The College Meltdown: Pruning in Chernobyl

Since the fallout of Occupy Wall Street in 2011, a small but persistent movement has sought to expose the widening inequities and systemic failures in U.S. higher education. We have agitated, analyzed, and educated, warning that the “market-driven” model championed by elite managers—presidents, trustees, CFOs, and state policymakers—would erode both academic quality and access. Today, that warning has become reality.

The College Meltdown is not a metaphor. It is a literal unraveling of an ecosystem where public support has eroded, tuition has skyrocketed, and students are left with crushing debt. Colleges are shuttering campuses, programs are disappearing, and adjuncts—already the backbone of instruction—face insecure employment. Meanwhile, neoliberal administrators, entrusted with guiding institutions through turbulence, have mostly engaged in cosmetic pruning rather than systemic reform.

This is not accidental. The managerial class in higher education—driven less by pedagogy than by budgets, branding, and financialization—has embraced austerity measures that protect elite interests while passing costs to students and staff. Endowment growth, athletics spending, and executive compensation often take priority over the academic mission. HBCUs and tribal colleges, already underfunded, bear the brunt of this mismanagement.

Efforts to stabilize the system have been tepid at best. Proposals for meaningful structural reform, from debt relief to state reinvestment, are watered down by political and market pressures. Neoliberals tout efficiency and innovation, yet rarely address the underlying moral crisis: the deliberate prioritization of profit over learning, and the failure to cultivate a socially responsible citizenry.

Our own engagement, since 2011, has aimed to shine light on these contradictions. We have chronicled how policies favoring privatization, corporate partnerships, and debt-financed tuition have created conditions ripe for collapse. We have amplified voices of students and faculty navigating these pressures. And we have challenged complacency in the academy, insisting that higher education be measured not just by financial metrics but by its capacity to educate, empower, and expand human potential.

“Pruning in Chernobyl” captures the essence of this moment: managerial actors trimming the edges while radioactive structural failures spread unchecked. Unless institutions confront the root causes—inequality, extractive financial models, and an erosion of public purpose—the meltdown will deepen. Our work remains to educate the public, hold decision-makers accountable, and imagine a higher education system that nurtures learning rather than merely managing decline.

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Sources:

1. Higher Education Inquirer Archives, 2016–2025.

2. American Injustice Archives, 2008-2012. 

The Mis-education of Global Elites

For generations, global elites have been positioned—socially, politically, financially—as the people best equipped to shape a better world. They have had the resources to eliminate poverty, curb climate catastrophe, restrain war, expand healthcare, reform universities, and make democratic participation meaningful. Instead, the world they have built is defined by widening inequality, ecological collapse, and a global crisis of legitimacy. Their failure is not accidental. It is the product of a profound mis-education: a system that trains elites not in stewardship or solidarity, but in domination, extraction, and self-preservation.

Across the United States, the U.K., Europe, and increasingly the Gulf States and East Asia, elite education has become a finishing school for rulers rather than a training ground for genuine public servants. These institutions—rich in endowment, selective in admission, steeped in prestige—construct worldviews that normalize inequity as efficiency, privatization as innovation, and austerity as necessity. Instead of interrogating the historical and structural forces that produce suffering, elite curricula often neutralize them, reducing political economy to management science and social justice to branding.

This mis-education manifests in global leadership failures. The same graduates who enter parliaments, presidential cabinets, central banks, multinational boards, and international NGOs routinely oversee policies that accelerate inequality and erode the public sphere. Many come from universities with unparalleled research capacity and moral rhetoric, yet preside over housing crises, medical debt catastrophes, and planetary degradation. They authorize wars but rarely experience them. They tout meritocracy while gatekeeping opportunity. They celebrate entrepreneurship while dismantling public goods. Their philanthropic initiatives—often built from profits derived through tax avoidance, monopolization, and labor exploitation—give the appearance of benevolence without altering the underlying systems of harm.

Carter G. Woodson’s warning in The Mis-education of the Negro echoes eerily here: “When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.” Global elites, educated into a narrow ideology that glorifies markets and hierarchy, do not need to be coerced into maintaining destructive systems—they do so voluntarily, believing themselves enlightened.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the corporate education complex itself. Elite universities produce the analysts who rationalize austerity, the managers who coordinate privatization, the consultants who reengineer public institutions to mimic corporations, and the financiers who define the metrics of success. They also cultivate the ideological insulation that shields elites from accountability. When their policies trigger chaos, the explanation is never structural, only technical: markets corrected, externalities emerged, populists disrupted stability. The mis-education of elites ensures they cannot see failure as their own.

Global institutions—from the IMF and World Bank to the UN and WTO—have mirrored this mindset. Their leaders, mostly trained in the same corridors of prestige, have promoted development models that prioritize capital mobility over community well-being, and foreign investment over local sovereignty. Even when faced with overwhelming evidence that structural adjustment, privatized healthcare, or financialization intensify human suffering, the elite worldview persists. The inability—or unwillingness—to imagine alternative systems is not an intellectual deficiency but the logical outcome of an education designed to reproduce power, not challenge it.

Meanwhile, those most affected by global crises—workers, migrants, debtors, students, the poor—are told to adapt, innovate, or sacrifice. They are bombarded with entrepreneurial rhetoric and resilience talk while their material conditions worsen. Political leaders lament social fragmentation but continue to funnel wealth upward. University administrators speak of inclusion while expanding administrative hierarchies and outsourcing labor. Energy executives promise transitions while drilling new pipelines. Tech CEOs warn about misinformation while building the infrastructure that spreads it.

The result is a world where the legitimacy of elites is evaporating. From Santiago to Paris, Lagos to Minneapolis, Delhi to London, mass movements are demanding accountability from institutions that have proven incapable of self-reform. The global backlash against inequality, authoritarianism, and corporate hegemony is not a misunderstanding—it is a recognition that the systems run by elites have failed.

If there is to be a better world, the mis-education of elites must be confronted directly. That means transforming the mission of universities from prestige accumulation to public purpose; replacing managerialism with democratic governance; centering histories of resistance rather than merely histories of empire; teaching economic justice instead of market worship; and training leaders who measure success not by shareholder value or rankings but by human flourishing.

Elites have long claimed exclusive expertise in solving the world’s problems. They have had centuries—and trillions—to prove it. They have failed miserably. A new generation of thinkers, activists, workers, and communities is already building the alternatives. Whether global elites choose to learn from them—or continue along their well-worn path of extraction and denial—will determine the next century.

For now, the record is clear: the institutions that shaped the world’s most powerful people were never designed to create justice. And they haven’t.

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Academic Sources

Baldwin, Davarian L. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. Bold Type Books, 2021.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Stanford University Press, 1996.
Giroux, Henry A. Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education. Haymarket Books, 2014.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Khan, Shamus Rahman. Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. Princeton University Press, 2011.
Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. Oxford University Press, 1956.
Mkandawire, Thandika. “Institutional Monocropping and Monotasking in Africa.” UNRISD, 2007.
Piketty, Thomas. Capital and Ideology. Harvard University Press, 2020.
Saul, John Ralston. Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. Free Press, 1992.
Sklair, Leslie. The Transnational Capitalist Class. Wiley-Blackwell, 2000.
Stiglitz, Joseph E. Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited. W.W. Norton, 2017.
Woodson, Carter G. The Mis-education of the Negro. Associated Publishers, 1933.

The Link Between Greed and Efficiency

In the mythology of American capitalism, “efficiency” is the magic word that justifies austerity for workers, rising tuition for students, and ever-expanding wealth for administrators, financiers, and institutional elites. It is framed as neutral, technocratic, and rational. In reality, efficiency in higher education has become inseparable from greed, functioning as a mask for extraction and consolidation.

Universities and their sprawling medical centers have become some of the largest landowners and employers in the cities they inhabit. As Devarian Baldwin has shown, these institutions operate as urban empires, expanding aggressively into surrounding neighborhoods, raising housing costs, displacing long-time residents, and reshaping cities to suit institutional priorities. University medical centers, nominally nonprofit, consolidate smaller hospitals, close services deemed unprofitable, and charge some of the highest healthcare prices in the nation. These operations are justified as efficiency or economic development, yet they often destabilize the communities they claim to serve.

Endowments, some exceeding fifty billion dollars at elite institutions, have become central to this dynamic. Managed like hedge funds, these pools of capital are heavily invested in private equity, venture capital, real estate, and derivatives. The financial logic of endowment management now shapes university priorities, shifting focus from public service and learning to capital accumulation, investor returns, and risk management. Efficiency is defined not by educational outcomes but by the growth of financial assets.

This culture of extraction has been amplified by decades of government austerity. Public funding for higher education has steadily declined since the 1980s, forcing institutions to behave like corporations. At the same time, the aging Baby Boomer generation is creating unprecedented financial pressures on Social Security, Medicare, and healthcare systems, leaving public coffers stretched thin and reinforcing a winner-take-all national mentality. In this environment, universities compete fiercely for students, research dollars, donors, and prestige, producing conditions ripe for exploitation.

Outsourcing has become a standard method to achieve “efficiency.” Universities frequently contract out food service, custodial work, IT, housing management, and security. Workers employed by these contractors often face lower wages, fewer benefits, and higher turnover, while administrators present these arrangements as cost-saving measures. Meanwhile, administrative layers within institutions continue to expand, creating a managerial class that oversees growth and strategy while teaching budgets shrink. As Marc Bousquet has argued, the corporate-style management model displaces faculty governance and treats students and staff as revenue streams rather than participants in a shared educational mission.

The adjunctification of the faculty exemplifies efficiency as exploitation. Contingent instructors now teach the majority of classes in American higher education, earning poverty-level wages without benefits while juggling multiple teaching sites. Institutions call this “flexibility” and “cost containment,” but in reality it transfers value from instruction to administrative overhead, athletics, real estate, and financial operations, all while reducing the quality of education and undermining academic continuity.

The rise of Online Program Managers, or OPMs, further illustrates the fusion of greed and efficiency. These companies design, manage, and market entire online degree programs, often taking forty to seventy percent of tuition revenue. While presented as efficiency partners, OPMs aggressively recruit students, inflate costs, and minimize academic oversight. Their business model mirrors the exploitative strategies of for-profit colleges, which pioneered high-cost, low-quality instruction combined with heavy marketing to capture federal loan dollars. The collapse of chains such as Corinthian, ITT, and EDMC left millions of borrowers with debt and no degree, yet the model persists inside nonprofit universities through OPMs and algorithm-driven online programs.

“Robocolleges” represent the latest evolution of this trend. AI-driven instruction, predictive analytics, automated grading, and digital tutoring promise unprecedented efficiency, but they often replace human educators, reduce pedagogical oversight, exploit student data, and prioritize enrollment growth over educational quality. Efficiency here serves the financial bottom line rather than the learning or well-being of students.

The result of these extractive practices is a national crisis of student debt, now exceeding one trillion dollars. Students borrow to cover skyrocketing tuition, outsourced services, underpaid instruction, and the costs of programs shaped by OPMs or automated platforms. Debt is not an accident of the system; it is the intended outcome, a mechanism for transferring public resources and student labor into private profit.

The broader social context intensifies the problem. Higher education exists in a winner-take-all, financialized society, where resources flow upward and the majority of people are told to compete harder, work longer, and borrow more. Universities have internalized this ideology, acting as both symbols and engines of extraction. Efficiency, under this paradigm, is defined not by the effectiveness of teaching or research but by the expansion of institutional power, wealth, and influence.

True efficiency would look very different. It would invest in educators rather than contractors, stabilize academic labor rather than exploit it, serve surrounding communities rather than displace them, expand learning opportunities rather than debt, and prioritize democratic governance over corporate-style hierarchy. Efficiency should measure how well institutions serve the public good, not how well they protect endowment returns, OPM profits, or administrative salaries.

Until such a redefinition occurs, efficiency will remain one of the most powerful tools of extraction in American higher education, a rhetorical justification for greed disguised as rational management.

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Sources

Devarian Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower
Marc Bousquet, How the University Works
Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed
Christopher Newfield, The Great Mistake
Sara Goldrick-Rab, Paying the Price
Government reports on for-profit colleges, student debt, and OPMs
Research on higher education financialization, outsourcing, and austerity policies

Remembering SNCC and CORE

To remember CORE (est. 1942 in Chicago) and SNCC (est. 1960) is to remember a democracy built not by elites but by everyday people—students, sharecroppers, domestic workers, bus drivers, teachers, and the poor and working class across the Jim Crow South and the segregated North. It is to remember Ella Baker’s wisdom, Diane Nash’s determination, Bob Moses’s quiet power, Fannie Lou Hamer’s moral force, James Farmer’s strategic brilliance—and also the thousands of unnamed organizers who risked everything without ever appearing in a textbook, a documentary, or a university lecture hall. Their names may not be widely known, but their work forms the backbone of the freedom struggle.

CORE and SNCC and were never celebrity movements. They were people-powered, grassroots engines of democracy. They were built by individuals who knocked on doors in rural counties where Black voter registration hovered near zero; who faced armed sheriffs, Klan mobs, and white citizens’ councils; who farmed during the day and attended movement meetings at night; who ferried activists to safe houses; who housed Freedom Riders despite threats of arson and lynching; who cooked for mass meetings; who walked into county courthouses where their presence alone was an act of political defiance. These unnamed contributors shaped history as much as the well-known leaders, and their invisibility in public memory is itself a measure of how selectively the United States remembers the struggle for justice.

Ella Baker insisted from the beginning that the movement’s strength rested in ordinary people discovering their own power. That is why she pushed for “group-centered leadership,” refusing the myth that liberation depends on a single, heroic figure. Her practice of listening deeply—and her belief that the least recognized people held the deepest wisdom—permeated SNCC’s organizing culture. It is a challenge to institutions today, especially universities that still cling to hierarchical models of governance and expertise.

CORE’s early commitment to interracial, nonviolent direct action emerged from a similar belief in collective action. Its activists—people like James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, and George Houser—helped introduce the tactics that would soon reverberate across the nation: sit-ins, freedom rides, boycotts, and jail-ins. CORE’s work in northern cities also exposed the hypocrisy of institutions—including universities—that claimed moral high ground while upholding segregation in housing, employment, and policing.

SNCC’s field secretaries—Charles McDew, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, and Prathia Hall, and so many others—did work that higher education still struggles to fully comprehend. Their organizing went far beyond protest; it involved listening to community elders, teaching literacy classes, building independent political organizations, challenging disenfranchisement at every level, and nurturing local leadership. Behind each of those actions were dozens of unnamed individuals who opened their homes, shared their limited resources, and stood guard against retaliation.

Remembering the unnamed is not sentimental. It is foundational. The freedom struggle was sustained by people whose names were never printed, whose stories never made the evening news, and whose families bore the consequences. Many were fired from their jobs, evicted from their homes, or harassed by police. Some disappeared from public life after the movement years, carrying trauma with little public recognition or support. Their sacrifices made the Civil Rights Movement possible, and higher education owes them a debt it has never acknowledged.

Today’s universities still wrestle with the structures the movement confronted: racialized inequality, policing, surveillance, donor influence, and hierarchical authority. Many of the same dynamics SNCC and CORE challenged—white paternalism, economic exploitation, authoritarian governance—are alive in campus politics and in the broader “college meltdown,” where austerity, privatization, and predatory actors erode public trust and opportunity.

To honor SNCC, CORE, and the thousands of unnamed organizers is to affirm that democracy emerges from the ground up. It means recognizing that real change requires more than symbolic gestures or PR-friendly “initiatives.” It demands revisiting Ella Baker’s core insight: strong people do not need strong leaders—they need structures that cultivate collective power.

Remembering them means acknowledging that the freedoms we now take for granted—voting rights, desegregation, access to education—were won not by institutions, but by people who challenged institutions. And it means seeing the present clearly: that grassroots organizing, from campus movements to community struggles, remains essential to confronting the crises of inequality, debt, climate, surveillance, and governance that define our era.

To remember SNCC and CORE is to remember not just the famous, but the countless unnamed: the hosts, the watchers, the singers, the marchers, the jailmates, the caretakers, the strategists, the frightened but determined teenagers, the elders who said “yes,” and the ones who insisted that freedom was worth the risk. Their legacy is the true measure of democracy—and a guide for what higher education must become if it is to serve justice rather than power.

Sources
Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s.
Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice.
Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle.
James Farmer, Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement.
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years.
Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement.
Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street.
SNCC Digital Gateway, Duke University.

How Educated Neoliberals Built the Homelessness Crisis—and Why HUD’s New Cuts Will Make It Worse

The US Department of Housing and Urban Development has quietly announced one of the most drastic federal rollbacks in homelessness policy in decades: a massive cut to permanent housing under the Continuum of Care (CoC) program, with more than half of its 2026 funding diverted to transitional housing and compliance-based services. HUD’s own internal estimates warn that up to 170,000 people could lose housing as a result of the shift. For millions of Americans, especially those on the margins, this is not a policy adjustment; it is the beginning of a humanitarian disaster.

To understand how we arrived here, it is not enough to point at the Trump administration, the ideological crusade against “Housing First,” or the White House Faith Office now shaping federal grantmaking. One must also examine the educated neoliberals who built and normalized the system that made this possible.

HUD’s policy change overturns decades of federal commitment to permanent supportive housing, an evidence-backed model that dramatically reduces chronic homelessness. The new Notice of Funding Opportunity caps permanent housing at just 30 percent of CoC dollars, down from 87 percent in prior years, while the remainder is funneled toward transitional housing, work or service requirements, mandatory treatment, and faith-based compliance programs. The total funding for 2026 is roughly $3.9 billion across 7,000 grants. That amount, spread across hundreds of thousands of people experiencing homelessness, is barely sufficient to provide minimal assistance, let alone stable housing or the comprehensive services this population needs. One-third of existing programs will run out of funds before the new awards are issued in May, leaving vulnerable individuals exposed to eviction during the harshest months of winter. Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness and a former HUD official, described the rollout as deeply irresponsible, warning that the administration is setting communities up for failure.

For decades, U.S. policy has been shaped not just by conservatives but also by a sprawling class of highly educated managers: MBAs, MPPs, JDs, think-tank fellows, foundation executives, nonprofit administrators, and “innovation” consultants. They came from America’s elite universities, fluent in market logic, managerialism, and austerity politics. They preached efficiency, accountability, metrics, and self-sufficiency. Many also personally accumulated wealth, often owning multiple homes, benefiting from investment income, and exploiting loopholes to minimize or avoid taxes. Meanwhile, the programs they manage shrink support for the poor and vulnerable.

Through their influence, housing became a program, not a public good. Public housing construction largely disappeared, replaced by a grant-driven, nonprofit marketplace controlled by elite professionals. Even the funding allocated for CoC programs, though nominally in the billions, is deliberately minimal. This scarcity forces competition, instability, and suffering among poor people. Nonprofit executives, most of whom depend on federal contracts and foundation dollars, rarely challenge the economic and political structures that produce homelessness. Accountability rhetoric replaced structural change, reframing homelessness as an issue of individual behavior rather than a systemic failure. The academy normalized the idea that poor people should suffer, teaching a generation of managers to prioritize markets, metrics, and “innovation” over human need. This bipartisan, university-trained professional class laid the foundation for the HUD cuts now threatening hundreds of thousands of lives.

HUD argues that the new model “restores accountability” and reduces the purported waste of Housing First, but decades of research contradict that claim. Permanent supportive housing reduces chronic homelessness, lowers emergency and policing costs, stabilizes people with disabilities, and is cheaper than institutionalization or shelters. Transitional housing with mandatory compliance, on the other hand, repeatedly pushes people back to the streets, disproportionately harms people with disabilities, increases mortality, inflates administrative costs, and creates churn rather than stability. The policy is not a mistake; it reflects the calculated priorities of an elite managerial class whose worldview demands austerity for the poor while allowing them to flourish materially.

The response in Washington has been striking. Forty-two Senate Democrats warned HUD that the shift violates the McKinney-Vento Act, undermines local decision-making, and rejects decades of federally funded research. Even twenty House Republicans urged careful implementation to avoid destabilizing services for seniors and disabled people. Yet decades of neoliberal policymaking—funded and legitimized by universities, foundations, and think tanks—have already created a system in which poverty and suffering are baked into federal policy. This latest HUD action simply codifies that worldview.

The crisis unfolding now is not just the product of Trump’s ideological war on Housing First. It is the logical endpoint of decades of privatization, the erosion of public housing, elite consensus around austerity, credentialed managerialism, the nonprofit-industrial complex, the foundation-university revolving door, and the belief—deeply embedded in higher education—that markets and metrics should govern everything. Many of these policymakers and nonprofit executives own multiple homes, refuse to pay taxes, and structure federal policy to ensure the poor remain dependent, unstable, and suffering. The people most directly harmed are those with the least political power: disabled people, elderly tenants, veterans, people with serious mental illness, women fleeing violence, and families trying to survive an economy that no longer works for them. Behind them stands a class of educated neoliberals who built the systems that made this outcome possible, often congratulating themselves for “innovation” while allowing misery to proliferate. This is not failure. This is design.

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Sources:

• Politico, “HUD to Cut Permanent Housing Funding for Homeless Programs,” 2025.

• National Alliance to End Homelessness, internal HUD funding documents, 2025.

• Ann Oliva, National Alliance to End Homelessness, statements to POLITICO, 2025.

• McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, 1987.

• HUD Notice of Funding Opportunity, 2026 Continuum of Care Program.

• Executive Order: “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” White House, 2025.

Why People Under 35 Are Not Afraid of Democratic Socialism

For Americans under 35, the term “democratic socialism” triggers neither fear nor Cold War reflexes. It represents something far simpler: a demand for a functioning society. Younger generations have grown up in a world where basic pillars of American life—higher education, medicine, economic mobility, and even life expectancy—have deteriorated while inequality has soared. Democratic socialism, in their view, is not a fringe ideology but a practical response to systems that have ceased to serve the common good.

Nowhere is this clearer than in higher education. Millennials and Gen Z entered adulthood as universities became corporate enterprises, expanding administrative layers, pushing adjunct labor to the brink, and relying on debt-financed tuition increases to keep the machine running. Public investment collapsed, predatory for-profit chains proliferated, and nonprofit universities acted like hedge funds with classrooms attached. Students saw institutions with billion-dollar endowments operate as landlords and asset managers, all while passing costs onto working families. When Bernie Sanders called for tuition-free public college, young people did not hear utopianism—they heard a plan grounded in global reality, a model that exists in Germany, Sweden, Finland, and other social democracies that treat education as a public good rather than a revenue stream.

Healthcare tells an even harsher story. Americans under 35 watched their parents and grandparents navigate a system more focused on billing codes than care, one where an ambulance ride costs a week’s wages and a bout of illness can mean bankruptcy. They experienced the rise of corporatized university medical centers, private equity–owned emergency rooms, and insurance bureaucracies that ration access more cruelly than any state. They saw life-saving drugs priced like luxury goods and mental health services pushed out of reach. Compare this to nations with universal healthcare: longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, and far less medical debt. Again, Sanders’ Medicare for All resonated not because of ideology but because young people recognized it as a plausible path toward the kind of humane medical system described by scholars like Harriet Washington, Elisabeth Rosenthal, and Mahmud Mamdani, who all critique the structural violence embedded in systems of unequal care.

Life expectancy itself has become a generational indictment. For the first time in modern U.S. history, it has fallen, driven by overdose deaths, suicide, preventable illness, and worsening inequities. Younger Americans know that friends and peers have died far earlier than their counterparts abroad. They see that countries with strong public services—childcare, unemployment insurance, housing supports, universal healthcare—live longer, healthier lives. They also see how austerity and privatization have hollowed out public health infrastructure in the United States, leaving communities vulnerable to crises large and small. The message is clear: societies that invest in people live longer; societies that treat health as a commodity do not.

Quality of Life (QOL) ties all of this together. People under 35 face rent burdens unimaginable to previous generations, debts that prevent them from forming families, stagnant wages, and a labor market defined by precarity. They face the erosion of public space, public transit, libraries, and social supports—what Mamdani would describe as the slow unraveling of the civic realm under neoliberalism. When they look abroad, they see countries with social democratic frameworks offering guaranteed parental leave, subsidized childcare, free or nearly free college, universal healthcare, and robust worker protections. These are not distant fantasies; they are functioning models that produce higher happiness levels, stronger social trust, and more stable democracies.

Older generations often accuse young people of radicalism, but the reality is the reverse. Millennials and Gen Z are pragmatic. They have lived through the failures of unfettered capitalism: historic inequality, monopolistic industries, soaring costs of living, and a political class unresponsive to their material conditions. They have read Sanders’ critiques of oligarchy and Mamdani’s analyses of state power and structural violence, and they see themselves reflected in those diagnoses. Democratic socialism appeals because it is rooted in material improvements to daily life rather than in abstract political theory. It promises a society where income does not determine survival, where education does not require lifelong debt, where parents can afford to raise children, and where basic health is not a luxury good.

People under 35 are not afraid of democratic socialism because they have already seen what the absence of a social democratic framework produces. They are not seeking revolution for its own sake. They are seeking a livable future. And increasingly, they view democratic socialism not as a radical break but as the only realistic path toward rebuilding public institutions, revitalizing democracy, and ensuring that future generations inherit a country worth living in.

Sources
Sanders, Bernie. Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In.
Sanders, Bernie. Where We Go from Here: Two Years in the Resistance.
Mamdani, Mahmood. Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity.
Mamdani, Mahmood. Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities.
Washington, Harriet. Medical Apartheid.
Rosenthal, Elisabeth. An American Sickness.
Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Baldwin, Davarian. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower.
Bousquet, Marc. How the University Works.

Neoliberalism and the Global College Meltdown

Over the past four decades, neoliberalism has reshaped higher education into a market-driven enterprise, producing what can only be described as a global College Meltdown. Once envisioned as a public good—a tool for civic empowerment, social mobility, and national progress—higher education in the United States, the United Kingdom, and China has been transformed into a competitive market system defined by privatization, debt, and disillusionment.

The United States: From Public Good to Profit Engine

Nowhere has neoliberal ideology had a more devastating effect on higher education than in the United States. Beginning in the 1980s, with the Reagan administration’s cuts to federal grants and the expansion of student loans, higher education funding shifted from public investment to individual burden. Universities adopted corporate governance models, hired armies of administrators, and marketed education as a private commodity promising personal enrichment rather than collective advancement.

The results are visible everywhere: tuition inflation, student debt exceeding $1.7 trillion, and the proliferation of predatory for-profit colleges. Elite universities transformed into financial behemoths, hoarding endowments while relying on contingent faculty. Meanwhile, working-class and minority students were lured into debt traps by institutions that promised upward mobility but delivered unemployment and despair.

The U.S. College Meltdown—a term that describes the system’s moral and financial collapse—is a direct consequence of neoliberal policies: deregulation, privatization, and austerity disguised as efficiency. The profit motive replaced the public mission, and the casualties include students, adjuncts, and the ideal of education as a democratic right.

The United Kingdom: Marketization and Managerialism

The United Kingdom followed a similar trajectory under Margaret Thatcher and her successors. The introduction of tuition fees in 1998 and their tripling in 2012 marked the formal triumph of neoliberal logic over public investment. British universities became quasi-corporate entities, obsessed with league tables, branding, and global rankings.

The result has been mounting student debt, declining staff morale, and a hollowing out of intellectual life. Faculty strikes over pensions and pay disparities underscore a deeper crisis of purpose. Universities now function as rent-seeking landlords—building luxury dorms for international students while cutting humanities departments. The logic of “student-as-customer” has reduced education to a transaction, and accountability has been redefined to mean profit margin rather than social contribution.

The UK’s College Meltdown mirrors that of the U.S.—a story of financialization, precarious labor, and the erosion of public trust.

China: Neoliberalism with Authoritarian Characteristics

At first glance, China seems to defy the Western College Meltdown. Its universities have expanded rapidly, producing millions of graduates and investing heavily in research. But beneath this apparent success lies a deeply neoliberal structure embedded in an authoritarian framework.

Since the 1990s, China’s higher education system has embraced competition, rankings, and market incentives. Universities compete for prestige and funding; families invest heavily in private tutoring and overseas degrees; and graduates face a saturated labor market. The result is mounting anxiety and unemployment among young people—known online as the “lying flat” generation, disillusioned with promises of meritocratic success.

The Chinese model fuses state control with neoliberal marketization. Education serves as both an instrument of national power and a mechanism of social stratification. In this sense, China’s version of the College Meltdown reflects a global truth: the commodification of education leads to alienation, regardless of political system.

A Global System in Crisis

Whether in Washington, London, or Beijing, the pattern is strikingly similar. Neoliberalism treats education as an investment in human capital, reducing learning to a financial calculation. Universities compete like corporations; students borrow like consumers; and knowledge becomes a tool of capital accumulation rather than liberation.

This convergence of economic and ideological forces has created an unsustainable higher education bubble—overpriced, overcredentialized, and underdelivering. Across continents, graduates face debt, underemployment, and despair, while universities chase rankings and revenue streams instead of justice and truth.

Toward a Post-Neoliberal Education

Reversing the College Meltdown requires more than reform; it demands a new philosophy. Public universities must reclaim their civic mission. Education must once again be understood as a human right, not a private investment. Debt forgiveness, reinvestment in teaching, and democratic governance are essential first steps.

Neoliberalism’s greatest illusion was that markets could produce wisdom. The College Meltdown proves the opposite: when education serves profit instead of people, it consumes itself from within.

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Sources:

• Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos (2015)

• David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005)

• Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed (2017)

• The Higher Education Inquirer archives on the U.S. College Meltdown

• BBC, “University staff strikes and student debt crisis,” 2024

• Caixin, “China’s youth unemployment and education anxiety,” 2023

THURSDAY: "The New Mayor of New York City" on Zoom (CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies)

 

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Thu. November 13: Zoom only

The New Mayor of New York City: A Post-Election Debrief A City Works Media Roundtable moderated by Laura Flanders   Thursday, November 13 1:00pm - 2:30pm Virtual-only via Zoom. Free and open to all.   Click here to register. Please register to access virtual event info and reminders.  (slucuny.swoogo.com/13November2025/register)   Guest Speakers: Claudia Irizarry Aponte - Labor and Work Reporter, THE CITY; Faculty, CUNY Newmark School of Journalism Liza Featherstone - Columnist, Jacobin and The New Republic; Contributing Writer, The Nation Amir Khafagy - Senior Labor Reporter, Documented Maya King - Politics Reporter, The New York Times Moderator: Laura Flanders - Host, Laura Flanders & Friends; Host, City Works Maya King Amir Khafagy Claudia Irizarry Aponte Liza Featherstone Laura Flanders

Tune in for a live City Works post-election roundtable that the Murphy Institute at CUNY SLU is organizing to discuss initial analysis and reactions to the election for the next mayor of New York City. The roundtable will be moderated by award-winning journalist Laura Flanders. Panelists will compare actual election results to their pre-election reporting on the mayoral race, pre-election polls and voter analysis, and general media coverage of the candidates. Speakers will provide our audience with insights on the actual voting results, including demographic/geographic trends that emerged in the electorate, and the impact that labor and social movements had on the election. Following the roundtable discussion, we will select questions from the live virtual audience to present to the panel for their comments.

Tue. December 9: in-person & Zoom event

The 2005 NYC Transit Workers Strike:  Reflections on the 20th Anniversary A conversation with Roger Toussaint, former president of TWU Local 100   Tuesday, December 9 6:30pm – 8:30pm (New York / E.T.)   In-person at CUNY SLU (map) & Virtual via Zoom livestream Free and open to all.   Click here to register. Please register to access in-person and virtual event info and reminders.  (slucuny.swoogo.com/9December2025)   Guest Speaker: Roger Toussaint - Former President, Transport Workers Union Local 100   Featuring: Joshua B. Freeman - Author, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (2000) and Garden Apartments: The History of a Low-Rent Utopia (2025) Kafui Attoh - Associate Professor, CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies; Author, Rights in Transit: Public Transportation and the Right to the City in California’s East Bay (2019)     Roger Toussaint  Joshua Freeman  Kafui Attoh 

The 2005 NYC transit workers strike, led by Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 under Roger Toussaint, remains deeply relevant to American workers in 2025. It highlights enduring lessons about labor militancy and the challenges of taking bold action in the face of legal repression and public sector austerity. The strike was a rare instance of a major U.S. union defying anti-strike laws—specifically New York’s Taylor Law—shutting down a city of millions to protect pension rights and resist a two-tier workforce.   How did TWU Local 100 mobilize an entire city to support workers, despite a hostile, well-funded corporate media campaign to vilify transit workers? What was won—and lost—as a result of the strike? What are the key lessons?   Join us on the 20th anniversary of the historic 2005 transit workers strike to learn from Roger Toussaint, former president of TWU Local 100; Joshua Freeman, labor historian and author of Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II; and Kafui Attoh, Professor of Urban Studies at CUNY SLU.