. The mask is slipping, and the century-old fiction of purity is harder to maintain. Whether that leads to real change—or merely a cleaner narrative over the same exploitative core—remains to be seen.

But history is clear. College football did not fall from grace.

It was born compromised.

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Sources

– National Collegiate Athletic Association, History of the NCAA
– Michael Oriard, Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle
– Taylor Branch, “The Shame of College Sports,” The Atlantic
– Allen Sack & Ellen Staurowsky, College Athletes for Hire
– ESPN Investigations and NCAA Infractions Reports
– Boston University CTE Center research on football-related brain injury
– U.S. Supreme Court, NCAA v. Alston (2021)

Higher Education and Empire: How U.S. Universities Reproduce Global Inequality

In the public imagination, universities are bastions of knowledge, debate, and progress. Yet beneath the veneer of research and scholarship lies a more troubling reality: many American institutions of higher education are deeply enmeshed in structures of global power, empire, and inequality. From elite research universities to sprawling public institutions, higher education in the United States not only reflects the hierarchies of the world it inhabits but actively reproduces them.

The complicity of universities is neither incidental nor simply a matter of individual choices by administrators. As scholars have noted, the mechanisms of institutional power are deeply structural. Economic and geopolitical pressures shape research priorities, hiring practices, and funding relationships. Academic capitalism, which treats universities as competitive, profit-driven enterprises, has become the norm rather than the exception (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2022). Faculty labor is increasingly precarious, tenure-track opportunities are scarce, and institutional priorities are subordinated to external market logics. The consequences are profound: the promise of knowledge as a public good is eroded, and access is increasingly limited to those already advantaged by class, race, or geography.

U.S. universities’ entanglement with empire is global in scope. Historical patterns of colonialism persist in the form of research agendas, partnerships, and international collaborations that favor dominant powers. The post-apartheid South African university system, for example, demonstrates how neoliberal pressures reshape higher education into corporatized, commodified institutions, constraining equity and social justice efforts (Jansen, 2024). Similarly, elite U.S. institutions reproduce intersectional inequalities, privileging white male scholars while marginalizing women and scholars from the Global South, consolidating a global hierarchy of knowledge production (Smith & Rodriguez, 2024). Knowledge itself becomes a commodity, valued not for its capacity to enlighten or empower but for its capacity to reinforce global hierarchies.

Military and defense connections illustrate another dimension of complicity. ROTC programs, defense research contracts, and partnerships with intelligence agencies embed universities directly within state power and the machinery of imperial control. Students from working-class backgrounds may see military scholarships as pathways to mobility, yet these programs impose long-term obligations, exposure to systemic discrimination, and moral risk, binding individuals to structures that serve national and corporate interests rather than individual or public welfare (Johnson, 2024). By providing both material incentives and ideological framing, universities shape not only research and discourse but also life trajectories, often in ways that reproduce existing inequalities.

Technological developments exacerbate these trends. The rise of artificial intelligence in global education exemplifies digital neocolonialism, where Western frameworks dominate curricula and knowledge production, marginalizing non-Western epistemologies (Lee, 2024). Universities, in adopting and disseminating these technologies, participate in global systems that enforce cultural hegemony while presenting an illusion of neutrality or progress.

Critics argue that U.S. higher education’s complicity is most visible during crises abroad. In Venezuela, universities have hosted panels and research collaborations that echo dominant U.S. policy narratives, while largely ignoring humanitarian consequences (Higher Education Inquirer, 2025). During conflicts in Yemen and Gaza, partnerships with foreign institutions and the enforcement of donor or corporate agendas frequently coincide with silence on human rights abuses. Even when individual scholars attempt to challenge these norms, institutional pressures—funding dependencies, prestige incentives, and market logics—often constrain their capacity to act.

The structural nature of this complicity means that reform cannot be solely individual or performative. Transparency in funding, ethical scrutiny of partnerships, and protection for dissenting voices are necessary but insufficient. Universities must critically examine their embeddedness within global systems of extraction, surveillance, and domination. They must ask whether the pursuit of prestige, rankings, or revenue aligns with the purported mission of fostering equitable knowledge production. Only through systemic, structural change can institutions move from passive complicity toward active accountability.

The implications of these dynamics extend beyond academia. Universities train professionals, shape policy, and generate research that informs global decision-making. When they normalize inequality, silence dissent, or serve as instruments of state or corporate power, the consequences are felt in classrooms, clinics, policy offices, and across global societies. Students, researchers, and communities are both shaped by and subjected to these power structures, often in ways that perpetuate the very inequalities institutions claim to challenge.

In exposing these patterns, recent scholarship has provided both a theoretical and empirical foundation for critique. From analyses of academic capitalism and labor precarity (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2022) to examinations of global knowledge hierarchies (Smith & Rodriguez, 2024) and digital neocolonialism (Lee, 2024), researchers have mapped the pathways through which higher education reproduces systemic inequality. By integrating these insights, scholars, students, and policymakers can begin to imagine alternatives—universities that truly serve knowledge, equity, and global justice rather than empire and market logic.

Higher education’s promise has always been aspirational: the idea that knowledge might liberate rather than constrain, enlighten rather than exploit. Yet in the current landscape, universities often do the opposite, embedding global hierarchies within their governance, research, and pedagogical frameworks. Recognizing this complicity is the first step. Confronting it requires courage, structural awareness, and a commitment to justice that extends far beyond the walls of the academy.

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References

• Higher Education Inquirer. (2025). Higher Education and Its Complicity in U.S. Empire. https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2025/11/higher-education-and-its-complicity-in.html

• Jansen, J. (2024). The university in contemporary South Africa: Commodification, corporatisation, complicity, and crisis. Journal of Education and Society, 96, 15–34.

• Johnson, M. (2024). The hidden costs of ROTC and military pathways. Higher Education Inquirer. https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2025/11/the-hidden-costs-of-rotc-and-military.html

• Lee, C. (2024). Generative AI and digital neocolonialism in global education: Towards an equitable framework. arXiv:2406.02966.

• Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2022). Not in the Greater Good: Academic capitalism and faculty labor in higher education. Education Sciences, 12(12), 912.

• Smith, R., & Rodriguez, L. (2024). The Howard‑Harvard Effect: Institutional reproduction of intersectional inequalities. arXiv:2402.04391.

Renting While Educated: The Housing Crisis and the Rise of the Educated Underclass

In the United States, a college degree once promised a path to stability — a steady job, a livable wage, and a secure place to call home. Today, that promise has fractured. Millions of degree-holders and would-be graduates find themselves unable to afford even modest housing, trapped in what can only be described as the educated underclass: people with credentials but without the economic security those credentials were supposed to guarantee.

The latest data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) makes clear that the housing crisis is not just about poverty — it is about the shrinking distance between the working poor and the working-educated. The gap between wages and rent has widened so dramatically that even college-educated workers, adjunct faculty, nonprofit staff, social workers, and early-career professionals are drowning in housing costs.

The Housing Wage and the Broken Promise of Higher Ed

According to NLIHC’s Out of Reach 2025 report, a full-time worker in the U.S. needs to earn $33.63 an hour to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment and $28.17 an hour for a one-bedroom. That’s far higher than what many degree-holders earn, especially those in education, public service, healthcare support, and the nonprofit sector.

The academic workforce itself is emblematic of the problem: adjunct instructors with master’s degrees — sometimes PhDs — often earn poverty-level wages. Yet the rents they face are no different from those of skilled professionals in high-paying industries.

Higher education promised mobility; instead, it delivered a generation of renters one missed paycheck away from eviction.

An Educated Underclass Renting in Perpetuity

NLIHC’s data shows a national shortage of affordable housing: only 35 affordable and available homes exist for every 100 extremely low-income renters. While this crisis hits the lowest-income Americans hardest, it also drags down millions of educated workers who now compete for the same shrinking stock of affordable units.

This convergence — between the working poor and the working educated — reflects a structural breakdown:

• New graduates carry student debt while starting in low-wage jobs.

• Millennial and Gen Z workers face rents that have grown far faster than wages.

• Former middle-class professionals, displaced by automation and recession, re-enter the workforce at lower wages that no longer match their credentials.

• Public-sector and nonprofit workers do “mission-driven” work but cannot afford to live in the communities they serve.

Increasingly, higher education is not a safeguard against housing insecurity — it is a gateway into it.

The Spiral: Student Debt, Rent Burden, and Delayed Adulthood

The educated underclass faces a double bind:
High rents prevent saving, while student debt prevents mobility.

NLIHC data shows that renters who are cost-burdened (spending more than 30% of income on housing) or severely cost-burdened (over 50%) are forced to cut spending on essentials. For many degree-holders, this means:

• Delaying or abandoning homeownership

• Working multiple jobs to cover rent

• Moving back in with parents

• Delaying marriage and child-rearing

• Relocating constantly in search of slightly cheaper housing

This is not “adulting” — it’s economic triage.

The educated underclass is increasingly indistinguishable from the broader working class in terms of economic vulnerability, yet still burdened by expectations that their degrees should have delivered them stability.

When Housing Costs Undermine Higher Education Itself

The affordability crisis is reshaping entire higher education ecosystems:

• Students struggle to find housing close to campus, leading to long commutes, couch surfing, or dropping out.

• Graduate students and postdocs — essential academic labor — increasingly rely on food aid, emergency grants, and organizing unions just to survive.

• Colleges in high-cost cities cannot hire or retain staff because employees cannot afford to live nearby.

• Public institutions face declining enrollment because families see no payoff to degrees that lead to poverty wages and unaffordable housing.

If higher education cannot provide a pathway out of housing insecurity, its legitimacy — and its future — is in question.

Toward Real Solutions: Housing as an Educational Issue

Solving this crisis requires acknowledging a simple truth: housing policy is higher-education policy.
The educated underclass is not a natural outcome of individual failure; it is the product of a system that overcharges for education and underpays for labor while allowing rents to skyrocket.

Real solutions would include:

• Large-scale public investment in deeply affordable housing

• Expansion of rental assistance and housing vouchers

• Living-wage laws that reflect real housing costs

• Student-housing development tied to public colleges

• Forgiveness of rental debt accumulated during economic shocks

• Strengthening unions among educators, adjuncts, graduate workers, and other low-paid professionals

The promise of higher education cannot be realized while a degree-holder earning $20, $25, or even $30 an hour still cannot afford a one-bedroom apartment.

The Verdict: Housing Is the Fault Line of the New Class Divide

NLIHC’s data confirms what millions of renters already know: the U.S. housing market punishes workers regardless of education level, and higher education no longer protects against precarity. The educated underclass is not a fringe category — it is becoming the norm.

Until wages align with housing costs and the housing system is restructured to serve people rather than profit, the divide between those who can afford stability and those who cannot will continue to widen. And higher education, once marketed as the bridge to a better life, will remain yet another broken promise — one rent payment away from collapse.

Sources
National Low Income Housing Coalition, Out of Reach 2025
NLIHC Research and Policy Briefs
NLIHC Affordable Housing Data and Fact Sheets

Preston Cooper Is Wrong: Enrollment Is Only One of Higher Education’s Many Crises

In a recent American Enterprise Institute article, Preston Cooper insists that the post-2010 collapse in college enrollment is “a correction, not a crisis.” According to Cooper, students are becoming more discerning consumers, abandoning low-value colleges and low-ROI degrees while flocking to higher-quality institutions and more lucrative majors. In this narrative, the system is simply shedding inefficiencies. The market is working.

But this argument is incomplete to the point of distortion. Enrollment decline is not a tidy market correction. It is a symptom of profound structural problems: affordability, inequality, political interference, labor exploitation, deteriorating academic quality, widespread cheating, and the growing reliance on “robocolleges” and automated learning platforms with questionable educational value. Cooper’s analysis ignores all of this and reduces higher education to a single variable—student choices—when the system is being reshaped by forces far larger and more corrosive than consumer preference.

Affordability remains the biggest barrier to access. Surveys repeatedly show that adults who never enrolled or who dropped out cite cost as their primary obstacle, and higher education leaders themselves acknowledge that families often do not understand the real price until they are already overwhelmed. Tuition, fees, housing, food, and transportation are enough to make college inaccessible for millions. This is not a sign of students shopping wisely; it is evidence of a system that has priced out vast segments of the population.

Cooper’s argument also ignores how structural inequalities determine who even reaches the point of decision-making. Research from multiple institutions shows that disparities in academic preparation—rooted in racial segregation, school funding inequity, socioeconomic status, and access to quality teachers—heavily influence college-going patterns. Students from under-resourced schools or low-income families do not have equal access to information, support systems, or opportunities. The idea that they are “choosing” not to attend low-value schools disregards the constraints that shape those choices.

Meanwhile, colleges themselves are destabilizing. Shrinking enrollments and stagnant public funding have produced financial crises across the sector. Even reputable institutions rely on aggressive discounting, program cuts, hiring freezes, and dependence on contingent faculty. Student support services shrink while administrative costs continue to rise. Cooper’s framing of “let the weak fail” overlooks the collateral damage: students denied needed resources, programs eliminated, and entire communities harmed when regional colleges collapse.

The crisis extends beyond finances. Students’ freedom of speech is increasingly under pressure as state legislatures, governors, and politically reactive boards restrict curricula, censor faculty, and monitor student organizations. Expression around race, inequality, gender, and geopolitical issues is under surveillance or actively punished. Whether driven by conservative politics, donor pressure, or administrative fear of controversy, the suppression of student and faculty voices undermines the university’s democratic mission.

Cooper also fails to address the degrading working conditions of adjunct faculty, who now make up the majority of instructors. Adjuncts often earn poverty-level wages, lack health insurance, and have no job security. Many teach at multiple institutions simply to survive. The system Cooper describes as “self-correcting” rests on the exploitation of the people responsible for delivering the education students are supposedly choosing.

Then there are the emerging problems he completely ignores: robocolleges and AI-driven instruction. As institutions cut costs, many outsource teaching to automated platforms, online mega-providers, and algorithmic tutoring systems. These “robocolleges” promise efficiency but often deliver shallow instruction, predatory recruitment, weakened student support, and minimal human interaction. They generate revenue, but not always learning. Cooper assumes that students are leaving low-value institutions, yet many of these automated systems are themselves low-value—and increasingly difficult to regulate or evaluate.

The rise of automated education connects directly to another crisis: academic integrity. AI-assisted cheating is now widespread across campuses. Students, overwhelmed by cost pressures, mental health struggles, large class sizes, and insufficient support, increasingly rely on AI tools to complete assignments without understanding the material. Instructors struggle to identify misconduct, institutions scramble to respond, and genuine learning becomes harder to guarantee. This is not the sign of a system “correcting” itself. It is evidence of a sector that has lost its footing and is failing to uphold educational standards.

Cooper’s argument rests on the assumption that higher education should primarily be judged by short-term labor-market returns. But higher education is more than a job-training pipeline. It is a public good that supports social mobility, civic participation, community development, scientific and cultural advancement, and democratic life. A system that suppresses speech, exploits faculty, overrelies on automated instruction, and cannot distinguish real learning from AI-generated work is not corrected. It is in crisis.

The enrollment decline is real, but it is only the surface. Beneath it lies a system plagued by affordability barriers, entrenched inequality, political intrusion, labor precarity, academic degradation, technological misuse, and rising distrust. To call this a “correction” is to look away from the deeper rot. For students, educators, and communities, it is a crisis—one that demands urgent structural reform rather than market-based optimism.

Sources
National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA). “The Biggest Barriers to Higher Education Enrollment Are Cost and Lack of Financial Aid.”
Inside Higher Ed. “Student Success Leaders Worry About Affordability, AI, and DEI.”
Brookings Institution. “Persistent Gaps in Academic Preparation Generate College Enrollment Disparities.”
Deloitte Insights. “Top Risks in Higher Education.”
Independent Institute. “Higher Education’s Triple Crisis.”
PEN America. “Tracking Campus Free Speech Legislation and Suppression.”
American Federation of Teachers / AAUP. “The Gig Academy: Precarity and the Exploitation of Adjunct Labor.”
The Century Foundation. Analyses of Online Program Management (OPM) and automated higher education risks.
Inside Higher Ed and Times Higher Education reporting on AI-driven cheating and academic integrity.

The Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity: Rethinking—and Challenging—America’s Economic Narrative

In a political moment defined by economic confusion, precarity, and widening inequality, the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) has positioned itself as one of the most forceful critics of how the U.S. government measures economic well-being. Founded in 2019 by Eugene “Gene” Ludwig—banking regulator, financier, and longtime critic of official labor statistics—the institute argues that the traditional indicators used by policymakers, economists, and the media no longer reflect the lived experience of most working and middle-class Americans.

LISEP’s core mission is straightforward: to replace or supplement conventional economic indicators with metrics that measure whether ordinary people can live decent, stable, self-supporting lives. In place of headline unemployment levels that minimize underemployment and wage suppression, LISEP developed the True Rate of Unemployment (TRU). Instead of accepting the Consumer Price Index as an indicator of affordability, it created the True Living Cost (TLC). And to evaluate whether households can achieve a baseline level of dignity, the institute introduced its Minimal Quality of Life Index (MQL).

Taken together, these indicators paint a sobering picture. LISEP’s most recent TRU data suggests that nearly one in four Americans—far more than the official unemployment rate—remains functionally unemployed or trapped in low-wage, unstable work. Its analysis of living costs shows that basic necessities such as housing, childcare, food, healthcare, and digital access are rising at rates that far outpace reported inflation. Its income distribution research finds that the bottom 60% of households fall severely short of the after-tax income required to meet even minimal quality-of-life thresholds.

In a time when both parties often claim economic success—pointing to record stock markets, low headline unemployment, and steady GDP growth—LISEP argues that these triumphal narratives obscure the steady erosion of working-class security.

But LISEP’s work does more than diagnose hardship; it challenges the legitimacy of the economic story that the United States tells about itself. That is precisely why its metrics have garnered attention—and controversy.
Methodological Innovations and the Pushback They Attract

Economists, policymakers, labor advocates, and academics have responded to LISEP’s work with a mixture of praise and skepticism. Some see LISEP as filling a critical gap—offering metrics that better capture the realities of gig workers, part-time workers, workers with unpredictable hours, and families priced out of life’s essentials. Others argue that LISEP’s approach risks injecting subjectivity into economic measurement and complicating long-established statistical frameworks.

One major point of debate centers on LISEP’s definition of unemployment. Traditional unemployment statistics only count individuals actively seeking work. LISEP’s TRU metric, by contrast, includes the underemployed, part-time workers who want full-time jobs, and discouraged workers who have given up looking. Critics argue that combining these groups creates a metric that resembles a policy argument more than a neutral measurement. Supporters counter that ignoring these groups produces an artificially rosy portrait of economic health and undervalues persistent structural inequality.

LISEP’s True Living Cost and Minimal Quality of Life indices face a different critique: they define “necessities” more broadly than some economists are comfortable with. Including internet access, basic technology, early childhood education, and modern transportation standards is, according to LISEP, essential to functioning in the 21st-century economy. Critics contend that because these standards go beyond subsistence, the metrics risk shifting from measuring need to measuring aspiration. The institute responds that “subsistence” is not an acceptable measure of human dignity in a wealthy nation.

Other scholars raise questions about transparency. While LISEP publishes summaries and explanations of its methodologies, some economists argue that its approaches would require broader independent replication and peer review to become standard tools. Yet others note that the Bureau of Labor Statistics itself has long used imperfect methods that were never designed to measure well-being—only labor market participation.

Where supporters and skeptics agree is on one point: LISEP has forced a deeply needed conversation about what economic dignity means in the United States today.
Why LISEP Matters for Higher Education and Public Policy

For institutions of higher learning—especially those that produce the economists, policymakers, and journalists who shape public discourse—LISEP’s challenge to economic orthodoxy is a call to scrutiny and humility. Universities continue to rely on traditional metrics in research, teaching, and policy labs, even when these metrics fail to capture the economic and social pressures facing students and their families.

Students at community colleges, regional publics, and underfunded institutions live the realities LISEP describes: multiple jobs, unpredictable hours, rising food and housing insecurity, and persistent underemployment after graduation. Yet their struggles are too often minimized by conventional indicators that suggest a thriving labor market.

If academia takes LISEP’s work seriously, it could shift research priorities, reshape debates on student debt, influence regional economic development strategies, guide labor-market forecasting, and elevate the experiences of the most economically vulnerable students.

For policymakers, LISEP’s metrics offer a different foundation for assessing whether economic growth is reaching ordinary people. They provide tools for evaluating whether wages are livable, whether childcare is accessible, whether housing is affordable, and whether the economy produces stable, family-supporting jobs. If adopted or even partially embraced, LISEP’s indicators could inform legislation on minimum wage, labor protections, social services, tax reform, cost-of-living adjustments, and more.

The institute’s broader message is simple: the United States cannot address inequality if it continues to celebrate misleading statistics.
A New Economic Narrative

Whether LISEP becomes a permanent influence or a dissenting voice will depend on how policymakers, journalists, and academic economists respond. If its metrics remain on the margins, they will serve as a moral indictment of traditional measures that ignore the reality of economic insecurity. If they are adopted, they could trigger a profound reevaluation of American economic policy—one grounded not in aggregate success but in shared prosperity.

LISEP insists that a healthy economy is not one that grows on paper but one that allows ordinary people to live decently. That premise alone places the institute on the front lines of the battle over how the United States understands its own economic health.
Sources



Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, “True Rate of Unemployment (TRU),” 2025, lisep.org.
Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, “True Living Cost (TLC),” 2025, lisep.org.
Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, “Shared Economic Prosperity (SEP) Measure,” 2025, lisep.org.
PR Newswire, “Majority of Americans Can’t Achieve a Minimal Quality of Life, According to New Ludwig Institute Research,” May 12, 2025.
Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, “Wage Inequality Grows With Low-Income Workers Losing Ground,” Press Release, April 16, 2025.

Moral Capital and Locus of Control

Moral capital has become a contested currency in American public life. It is deployed by political elites to justify austerity, by campus executives to rationalize managerial authority, and by think tanks to discipline the working class. Yet moral capital also rises from below—from students building mutual-aid networks, from adjuncts organizing for fair wages, from communities confronting the harms universities have helped produce. In an era defined by climate peril, surveillance capitalism, and proliferating wars, the stakes of who controls moral capital—and who gets to exercise real agency—have never been higher.

At the center of this struggle lies a fraught psychological and sociological concept: locus of control. Higher education constantly toggles between narratives of internal control (grit, resilience, personal responsibility) and external control (the market, political pressures, funding cycles). Powerful actors encourage an internal locus of control when it shifts blame downward, and an external locus of control when it shields institutional failure. Students, staff, and faculty live suspended in this contradiction, expected to absorb the consequences of decisions made far above them.

Quality of Life as Moral Imperative

Quality of Life—once peripheral to higher education policy—is now a defining moral issue. Students and workers contend with unstable housing, food insecurity, unsafe campuses, inaccessible mental health care, and relentless economic pressures. For many, these burdens are compounded by existential crises: climate anxiety, global conflicts, democratic backsliding, and precarity amplified by technological surveillance.

Institutions often portray these crises as personal challenges requiring self-management. But Quality of Life is not an individual moral failure; it is a metric of collective conditions. When a university community’s quality of life declines, it signals a profound imbalance between agency and structure—a distorted locus of control.

The Industry’s Manufactured Moral Capital

Universities have long crafted narratives that elevate their own moral standing while displacing responsibility onto individuals. The “grateful striver” student, the “self-sacrificing” adjunct, the “visionary” president—these tropes protect managerial systems from scrutiny and allow elites to accumulate moral capital even as Quality of Life deteriorates for everyone else.

This manufactured moral authority collapses under existential pressures. As campuses confront heatwaves, flooding, militarized policing, housing crises, widening wars, and state-sanctioned surveillance, it becomes impossible to sustain the fiction that individuals can simply “grit” their way to stability.

Reclaiming Moral Capital 

Moral capital is not owned by institutions. It can be reimagined, reclaimed, and reoriented. Four longstanding modes of internal discipline—temperance, celibacy, critical thinking, and solidarity—take on new urgency when placed in the context of planetary and political crisis.

Temperance

Temperance, stripped of its historical misuse, becomes a strategy of mindful refusal in the face of consumption-based exploitation. It includes rejecting burnout culture, resisting technological tools that monitor student behavior, and refusing to internalize blame for systemic failures. In an era of climate breakdown, temperance also signifies ecological responsibility—a modest but meaningful form of internal control aligned with global survival rather than institutional convenience.

Celibacy

Broadly interpreted, celibacy represents intentional self-limitation that protects one’s emotional and cognitive bandwidth. Amid surveillance-driven social media, algorithmic manipulation, and institutions that increasingly commodify student identity, celibacy can be a form of psychological sovereignty. It creates space for reflection in a world designed to keep people reactive, distracted, and easily governed.

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking remains the academy’s most subversive tradition—especially when deployed against the university itself. It helps students analyze the interplay between personal agency and systemic constraint. It equips them to understand climate injustice, militarism, and the geopolitics of knowledge production. And it exposes the ways mass surveillance—from learning analytics to campus police technologies—erodes autonomy and shifts the locus of control away from individuals and communities toward powerful institutions.

Solidarity

Solidarity transforms private moral commitments into collective action. It breaks the isolation manufactured by surveillance systems, precarity, and competitive academic cultures. Solidarity has historically been the source of the most effective nonviolent strategies—from civil rights sit-ins to anti-war mobilizations to student debt strikes. Today, as geopolitical conflicts escalate and authoritarian tendencies rise, the power of organized nonviolence becomes an existential necessity. It is one of the few tools capable of confronting militarized policing, resisting state repression, and challenging the corporate infrastructures that profit from crisis.

Nonviolent Strategies in an Era of Global Threat

Nonviolent action remains a potent form of moral capital—and one of the most effective forms of collective agency. Research across conflicts shows that sustained, mass-based nonviolent movements often outperform violent struggles, especially against highly resourced opponents. For universities, which increasingly collaborate with defense contractors, data brokers, and state surveillance agencies, nonviolent resistance has become both a safeguard and a moral compass.

Sit-ins, teach-ins, encampments, divestment campaigns, and labor actions reassert external locus of control as something communities can influence—not by force, but by moral clarity, strategic discipline, and the refusal to comply with harmful systems.

Mass Surveillance as a Threat to Moral Agency

Mass surveillance is now woven into the fabric of academic life. Learning management systems track student behavior down to the minute. Proctoring software uses biometrics to police exams. Campus police drones and public-private security networks feed data into law enforcement databases. Administrative dashboards quantify student “risk” and worker “efficiency” in ways that reshape institutional priorities.

This surveillance apparatus corrodes moral capital by reducing human judgment to automated metrics. It also distorts locus of control: individuals are told to take responsibility while being monitored and managed by opaque systems far beyond their influence.

Reclaiming agency requires dismantling or limiting these systems, demanding transparency, and reasserting human dignity in spaces now governed by algorithms.

Toward a More Honest Locus of Control

Moral capital and locus of control are not academic abstractions. They are lived realities shaped by climate disruption, war, inequality, and surveillance. Higher education must stop using moral narratives to deflect responsibility and instead cultivate practices that reinforce real agency: temperance, celibacy, critical thinking, solidarity, and the disciplined power of nonviolent resistance.

In a world marked by existential threats, reclaiming moral capital from below is not simply an intellectual exercise—it is a condition for survival, and a pathway to collective liberation.

Sources
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Erica Chenoweth & Maria Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Astra Taylor, Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone

Medugrift and the price makers in higher education

In the United States, the cost of higher education is not a natural phenomenon. It is deliberately constructed by a network of institutional actors who function as price makers: university presidents, chief financial officers, boards of trustees, governors, and state legislators. They determine what students pay, how institutions are structured, and whose interests higher education ultimately serves. Their decisions shape tuition, labor conditions, program priorities, and the balance between education and the expanding world of medugrift—the hybrid system where medicine, education, debt, and corporate extraction intersect.

For decades, the American public has been told that tuition rises because education is inherently expensive. But as Richard Wolff argues in his critiques of the “War on the Working Class,” the economic decisions shaping tuition, labor costs, athletics, administrative growth, and capital projects reflect class priorities. The price makers choose which costs are fundamental and which are negotiable. They choose what gets built, who gets hired, and how much debt institutions take on. They choose who pays.

University presidents now act more like corporate executives than academic leaders. They negotiate seven-figure salaries, travel globally for fundraising, and preside over campuses where luxury construction often outruns academic needs. They approve budgets that elevate branding and athletics while pressuring academic departments to justify their existence through profit metrics. Tuition increases rarely slow presidential compensation; instead, they are framed as regrettable necessities dictated by “the market” or “competitive realities.”

CFOs enforce a financial logic that prioritizes credit ratings, cash reserves, and debt-financed expansion. They present budgets as neutral, but each line reflects a hierarchy of value. Instruction is cast as a cost center. Staff health care, faculty benefits, and student services become “inefficiencies.” Meanwhile, massive expenditures on consultants, real estate, information systems, and administration are justified as essential to “modernization.” The result is predictable: the people who teach and learn bear the burden while those who administer expand.

Trustees represent another layer of price making. Often drawn from banking, private equity, real estate, biotech, and corporate medicine, trustees bring a worldview shaped by capital accumulation rather than public service. They authorize tuition hikes, approve investment strategies, and greenlight partnerships that blend public education with private profit. Many trustees sit simultaneously on hospital boards or medical investment firms, allowing medugrift to flourish in the shadows of institutional legitimacy. Their decisions shape which programs expand, which shrink, and which students are offered genuine opportunity.

State governors and legislators are external architects of scarcity. Since the 1980s, state governments have systematically defunded public higher education while channeling resources to mass incarceration, gambling revenue schemes, corporate tax breaks, and subsidies to companies like Amazon. These choices undermine the ability of public institutions to remain affordable and force them to operate increasingly like private universities. The shift from public funding to tuition revenue is not inevitable; it is a political strategy. HBCUs and tribal colleges have lived with this manufactured scarcity for generations. Their chronic underfunding—documented in numerous state audits and federal investigations—illustrates what happens when government treats education for marginalized communities as optional.

The emergence of medugrift reveals a deeper structural problem. At the intersection of higher education and corporate medicine sits an engine of extraction. University medical systems leverage public funding, student tuition, and philanthropic contributions to build financial empires that often serve administrators first and communities last. Medical schools charge extreme tuition while placing students into debt-heavy paths. University hospitals consolidate regional health systems, increasing costs while reducing access. Research produced through public dollars is routinely captured by private pharmaceutical or biotech companies. Meanwhile, residents and faculty in these health systems often endure poor working conditions and stagnant pay. Medugrift conceals itself behind the prestige of medicine, but its logic mirrors that of predatory education: privatize gains, socialize losses, and extract from those with the least bargaining power.

Who determines the costs to students? The answer lies in the aggregated decisions of these actors. When a university raises tuition to protect its bond rating, that is a decision. When trustees invest in athletics while cutting humanities programs, that is a decision. When governors choose prisons over scholarships, that is a decision. When state legislatures allow gambling revenue to substitute for stable taxation, that is a decision. Each choice shifts the financial burden downward while consolidating power upward.

This is not simply mismanagement; it is a class project. The people who determine prices do not feel them. Students, families, adjunct instructors, and underfunded communities do. For working-class students, particularly those from historically excluded backgrounds, the price makers have built a system defined by debt, precarity, and limited mobility.

Nothing about this system is inevitable. There was a time when public universities were affordable, when trustees included community members and labor leaders, when presidents were educators, and when medical centers served the public rather than corporate conglomerates. If the price makers can build this system, a more democratic and humane system can be built to replace it.

The question for the coming decade is not whether higher education is too expensive. The public has already reached its verdict. The question is whether students, workers, and communities will continue to let the price makers—and the medugrift machinery attached to them—define who gets educated, who gets indebted, and who gets left behind.

Sources
Richard D. Wolff, Understanding Socialism; Capitalism Hits the Fan
Elisabeth Rosenthal, An American Sickness
Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid
Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul
State Higher Education Finance (SHEF) Reports
U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, HBCU Funding Analyses

Penn Graduate Students (GET-UP) Authorize Strike as Contract Talks Falter

Graduate student workers at Penn have overwhelmingly authorized a strike — a decisive move in their fight for fair pay, stronger benefits, and comprehensive protections. The vote reflects not only deep frustration with stalled negotiations but also the growing momentum of graduate-worker organizing nationwide.

A year of bargaining — and growing frustration

Since winning union recognition in May 2024, GET‑UP has spent over a year negotiating with Penn administrators on their first collective-bargaining agreement. Despite 35 bargaining sessions and tentative agreements on several non-economic issues, key demands — especially around compensation, benefits, and protections for international students — remain unmet.

Many observers see the strike authorization as long overdue. “After repeated delays and insulting offers, this was the only way to signal our seriousness,” said a member of the bargaining committee. Support for the strike among graduate workers is overwhelmingly strong, reflecting a shared determination to secure livable wages and protections commensurate with the vital labor they provide.

Strike authorization: a powerful tool

From Nov. 18–20, GET‑UP conducted a secret-ballot vote open to roughly 3,400 eligible graduate employees. About two-thirds voted, and 92% of votes cast authorized a strike, giving the union discretion to halt academic work at a moment’s notice.

Striking graduate workers, many of whom serve as teaching or research assistants, would withhold all academic labor — including teaching, grading, and research — until a contract with acceptable terms is reached. Penn has drafted “continuity plans” for instruction in the event of a strike, which union organizers have criticized as strikebreaking.

Demands: beyond a stipend increase

GET‑UP’s contract demands include:

• A living wage for graduate workers

• Expanded benefits: health, vision, dental, dependent coverage

• Childcare support and retirement contributions

• Protections for international and immigrant students

• Strong anti-discrimination, harassment, and inclusive-pronoun / gender-neutral restroom protections

While Penn has agreed to some non-economic protections, many critical provisions remain unresolved. The stakes are high: graduate workers form the backbone of research and teaching at the university, yet many struggle to survive on modest stipends.

Context: a national wave of UAW wins

Penn’s graduate workers are part of a broader wave of successful organizing by the United Auto Workers (UAW) and allied graduate unions. Recent years have seen UAW-affiliated graduate-worker locals achieve significant victories at institutions including Cornell, Columbia, Harvard, Northwestern, and across the University of California (UC) system.

At UC, a massive systemwide strike in 2022–2023 involving tens of thousands of Graduate Student Researchers (GSRs) and Academic Student Employees (ASEs) secured three-year contracts with major gains:

• Wage increases of 55–80% over prior levels, establishing a livable baseline salary.

• Expanded health and dependent coverage, childcare subsidies, paid family leave, and fee remission.

• Stronger protections against harassment, improved disability accommodations, and support for international student workers.

• Consolidation of bargaining units across ASEs and GSRs, strengthening long-term collective power.

These gains demonstrate that even large, resource-rich institutions can be compelled to recognize graduate labor as essential, and to provide fair compensation and protections. They also show that coordinated, determined action — including strike authorization — can yield significant, lasting change.

What’s next

With strike authorization in hand, GET‑UP holds a powerful bargaining tool. While a strike remains a last resort, the overwhelming support among members signals that the union is prepared to act decisively to secure a fair contract. The UC precedent, along with wins at other UAW graduate-worker locals, suggests that Penn could follow the same path, translating student-worker momentum into meaningful, tangible improvements.

The outcome could have major implications not just for Penn, but for graduate-worker organizing across the country — reinforcing that organized graduate labor is increasingly a central force in higher education.

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Sources

• Penn graduate workers union authorizes strike vote

• Ongoing contract negotiations at Penn

• AAUP-Penn denounces university “strikebreaking” memo

• Bargaining updates for graduate workers

• UC graduate workers end strike with historic three-year contract

• Liberation News: UC Academic Workers Win Historic Contracts