To compare is to despair

"Comparison is the thief of joy." —often attributed to Theodore Roosevelt, and weaponized daily by the digital world we live in.

In an age of filtered feeds and performance metrics, comparison is no longer a passing emotion—it’s a way of life. For people raised with smartphones and social platforms, the pressure to measure up has become both ambient and acute. “To compare is to despair” is more than a caution—it’s a diagnosis. And it’s quietly devastating a generation’s mental health, self-worth, and trust in institutions like higher education.

Documentary filmmaker Lauren Greenfield has been chronicling this culture of status anxiety for decades, from The Queen of Versailles to Generation Wealth. In her latest docuseries, Social Studies, she turns her lens toward teenagers navigating school, relationships, and identity—all through the distorting lens of the internet. In a media-saturated world, Greenfield argues, comparison has shifted from a social quirk to a psychological crisis. Teenagers now compare their lives not just with classmates or neighbors, but with curated content from the global elite, influencers, and AI-polished strangers. What Greenfield captures is the raw vulnerability of growing up under digital surveillance—the feeling that you’re never doing enough, never owning enough, never being enough.

This manufactured inadequacy bleeds directly into higher education. Universities don’t just market degrees; they market lifestyles, futures, identities. The elite college brochure is a fantasy of rooftop gardens, tech internships, and backpacking trips between semesters. Meanwhile, the lived reality for many students is debt, stress, food insecurity, and academic burnout. But even that struggle becomes content, aestheticized into productivity vlogs or “study with me” videos that offer a sanitized glimpse of chaos. In today’s world, even your suffering must be marketable.

Social media didn’t invent comparison culture, but it mechanized it. Platforms are built on engagement, and nothing engages like insecurity. You see the roommate who lands a six-figure tech job before graduation. You watch influencers turn their gap years into brands. You internalize their wins as your losses. This algorithmic envy operates in real time and at scale, colonizing your attention and monetizing your despair.

Comedy shows like The Daily Show have long satirized this trap, poking fun at everything from the elite college admissions racket to the corporate-speak of “personal branding.” In one segment, a correspondent joked that “success” now means optimizing yourself for LinkedIn before you’ve even figured out who you are. That’s the punchline of the meritocracy myth: you’re told that everything is possible if you just work hard enough—while quietly being outpaced by generational wealth, legacy admissions, and curated advantage.

Meanwhile, musical artists like Social Studies echo the emotional toll. Their lyrics speak to the distance between who we are and who we’re performing to be. That split—the psychological tension between self and spectacle—is the breeding ground of despair. It’s not just that others seem to be doing better; it’s that we no longer trust what “better” even means.

Higher education plays its part. Universities now sell the dream of transformation while enforcing systems of stratification. Your college isn’t just where you study—it becomes your brand, your future network, your worth. And when so much of that promise turns out to be hollow—when the degree doesn’t lead to stability, when the tuition bill becomes a lifelong debt—you don’t just feel disappointed. You feel defective. The system tells you the problem is you.

But the problem is structural. Comparison thrives in systems built on scarcity and spectacle. When there aren’t enough good jobs, enough affordable housing, enough room at the top, we’re trained to compete with each other rather than question the game. Greenfield’s work reminds us that these systems aren’t accidental—they’re profitable. In Social Studies, young people live their lives on screen while corporations harvest their data and self-esteem. The comparison economy runs on your insecurity.

To opt out—however imperfectly—is a quiet revolution. That might mean logging off. Or choosing a slower, less “optimized” path. Or resisting the urge to measure your value against someone else’s performance. Or just remembering that most of what you see is only half true. It might mean treating your own life not as a résumé or content stream, but as something real, worthy, and complex.

To compare is to despair. But to recognize comparison for what it is—a system, not a truth—is a first step toward something else.

Sources
Lauren Greenfield, Social Studies, FX / Hulu, 2024
Greenfield, Interview with Interview Magazine, 2024
“Social Media Swallowed Gen Z,” Wired, 2024
The Daily Show, segments on education and meritocracy
Social Studies, “Wind Up Wooden Heart,” 2010
Patricia Greenfield, Cultural Psychology and Individualism, UCLA
The Higher Education Inquirer archives

When Parenthood Feels Like a Trap: Regret, Trumpism, and the Educated Underclass

The recent MSN article “I Regret Having Children — It Has Stripped My Life of Meaning” is not just a private confession. It is a mirror reflecting a collapsing social order — one where parenting, education, and labor are all defined by debt, exhaustion, and disillusionment.

In today’s America, the family, the school, and the workplace no longer promise progress; they reproduce precarity. The personal regret of parents becomes a collective symptom of a society that demands self-sacrifice but offers little reciprocity.

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The Privatization of Care and the Myth of the “Good Parent”

Since the Reagan era, neoliberal ideology has reduced social problems to personal failures. Families are told to work harder, plan better, and be grateful — while the state retreats from childcare, healthcare, and education.

Parenting, once understood as a shared civic project, is now a private ordeal. The “good parent” myth demands endless self-denial while ignoring the structural forces that make family life unsustainable: stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, unaffordable education, and the erosion of community networks.

The parent who whispers, “I regret having children,” isn’t rejecting love — they are acknowledging betrayal. They were promised fulfillment through family, but abandoned by a system that commodifies care and isolates suffering.

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The Dobbs Decision and the Politics of Coerced Parenthood

The 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling — which overturned Roe v. Wade — deepened this betrayal. By stripping away the constitutional right to abortion, the Supreme Court forced millions into unwanted pregnancies under conditions of economic and emotional strain.

This was no accident of jurisprudence. It was the political offspring of neoliberal neglect and Trump-era authoritarianism — a regime that exalts “family values” while defunding the social infrastructure that makes family life possible.

Dobbs represents coerced parenthood in a nation without paid leave, affordable childcare, or universal healthcare. It is the culmination of a system that insists on reproduction but refuses responsibility — transforming bodily autonomy into a political battleground while leaving families to fend for themselves.

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Trumpism, Despair, and Manufactured Nostalgia

Trumpism feeds on the despair that neoliberalism creates. It promises to restore “traditional America” — stable jobs, strong families, obedient children — but it offers only resentment as consolation.

When exhausted parents or debt-ridden graduates look for meaning, Trumpian populism channels their frustration toward scapegoats: immigrants, educators, feminists, the poor. It converts structural despair into cultural war.

Trump’s America is a paradox: it glorifies the family while destroying the material base that sustains it. It preaches “Make America Great Again” while keeping its base desperate, indebted, and emotionally dependent on rage.

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The Rise of the Educated Underclass

Nowhere is this contradiction clearer than in the making of the educated underclass — the millions of Americans who did everything “right” but found the social contract shredded beneath them.

They earned degrees, followed career advice, and invested in the myth of meritocracy. Yet decades of wage stagnation, precarious employment, and student debt have left them economically fragile and politically disoriented.

Many are parents who believed education would secure their children’s futures. Instead, they see their own children inheriting instability — locked out of homeownership, burdened with loans, and facing a world where credentials no longer guarantee dignity.

This educated underclass, spanning teachers, social workers, adjunct professors, nurses, and mid-level professionals, represents the human fallout of the neoliberal university and the marketized economy it feeds. Their disillusionment — like parental regret — is both personal and systemic.

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Higher Education as a Debt Factory

Colleges once promised upward mobility; now they manufacture anxiety and debt. The family that sacrifices for tuition does so on faith that a degree still matters. But as corporate consolidation and automation erode stable work, that faith collapses.

Parents, particularly those from the working and lower-middle class, internalize this collapse as failure — not recognizing that the problem lies in a system that sells hope on credit. Their children, emerging into a gig economy with record debt, form the next generation of the educated underclass: credentialed, precarious, and politically volatile.

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Regret as a Rational Response

In this context, parental regret is not deviance — it is rational. It reflects the exhaustion of trying to raise children, pay loans, and sustain meaning in a society where everything, including love, has been commodified.

It reflects the psychic cost of neoliberalism’s lie: that education, work, and family can still deliver self-realization without collective solidarity or public investment.

And it warns of what happens when a nation loses faith not only in its institutions but in the very act of reproduction itself.

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Toward a Politics of Care and Repair

To break this cycle, we must confront the intertwined crises of reproduction, education, and inequality. A humane alternative would demand:

• Universal reproductive freedom — protecting the right not to bear children, and the resources to raise them with dignity.

• Tuition-free higher education and student debt relief — dismantling the educated underclass.

• Guaranteed childcare, healthcare, and paid leave — treating parenting as collective labor, not private suffering.

• Living wages and housing justice — reestablishing the economic base of real family life.

• Democratized higher education — ending the capture of universities by finance and corporate boards.

Only by restoring care as a public good — not a private burden — can we move beyond regret toward renewal.

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From Regret to Resistance

The parent who says, “I regret having children,” and the graduate who says, “My degree ruined my life,” are not failures. They are witnesses. Their grief exposes the moral bankruptcy of a system that exploits care, education, and aspiration for profit.

Trumpism thrives on that despair, offering nostalgia instead of justice. Neoliberalism rationalizes it, calling it “personal responsibility.”

But the truth is collective: meaning cannot survive where solidarity has been destroyed. The antidote to regret is not silence — it is organizing. It is rebuilding a society where care, education, and dignity are shared, not sold.

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Sources

• MSN News, “I Regret Having Children — It Has Stripped My Life of Meaning,” 2025.

• Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. ___ (2022).

• Donath, Orna. Regretting Motherhood: A Sociopolitical Analysis. North Atlantic Books, 2017.

• Fraser, Nancy. Cannibal Capitalism. Verso, 2022.

• Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos. Zone Books, 2015.

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

• Hochschild, Arlie. Strangers in Their Own Land. The New Press, 2016.

• Shaulis, Dahn. The College Meltdown (Higher Education Inquirer archives).

Street Psychology: Working-Class Wisdom in the Age of Neoliberalism and Trump

In the United States of 2025—where neoliberal capitalism and creeping authoritarianism grind down the human spirit—there’s an urgent need for a way of thinking, surviving, and resisting that doesn’t come from think tanks or corporate wellness plans. Street Psychology is that way.

This idea isn't new. It’s an outbreak from earlier projects like Street Sociologist (2009–2012) and American Injustice (2009–2013), digital spaces that chronicled working-class survival under austerity, war, mass incarceration, student loan predation, and the Great Recession. Those projects documented both despair and resistance—voices from the margins that understood the system was not broken but operating as designed. Street Psychology is the next step in that lineage. It names the psychic toll of exploitation and dares to offer tools for survival drawn not from institutions, but from the people themselves.

Street Psychology isn’t a licensed profession or clinical method. It’s a bottom-up philosophy. A way of being that honors grit, grief, memory, and movement. It draws from Black Psychology, Radical Social Work, and the unspoken survival strategies passed down through generations—especially those of the poor, the working class, the dispossessed.

It tells us: you’re not crazy. You’re living in a society that has normalized cruelty.

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Life Under Pressure

In today's America, working people face a perfect storm. Medicaid cuts, climate shocks, unpayable debt, and housing crises are daily facts of life. The Trump regime, emboldened by a Supreme Court that erodes checks and balances, offers little more than political theater and corporate tax breaks. "Law and order" is back—but so are vigilante violence and state repression. In this environment, working-class people are expected to carry on as if nothing is wrong—grinding away at gig jobs, navigating broken transit systems, shouldering invisible pain.

Street Psychology offers no false comfort. It teaches that burnout, anxiety, and despair are not personal failures—they are rational reactions to a system that exploits and isolates. It offers a politics of honesty.

It reminds us that mental health cannot be separated from rent, food, dignity, and debt.

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Lessons from Horror and Triumph

Street Psychology is grounded in history—not the history of presidents and generals, but the people’s history of how folks made it through.

During the Great Depression, when one in four Americans was unemployed, it was mutual aid, union organizing, and government pressure from below that helped form the New Deal—not just FDR’s goodwill. Neighbors shared food. Workers seized factories. Families survived on ingenuity and grit. Street Psychology carries that memory.

During World War II, ordinary people faced rations, displacement, and death on an unprecedented scale. But they also built community resilience. Black Americans moved north and west in the Great Migration, seeking both work and dignity. Women entered the workforce by the millions—not for empowerment branding, but to survive. Trauma was everywhere, but so was collective purpose. Street Psychology remembers that duality.

And in the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw the brutal convergence of economic inequality, medical neglect, and state failure. But we also saw mutual aid networks rise overnight. Grocery workers, nurses, delivery drivers, and custodians became the front line—not billionaires or generals. People created community fridges, distributed masks, and organized rent strikes. Even amid mass death and disinformation, something deeply human survived. Street Psychology draws its oxygen from these moments.

It says: we’ve been through hell before—and we’ve learned how to survive together.

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Radical Roots and Collective Healing

Street Psychology stands on the shoulders of Black radical thinkers like Dr. Na’im Akbar and Dr. Wade Nobles, who taught that psychological liberation requires historical truth and cultural self-determination. It borrows from the Radical Social Worker tradition that insists depression and addiction often emerge from exploitation, not deficiency.

It echoes the voices of those doing hard, dirty, “bullshit jobs,” as David Graeber called them—people whose work is exhausting, precarious, and spiritually deadening. It respects those whose minds and bodies are tired because they’ve been used up. And it says plainly: this is not your fault.

Healing begins with naming the madness.

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A People's Practice

Street Psychology thrives outside institutions. It happens in union halls, kitchens, church basements, food pantries, WhatsApp threads. It takes the form of eye contact, a ride to work, a bag of groceries, a story told without shame. It asks us not to fix ourselves to fit a broken world—but to remember we are not alone in our pain or our power.

It teaches that even in a world of distraction and despair, we can practice presence and solidarity. We can re-learn how to listen, how to mourn, how to laugh in defiance.

This psychology is not neutral. It does not pretend to be apolitical. It stands with those being crushed—by the debt collectors, the landlords, the ICE raids, the fascists in suits. It says: you matter. Your struggle matters. And you're not the only one carrying this weight.

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A Call to Reclaim Our Minds

Street Psychology is not a cure. It is not a self-help manual. It is a collective reckoning. A refusal to be shamed into silence or fragmented into diagnosis. It is the unlicensed, unpolished wisdom of people who’ve lived through hell and still show up for each other.

In the age of Trump, AI surveillance, climate breakdown, and economic betrayal, this might be our best chance: to recover the human, to restore the political, and to reclaim the psychological as a shared terrain.

Let’s build a new commons—not just of resources, but of understanding. Let’s build a psychology that is street-smart, justice-rooted, and history-aware.

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Sources & Influences:

• Akbar, Na’im. Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery

• Nobles, Wade. Seeking the Sakhu

• Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs

• Paulo Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed

• Radical Social Worker Collective

• Mutual Aid Disaster Relief

• American Injustice (2009–2013) and Street Sociologist (2009–2012) blog archives

• Historical memory from the Great Depression, WWII home front, and COVID-19 mutual aid networks

• People’s CDC, APA, KFF data on structural causes of psychological distress

Street Psychology lives in those who refuse to forget—and who refuse to give up. If you or your community are practicing this in any form, we want to hear from you.

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

Generation Z and the Fractured American Dream: Class Divide, Debt, and the Search for a Future

For Generation Z, the old story of social mobility—study hard, go to college, work your way up—has lost its certainty. The class divide that once seemed bridgeable through education now feels entrenched, as debt, precarious work, and economic volatility blur the promise of progress.

The new economy—dominated by artificial intelligence, speculative assets like cryptocurrency, and inflated housing markets—has not delivered stability for most. Instead, it’s widened gaps between those who own and those who owe. Many young Americans feel locked out of wealth-building entirely. Some have turned to riskier bets—digital assets, gig work, or start-ups powered by AI tools—to chase opportunities that traditional institutions no longer provide. Others have succumbed to despair. Suicide rates among young adults have climbed sharply in recent years, correlating with financial stress, debt, and social isolation.

And echoing through this uncertain landscape is a song that first rose from the coalfields of Kentucky during the Great Depression—Florence Reece’s 1931 protest hymn, “Which Side Are You On?”

Come all you good workers,
Good news to you I’ll tell,
Of how the good old union
Has come in here to dwell.

Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?

Nearly a century later, those verses feel newly urgent—because Gen Z is again being forced to pick a side: between solidarity and survival, between reforming a broken system or resigning themselves to it.

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The Class Divide and the Broken Ladder
Despite record levels of education, Gen Z faces limited social mobility. College remains a class marker, not an equalizer. Students from affluent families attend better-funded universities, graduate on time, and often receive help with housing or job placement. Working-class and first-generation students, meanwhile, navigate under-resourced campuses, heavier debt, and weaker professional networks.

The Pew Research Center found that first-generation college graduates have nearly $100,000 less in median wealth than peers whose parents also hold degrees. For many, the degree no longer guarantees a secure foothold in the middle class—it simply delays financial independence.

They say in Harlan County,
There are no neutrals there,
You’ll either be a union man,
Or a thug for J. H. Blair.

The metaphor still fits: there are no neutrals in the modern class struggle over debt, housing, and automation.

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Debt, Doubt, and the New Normal
Gen Z borrowers owe an average of around $23,000 in student loans, a figure growing faster than any other generation’s debt load. Over half regret taking on those loans. Many delay buying homes, having children, or even seeking medical care. Those who drop out without degrees are burdened with debt and little to show for it.

The debt-based model has become a defining feature of American life—especially for the working class. The price of entry to a better future is borrowing against one’s own.

Don’t scab for the bosses,
Don’t listen to their lies,
Us poor folks haven’t got a chance
Unless we organize.

If Reece’s song once called miners to unionize against coal barons, its spirit now calls borrowers, renters, adjuncts, and gig workers to collective resistance against financial systems that profit from their precarity.

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AI and the Erosion of Work
Artificial intelligence promises efficiency, but it also threatens to hollow out the entry-level job market Gen Z depends on. Automation in journalism, design, law, and customer service cuts off rungs of the career ladder just as young workers reach for them.

While elite graduates may move into roles that supervise or profit from AI, working-class Gen Zers are more likely to face displacement. AI amplifies the class divide: it rewards those who already have capital, coding skills, or connections—and sidelines those who don’t.

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Crypto Dreams and Financial Desperation
Locked out of traditional wealth paths, many young people turned to cryptocurrency during the pandemic. Platforms like Robinhood and Coinbase promised quick gains and independence from the “rigged” economy. But when crypto markets crashed in 2022, billions in speculative wealth evaporated. Some who had borrowed or used student loan refunds to invest lost everything.

Online forums chronicled not only the financial losses but also the psychological fallout—stories of panic, shame, and in some tragic cases, suicide. The new “digital gold rush” became another mechanism for transferring wealth upward.

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The Real Estate Wall
While digital markets rise and fall, real estate remains the ultimate symbol of exclusion. Home prices have climbed over 40 percent since 2020, while mortgage rates hover near 8 percent. For most of Gen Z, ownership is out of reach.

Older generations built equity through housing; Gen Z rents indefinitely, enriching landlords and institutional investors. Without intergenerational help, the “starter home” has become a myth. In America’s new class order, those who inherit property inherit mobility.

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Despair and the Silent Crisis
Behind the data lies a mental health emergency. The CDC reports that suicide among Americans aged 10–24 has risen nearly 60 percent in the past decade. Economic precarity, debt, housing insecurity, and climate anxiety all contribute.

Therapists describe “financial trauma” as a defining condition for Gen Z—chronic anxiety rooted in systemic instability. Universities respond with mindfulness workshops, but few confront the deeper issue: a society that privatized risk and monetized hope.

They say in Harlan County,
There are no neutrals there—
Which side are you on, my people,
Which side are you on?

The question lingers like a challenge to policymakers, educators, and investors alike.

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A Two-Tier Future
Today’s economy is splitting into two distinct realities:

• The secure class, buffered by family wealth, education, AI-driven income, and real estate assets.

• The precarious class, burdened by loans, high rents, unstable work, and psychological strain.

The supposed democratization of opportunity through technology and education has in practice entrenched a new feudalism—one coded in algorithms and contracts instead of coal and steel.

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Repairing the System, Not the Student
For Generation Z, the American Dream has become a high-interest loan. Education, technology, and financial innovation—once tools of liberation—now function as instruments of control.

Reforming higher education is necessary, but not sufficient. The deeper work lies in redistributing power: capping predatory interest rates, investing in affordable housing, curbing speculative bubbles, ensuring that AI’s gains benefit labor as well as capital, and confronting the mental health crisis that shadows all of it.

Florence Reece’s song endures because its question has never been answered—only updated. As Gen Z stands at the intersection of debt and digital capitalism, that question rings louder than ever:

Which side are you on?

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Sources

• Florence Reece, “Which Side Are You On?” (1931).

• Pew Research Center, “First-Generation College Graduates Lag Behind Their Peers on Key Economic Outcomes,” 2021.

• Dēmos, The Debt Divide: How Student Debt Impacts Opportunities for Black and White Borrowers, 2016.

• EducationData.org, “Student Loan Debt by Generation,” 2024.

• Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Gen Z Student Debt and Wealth Data Brief, 2022.

• CNBC, “Gen Z vs. Their Parents: How the Generations Stack Up Financially,” 2024.

• WUSF, “Generation Z’s Net Worth Is Being Undercut by College Debt,” 2024.

• Newsweek, “Student Loan Update: Gen Z Hit with Highest Payments,” 2024.

• The Kaplan Group, “How Student Debt Is Locking Millennials and Gen Z Out of Homeownership,” 2024.

• CDC, Suicide Mortality in the United States, 2001–2022, National Center for Health Statistics, 2023.

• Brookings Institution, “The Impact of AI on Labor Markets: Inequality and Automation,” 2024.

• CNBC, “Crypto Crash Wipes Out Billions in Investor Wealth, Gen Z Most Exposed,” 2023.

• Zillow, “U.S. Housing Affordability Reaches Lowest Point Since 1989,” 2024.

Digital Dope: How Internet Addiction Mirrors the Great Crises of Gin, Opium, Meth, and Fentanyl

In the 18th century, gin swept through the working-class neighborhoods of London, offering brief euphoria and long-term devastation. In the 19th century, opium dulled the pain of colonialism and industrial collapse. The 20th century brought methamphetamine and its promise of energy and escape, followed by fentanyl—cheap, potent, and deadly.

Now, in the 21st century, we face a new form of mass addiction: not chemical but digital. The most addictive substances of our time are not smoked, snorted, or injected—they are streamed, swiped, and scrolled.

The internet, once hailed as a revolution in knowledge and communication, has been weaponized into an empire of distraction and dependency. Social media, pornography, and online gambling—backed by surveillance capitalism and unchecked corporate power—are engineered for compulsive use. And like the addictive epidemics of the past, they are eroding individual agency, family life, and the very foundations of civic society.

The Gin Craze and the Algorithmic Binge

In 18th-century Britain, the Gin Craze turned city streets into open-air taverns. Cheap, potent alcohol flooded the market, leading to widespread addiction, crime, and social decay. The state profited from taxes while the poor drowned in despair.

Today’s equivalent is the infinite scroll. Social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook—like gin—are engineered to be consumed endlessly. The user is reduced to a set of engagement metrics. Like the gin drinker numbing pain, the social media user seeks validation, escape, or identity in a flood of curated images and outrage. Depression, anxiety, and loneliness have exploded, especially among teens and young adults. Suicides, particularly among girls, have surged in tandem with social media usage.

Opium Dens and the Porn Empire

The opium den offered oblivion. It soothed pain but eroded will. Victorian elites warned of its moral decay while quietly indulging themselves.

Today, online pornography is the new opium—widely available, hyper-stimulating, and often degrading. Once confined to private spaces, it is now accessible to children, monetized by multi-billion-dollar platforms, and normalized by mainstream culture. The effects—especially on young people—include desensitization, unrealistic expectations, isolation, and difficulty forming real-life relationships.

Research has shown that excessive porn consumption alters brain chemistry similarly to addictive drugs. It hijacks the reward system, rewires sexual expectations, and in many cases, contributes to erectile dysfunction, compulsive behavior, and emotional detachment.

Meth, Fentanyl, and the Speed of the Feed

Meth promised productivity; fentanyl promises relief. Both deliver destruction.

Digital addiction today mimics the frenetic highs of meth and the numbing power of fentanyl. The constant rush of notifications, likes, and headlines overstimulates the brain and crushes attention spans. Apps and games are engineered like slot machines, delivering intermittent reinforcement that keeps users hooked. The average smartphone user touches their phone over 2,500 times a day.

University students struggle to read long texts or concentrate for extended periods. Professors battle declining classroom attention and rising rates of anxiety and burnout. Like meth, the digital feed gives the illusion of efficiency while grinding the mind into dust.

Online Gambling: Casino in Your Pocket

The rise of online sports betting and casino apps has brought Vegas to every dorm room and bedroom. Targeted ads on Instagram and YouTube lure young people into betting with "free" money. Many students—especially young men—develop compulsive behaviors, losing thousands before they graduate. Some turn to credit cards, payday loans, or family bailouts.

States, like governments in the gin and opium eras, have embraced online gambling for its tax revenues. Universities, meanwhile, remain largely silent—even as students destroy their finances and futures through legalized digital addiction.

Higher Education: From Ivory Tower to Digital Trap

Colleges were once sanctuaries of thought and reflection. Today, they are nodes in the digital economy—where learning management systems monitor clicks, and students are nudged toward screens at every turn. Social interaction is filtered through group chats and Reddit threads. Pornography, gambling, and endless scrolling are a click away on the same device used to write term papers and attend virtual lectures.

Even counseling services are digitized. The solution to tech addiction, students are told, is often more tech—apps that monitor screen time, AI chatbots for mental health, or video therapy that feels detached and impersonal.

The Profiteers and the Pushers

In every addiction crisis, there are profiteers: distillers, opium traders, pharmaceutical companies, and cartels. Today, Big Tech plays the same role. Meta, TikTok, YouTube, Pornhub, DraftKings, FanDuel, and hundreds of smaller apps compete for attention with algorithms that exploit human weakness.

Their business model depends on addiction. They study neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and micro-targeted advertising with military-grade precision. Like the drug lords of the past, they deny responsibility while reaping billions.

And just as the poor suffered most in the gin and opioid crises, it is the working class, the unemployed, the chronically ill, and the disconnected who fall hardest into the digital pit.

The Need for Radical Intervention

Digital addiction is not a moral failing—it’s a public health emergency. Like past addiction epidemics, the solution requires:

• Public awareness campaigns

• Stricter age and content regulation

• Taxation on digital vice industries

• Digital literacy education at all levels

• Offline spaces and activities that foster real connection and attention

Higher education must lead. Not by digitizing every service, but by teaching students to reclaim their minds, their time, and their agency. Faculty must model mindful engagement and challenge the corporatization of the university by tech companies. Administrators must reconsider their reliance on LMS systems, data harvesting, and digital surveillance.

Will We Wake Up in Time?

In the past, addiction crises forced society to reflect on what was lost: family cohesion, civic virtue, mental clarity, and freedom itself. We stand again at such a crossroads. The digital drug is in every hand, and the overdose is slow—but devastating.

Like gin, opium, meth, and fentanyl, the internet addiction crisis is about more than chemicals—it’s about despair, disconnection, and exploitation. And like those earlier epidemics, it is not an individual failing, but a systemic one. The good news? As with past crises, awareness is the first step toward recovery. The question is: Will we act before another generation is lost?

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The Higher Education Inquirer continues to investigate the intersection of capitalism, addiction, and the commodification of human attention. Reach out if you have a story to share.

Can the newly formed PA Board of Higher Education do much for the People?

In 2024, Pennsylvania has formed a state Board of Higher Education. Can the organization create value for all its citizens and improve the Quality of Life for Pennsylvanians, or is it just another layer of bureaucracy whose major role is to maintain the status quo? 

The Pennsylvania Board of Higher Education is composed of 21 members, representing postsecondary education, government, business, labor and students. Some schools like Penn State, Pitt, and Temple each have a representative. Other institutions, like the state's 15 community colleges and 10 PASSHE schools are represented by one person.

The University of Pennsylvania ($20.9 billion endowment and 1,085 acres of urban property), Carnegie-Mellon University ($2.7 billion and 157 acres of urban property), and other elite private schools are not represented and stand apart from the oversight.

What's the Mission?

There is no mention about how this new Board can make a difference. No progressive ideas or policies have been introduced other than that the organization seeks to ensure that there is no undue competition among the schools. 

Wealth and Want in PA Higher Education 

Pennsylvania has more than 150 colleges, universities, and technical schools. They are all connected by a harsh economic system that promotes increasing wealth and want. Pennsylvania's immense wealth is illustrated in a handful of elite and brand name colleges and universities primarily in and around its two major urban areas: Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. And wealth is demonstrated in their endowments and real estate holdings. 

University of Pennsylvania: $20.9 billion and 1,085 acres of urban property

Pennsylvania State University: $4.44 billion and 22,484 acres of property statewide

Carnegie-Mellon: $2.7 billion and 157 acres of urban property

Thomas Jefferson University: $2.3 billion and 100 acres of urban property

Swarthmore: $2.2 billion and 425 acres of suburban property

Lehigh University: $1.8 billion and 2350 acres of suburban property

Bryn Mawr College: $1.6 billion and 135 acres of suburban property

Villanova University $1.5 billion and 408 acres of suburban property

University of Pittsburgh: $1.1 billion and 132 acres of suburban property

Drexel University: $1.1 billion and 96 acres of urban property

Lafayette College: $1 billion and 340 acres of suburban property

Bucknell: $1 billion and 450 acres of suburban property

Duquesne University: $1 billion and 50 acres of urban property

Temple University: $750 million and 115 acres of urban property

Haverford University: $643 million and 216 acres of suburban property. 

Washington and Jefferson: $380 million and 60 acres of small-town property

Widener University: $90 million and 216 acres of urban property

The differences between life outside of Penn, Temple, and Drexel and other parts of Philadelphia (North and West Philly) are stark.  And the Philadelphia suburbs that include some of the elite schools are reflective of wealth, power, and prestige. Scenes of wealth and want are also apparent in and around Pittsburgh. 

State universities outside of these urban and suburban areas, aside from College Park, have been declining for more than a decade. The Community College of Philadelphia, a career lifeline for the working class, has one of the lowest graduation rates in the US. The same goes for Harrisburg Area Community College. Pennsylvania also has Lincoln University and Cheyney University of Pennsylvania: two Historically Black Colleges and Universities that have been historically underfunded and serve as lasting symbols of resistance against white supremacy, an ideology still deeply embedded in Pennsylvania's society and economy.

PA Economy: Growing Inequality and Rural Decline 

Pennsylvania's economy is diverse yet unsustainable. It consists of traditional industries such as manufacturing and agriculture as well as healthcare, energy, technology, and education. Healthcare (reactive medicine) and energy (fossil fuels), in particular, are expensive for the state and expensive the planet. 

The problems in Pennsylvania's higher education system extend beyond the schools represented in the new Board. These economic and social problems are persistent and worsening for the working class. Pennsylvania's population is stagnant, increasing slightly in urban areas and declining in rural areas. 

There is also a demographic cliff with Baby Boomers reaching their 80s (and greater disability) and fewer children being born in the Commonwealth. Children living with Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed (ALICE) families is 41 percent.  

Savage Inequalities in K-12 Education

Pennsylvania has some of the widest education gaps in the country. A national study found Pennsylvania at the bottom of all states in school funding fairness. Among the 50 states, Pennsylvania ranked 49th in the Black-white opportunity gap, 50th in the Hispanic-white opportunity gap, and 49th in the gap between students from low-income families and their wealthier peers. 

Unequal Wealth Distribution 

Pennsylvania is one of the most unequal states in the country, with the top 1% of earners making 21.7 times more than the bottom 99%. 

The richest people in Pennsylvania are Jeff Yass ($29B), Michael Rubin ($11.5B), Victoria Mars ($9.7B), Arthur Dantchik ($7.3B), Thomas Hagen ($5.2B), Jeff Lurie ($4.9B), Maggie Hardy ($4.1B), Mary Alice Dorrance Malone ($3.7B), John Middleton ($3.7B), and Thomas Tull ($2.9B). 

The average income of the top 1% is $1,100,962, compared to $50,830 for the rest of the state. Income inequality in Pennsylvania has been worsening since the 1970s. The richest 5% of households have incomes that are 11.7 times larger than the bottom 20%. 

Over half of Pennsylvania's wealth is concentrated in six counties: Montgomery, Allegheny, Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Philadelphia. The wealthiest county is Chester, with a median household income of $104,161 in 2020. 

Regressive Tax Structure 

Pennsylvania has a flat tax rate of 3 percent, and its corporate tax rate is a flat 8.49 percent and falling. The combined state personal income tax and local earned income tax led to Pennsylvania having the 18th highest income tax burden. Pennsylvania ranked 25th for its total per capita property tax burden. New Jersey, New York, and Maryland had a higher tax burden in both comparisons.  

Mass Incarceration for Social Control, Deaths of Despair

Pennsylvania has the highest incarceration rate in the Northeast and the second highest rate in the country when including people on probation or parole. And its correctional system spends nearly $3 billion annually. Black adults make up 46% of Pennsylvania's prison population, even though they only make up 11% of the state's population. The flip side of the coin, deaths of despair (suicide, drug overdoses) are common among the working class in rural and urban areas.  

Related links:

"20-20": Many US States Have Seen Enrollment Drops of More Than 20 Percent 

College Meltdown: NY, IL, MI, PA, VA hardest hit

The Disillusioned Young Man and Higher Ed in the US

Across the United States, growing numbers of young men are dropping out—of college, of the labor market, and of public life. They are disillusioned, disappointed, and increasingly detached from the institutions that once promised stability and purpose. Higher education is at the center of this unraveling. For many young men, it has become a symbol of a broken social contract—offering neither clear direction nor tangible reward.

Enrollment numbers reflect this retreat. Women now account for nearly 60 percent of U.S. college students. Men, particularly working-class men, have been withdrawing steadily for years. They are not disappearing from education simply out of disinterest—they are being priced out, pushed out, and in some cases replaced.

College has become a high-risk gamble for those without economic security. Some students take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans and find themselves dropping out or graduating into dead-end jobs. Others gamble in a more literal sense. The explosion of online sports betting and gambling apps has created a public health crisis that is largely invisible. Research shows that college students, particularly men, are significantly more likely to develop gambling problems than the general population. Some have even used federal student aid to fund their gambling. The financial and psychological toll is severe.

Alcohol remains another outlet for despair. While binge drinking has long been part of campus life, it is now more frequently a form of self-medication than social bonding. The stresses of debt, job insecurity, isolation, and untreated mental illness have led many young men to drink excessively. The consequences—academic failure, expulsion, addiction, violence—are often invisible until they are catastrophic.

The education system offers few lifelines. Counseling services are understaffed. Mentorship is scarce. For-profit colleges and nonselective public institutions offer quick credentials but little career mobility. Internships are often unpaid. Adjunct professors, who now make up the majority of the college teaching workforce, are overworked and underpaid, with little time for student engagement. The result is an environment where young men are left to fend for themselves, often without guidance, community, or hope.

Into this vacuum step political influencers who promise meaning and belonging—but offer grievance and distraction instead. Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, has become one of the most recognizable figures appealing to disaffected young men. His message is simple: college is a scam, the system is rigged against you, and the left is to blame. But Kirk’s rhetoric does little to address real economic suffering. Instead of empowering young men with tools for analysis, organizing, or resilience, he offers them a worldview of resentment and victimhood. It's ideology without substance—an escape route that leads nowhere.

Compounding the crisis is the transformation of the U.S. labor market. Union jobs that once offered working-class men decent wages and stability have been gutted by automation, offshoring, deregulation, and union-busting campaigns. The pathways that allowed previous generations to thrive without a college degree have largely disappeared. Retail and service jobs dominate the landscape, with low pay, high turnover, and little dignity.

Meanwhile, higher education institutions have increasingly turned to international students to fill seats and boost tuition revenue. Many universities, especially at the graduate level, rely on international students—who often pay full price—to subsidize their operations. These students frequently gain access to internships, research positions, and jobs in STEM fields, sometimes edging out U.S. students with less financial or academic capital. While international students contribute intellectually and economically to American higher ed, their presence also reflects a system more concerned with revenue than with serving local and regional populations.

This mix of economic decline, addiction, alienation, and displacement has left many young men feeling irrelevant. Some turn to substances. Some drop out entirely. Others embrace simplistic ideologies that frame their loss as cultural rather than structural. But the deeper truth is this: they are caught between institutions that extract from them and influencers who exploit them.

The American higher education system has failed to adapt to the reality of millions of young men who no longer see it as a path forward. Until colleges address the psychological, social, and economic pain these men are facing—until they offer real support, purpose, and value—the disillusionment will deepen. Until labor policy creates viable alternatives through union jobs, apprenticeships, and living wages, higher education will continue to function not as a ladder of mobility but as a mirage.

Sources:
National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, Current Term Enrollment Estimates
University at Buffalo, Clinical and Research Institute on Addictions
International Center for Responsible Gaming
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance
Turning Point USA public statements and financial filings
U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics: Union Membership Data
Institute of International Education, Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange
The Higher Education Inquirer archives on student debt, labor displacement, and campus disinformation campaigns

Iron Cage or Golden Handcuffs? (Glen McGhee and Dahn Shaulis)

Max Weber’s “iron cage” described a world where bureaucratic rationality and capitalist structures governed life so thoroughly that individuality and freedom were diminished. Today, Americans still live in that cage, bound by debt, hierarchy, and rules that channel human energy into impersonal systems. Alongside the cage sits another metaphor: the “golden handcuffs.” Unlike the coercion of bureaucracy, golden handcuffs represent the comfort and stability of jobs, mortgages, and benefits that discourage mobility. Taken together, iron and gold shape a society increasingly stuck in place.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the experience of younger generations. Student loan debt has become one of the most powerful bars of the iron cage. For decades, policymakers sold higher education as the ticket to mobility, yet the financing model has left tens of millions of Americans burdened with obligations that stretch across lifetimes. Parents still paying their own loans now watch their children borrow again, creating a cycle of indebtedness that limits family formation, delays homeownership, and stifles geographic mobility. College graduates often cannot take risks—whether by starting a business, moving to a new city, or pursuing meaningful but lower-paid work—because debt service makes such choices impossible. The American promise of education as liberation has become, for many, education as shackles.

Layered onto this cage is the massive growth of what anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”—roles that exist less to create value than to maintain bureaucratic appearance and control. Whole sectors of the economy are filled with paper-pushers, compliance officers, middle managers, and customer service agents who know that their work adds little or nothing to society. Yet these jobs proliferate because they keep the system running, providing salaries and benefits that workers can’t easily abandon. Here lie the golden handcuffs: people remain in unfulfilling work not because they love it, but because the alternative—losing health insurance, defaulting on loans, or risking homelessness—is too dangerous. In effect, workers trade freedom for security, their ambitions dulled by the constant calculation of what can be risked and what cannot.

The Wall Street Journal recently documented how job-switching and geographic mobility have fallen to historic lows. For many, the causes are high housing costs, limited relocation packages, and rising mortgage rates. But behind those immediate factors lie deeper structures. Student loan debt reduces the willingness to gamble on uncertain opportunities. Bullshit jobs, however empty, offer just enough stability to keep people locked in place. Older generations, insulated by home equity or pensions, may experience the golden handcuffs as a form of protection, but their children and grandchildren feel more of the iron cage, inheriting debts and diminished opportunities while being funneled into roles that drain meaning from their labor.

The intergenerational effect is stark. Families once imagined that each generation would surpass the last, but mounting evidence shows downward mobility as the norm. Debt and immobility mean that the youngest workers face worse prospects than their parents, often despite higher levels of formal education. The cage has become hereditary, reinforced by golden handcuffs that reward those already inside while barring others from entry.

The consequences reach far beyond individual frustration. A society of debt-burdened, risk-averse workers chained to meaningless jobs loses dynamism, creativity, and the possibility of real progress. Economic innovation falters when people cannot afford to move, switch jobs, or challenge existing hierarchies. Civic life suffers when millions are too tired or precarious to participate fully. What Weber described as the cold rationality of bureaucracy now fuses with financialization and corporate incentives to produce both stagnation and quiet despair.

The question is not only whether Americans are trapped in iron cages or bound by golden handcuffs, but who profits from these arrangements. Student loan servicers, corporate employers, and real estate interests all benefit from a population too indebted, too constrained, and too risk-averse to push back. Unless there is structural change—through debt relief, meaningful labor reform, and a housing policy that restores mobility—the chains will only tighten, passed from one generation to the next.

The iron cage and the golden handcuffs are not metaphors in tension; they are metaphors in partnership, binding Americans simultaneously by force and by comfort. Together they describe a society that promises freedom while delivering entrapment, and a generation that is learning the hard way that education, work, and home are less ladders to opportunity than carefully designed systems of control.

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Sources

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905).
“Understanding Max Weber’s Iron Cage,” ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/understanding-max-webers-iron-cage-3026373
“Nobody’s Buying Homes, Nobody’s Switching Jobs—and America’s Mobility Is Stalling,” Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2025. https://www.wsj.com/economy/american-job-housing-economic-dynamism-d56ef8fc
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018).
Steven J. Davis and John Haltiwanger, “Dynamism Diminished: Housing Markets and Business Formation,” AEA Research (2024). https://www.aeaweb.org/research/charts/dynamism-diminished-housing-markets
“The Intergenerational Burden of Student Loan Debt,” Brookings Institution, October 2021. https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-intergenerational-burden-of-student-loan-debt/

Get Wise, Guys: The Perils of the Sports Betting Culture

The NCAA Calls it a Nightmare 

It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of betting on college sports, the potential for quick money, and the social aspect of it all. But let's peel back the curtain and examine the real dangers that lurk beneath the surface of the sports betting culture.  

The Illusion of Easy Money
While it may seem like a simple way to make extra cash, the reality is much more complex. The odds are stacked against you, and the house always has an edge. Chasing losses can lead to a dangerous cycle of debt and despair.

The Mental Toll
The emotional rollercoaster of sports betting can take a significant toll on your mental health. The highs of winning can be fleeting, while the lows of losing can be devastating. The constant stress, anxiety, and disappointment can lead to serious mental health issues.

The Social Impact
Gambling addiction can strain relationships with friends and family. It can lead to isolation, secrecy, and a breakdown of trust. Your academic performance may suffer as you prioritize betting over your studies.

Get Wise, Stay Wise
While it's tempting to indulge in the thrill of sports betting, it's important to approach it with a level head. If you are underage, don't do it.  If you are over 25 and don't have an addiction, stick to a few small bets and a small budget, and know when to walk away. Don't drink or do drugs before, during, or after wagering. If you find yourself struggling with a gambling addiction, seek help immediately.  And if someone notices problems before you do, consider them an ally, and listen. 

Remember, the true joy of sports lies in the game itself, not in the financial outcome.

The National Problem Gambling Helpline (1-800-GAMBLER) is operated by the National Council on Problem Gambling. The helpline serves as a one-stop hub connecting people looking for assistance with a gambling problem to local resources. This network includes 28 contact centers which cover all 50 states and the U.S. territories. The National Problem Gambling Helpline offers call, text and chat services 24/7/365.

Project 1775, Project 2025, and the Promise of Project 2026: A Call for Revolutionary Hope in American Higher Education

In a fiery and prophetic address, the House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries invoked the memory of America’s original struggle for freedom, branding the tyranny of King George III in the years before the American Revolution as “Project 1775.” With bold clarity, he drew a straight line from that era of oppression to today’s rising authoritarianism—what he identified as “Donald Trump’s Project 2025” and the accompanying Trump Spending Bill. But rather than ending in despair, his speech was a call to courage and hope: just as Project 1775 gave birth to the Revolution of 1776, we are called to give birth to a new movement—Project 2026, a revolutionary vision of democracy, justice, and renewal.

His message resonates beyond politics—it speaks deeply to the state of American higher education, which now stands at a crossroads. Under siege from authoritarian impulses, stripped of funding, and commodified by corporate greed, our colleges and universities reflect a nation in spiritual crisis. But as the Minority Leader reminded us, this moment is also one of great opportunity.

“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” (2 Timothy 1:7)

Project 2026 is not merely a reaction to tyranny—it is a faith-driven declaration of agency. It is a call to restore education as a public good, not a private racket. It is a rejection of robocolleges, shadowy online program managers, and predatory lenders that have turned learning into a means of lifelong debt. And it is a stand against those who weaponize ignorance and rewrite history for their own gain.

We are reminded in the New Testament that resistance is righteous, and that reform must be rooted in love, justice, and truth.

“And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32)

This truth must guide the next phase of the American experiment—a truth that recognizes students not as consumers but as citizens; that sees teachers not as disposable labor but as bearers of light; and that understands education as liberation, not subjugation.

Project 2026 can become our modern Sermon on the Mount, a blueprint for building a nation where colleges nurture both critical thinking and spiritual compassion, where public funding is a covenant—not a weapon—and where we "do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God" (Micah 6:8).

For decades, institutions of higher learning have drifted toward elitism, exclusion, and exploitation. Many have served as tools of empire, not vessels of enlightenment. Project 2026 offers a rebirth—a Great Awakening that opens the doors of education wide to the poor, the marginalized, and the weary. It speaks to the tired adjunct, the indebted graduate, the first-generation student, and the worker seeking dignity.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” (Matthew 5:6)

This is the moment to stand together. Project 2026 must not be left to chance or left in the hands of the powerful alone. It is a grassroots revolution of the mind and spirit—a multiracial, multigenerational, moral movement that calls upon students, faculty, parents, and communities to say: No more.

No more austerity cloaked as fiscal responsibility.
No more censorship masquerading as patriotism.
No more debt for a degree that leads to precarious work and empty promises.

Instead, let us build an education system worthy of democracy—a system animated by the values that once inspired a ragtag group of rebels in 1776. Let us be the generation that reclaims education as the soul of the Republic.

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:2)

The struggle ahead will not be easy. But neither was 1776. And yet from that fire emerged a new nation. With faith and fierce love, Project 2026 can become a new declaration—not just of independence, but of interdependence. A declaration of solidarity with the forgotten, the silenced, and the struggling.

Let the tyrants tremble. Let the profiteers beware.
A revolution is stirring in our hearts.

And as Scripture reminds us:

“If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31)

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Sources:

• The Holy Bible, New Testament

• House Minority Leader remarks, July 3, 2025

• Trump-aligned Project 2025 blueprint (Heritage Foundation)

• Trump Budget and Spending Bill (2025)

• The Higher Education Inquirer archives on privatization, debt peonage, and adjunct labor in U.S. higher education

Throwing the Flag for the Fourth Time: U.S. College Students Are Still Gambling with Student Aid

In this fourth installment of our continuing investigation into student gambling, one issue looms larger than ever: the misuse of student financial aid to fund risky betting behavior. This is not an isolated anomaly or a cautionary footnote. It is a widespread and worsening crisis that reveals the vulnerabilities in a higher education system increasingly entangled with digital addiction and financial exploitation.

An estimated one in five U.S. college students has used student aid—whether federal loans, Pell Grants, or other education funds—to place bets, often through mobile sports betting platforms. These findings, confirmed in recent surveys by Intelligent.com and state gambling councils, expose a troubling truth: higher education is not just failing to prevent this behavior; it may be silently enabling it.

Since the 2018 Supreme Court decision that overturned the federal ban on sports betting, online gambling has exploded in popularity. Students can now place bets with a few taps on their phones, often encouraged by targeted promotions, social media ads, and campus culture. A 2023 NCAA survey showed that nearly 60 percent of 18- to 22-year-olds had engaged in sports betting, with as many as 41 percent betting on their own school’s teams. What was once considered deviant is now normalized.

Financial aid, originally intended to help students pay for tuition, housing, and books, has become a silent reservoir for gambling losses. Students who misuse these funds often do so quietly, making it easy for the behavior to go undetected until academic or financial disaster strikes. This is not only a matter of personal irresponsibility but of systemic neglect. With little oversight of how aid money is spent after disbursement, students can easily divert those funds toward high-risk activities without triggering institutional red flags.

The consequences are severe. Students who gamble with loan money frequently fall behind on rent and tuition. Some accumulate additional credit card debt. Many report heightened levels of anxiety, depression, and academic disengagement. A subset drops out entirely—often with thousands of dollars in nondischargeable debt and no degree to show for it. What we’re witnessing is the transformation of long-term educational debt into a form of speculative entertainment, with young people bearing the cost and the state underwriting the risk.

Colleges and universities, for the most part, have done little to stop this. Fewer than a quarter have any formal gambling policy in place. Counseling centers are often underfunded and untrained in gambling-specific treatment. Awareness campaigns are limited and usually reactive. Meanwhile, the gambling industry continues to rake in profits and expand its reach on college campuses, sometimes through sponsorship deals or targeted advertisements that blur the lines between athletics, student identity, and wagering.

The NFL Foundation’s $600,000 commitment to gambling awareness may be well-intentioned, but it’s woefully insufficient when compared to the scale of the problem and the profits at stake. While a handful of schools have taken steps to limit advertising or incorporate gambling risk into financial literacy programs, these measures remain the exception rather than the rule.

This is not a moral panic. It is a public health crisis driven by the same factors that have fueled other digital addictions: rapid technological change, corporate lobbying, student precarity, and institutional inaction. It is part of a broader shift toward what we’ve described in previous articles as “digital dope”—a system in which tech companies engineer compulsive behaviors for profit, and colleges quietly adjust to a reality where student attention, money, and mental health are fair game.

The normalization of gambling, especially among male students, mirrors other troubling trends we’ve reported: rising alcohol abuse, declining classroom engagement, and growing alienation from educational institutions. Many of these students are not just gambling because it’s fun—they are using it to escape a deeper sense of disconnection, uncertainty, and despair.

To meaningfully address this crisis, institutions must confront the uncomfortable truth that financial aid is being used to subsidize digital addiction. That means enforcing clear restrictions on gambling app promotions, integrating gambling screening into student health protocols, rethinking how aid is distributed and monitored, and establishing formal policies that treat gambling risk with the same urgency as alcohol or drug abuse.

In publishing our fourth report on student gambling, The Higher Education Inquirer again asks: how many warnings are needed before the problem is acknowledged at scale? How many more students must drop out, spiral into debt, or fall into addiction before administrators, lawmakers, and the Department of Education take this seriously?

The answers are not hard to find. What’s missing is the will to act.

Sources:
Intelligent.com (2022, 2023), College Student Gambling Surveys
NCAA (2023), Sports Betting Participation Data
Nevada Council on Problem Gambling (2024)
Florida Council on Compulsive Gambling (2023)
CollegeGambling.org
Time Magazine (2024), “An Explosion in Sports Betting Is Driving Gambling Addiction Among College Students”
Kindbridge (2025), “Is America in the Middle of a College Student Gambling Addiction Crisis?”
Addiction.Rutgers.edu (2024), “The Rise of Sports Betting Among College Students”
HigherEducationInquirer.org (2025), “Student Aid and Student Gambling: Risky Connection”