Higher Education in Crisis: How Attacks from Conservatives, Elites, and Financiers Hurt Our Public Universities

Abstract

When discussing the state of contemporary public higher education, the conversation centers around an unfortunate, yet accidental, institutional failure. With statewide funding and federal student aid decreasing overall,1 universities have elected to cut programs, take on debt, and raise tuition and fees.2 Rising prices leave students either unable to afford higher education or push them further into debt, decreasing enrollment at four-year public universities.3 However, this crisis did not develop on its own and students are not to blame. This structural imbalance results from a long-term attack by conservative thinkers, elites, and financiers who use higher education to retain power and maximize their wealth. As examples of these trends, white supremacist ideology used privatization to circumvent the desegregation of public schools ruled in Brown v the Board of Education (1954). Throughout the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960’s, university administrations shifted the responsibility of paying for education onto students to keep them from demonstrating against oppressors.4 Private interests, bankers, and financiers used policy to further the assault on education through lobbying, tax avoidance, and investments. Tax loopholes create less tax revenue for already limited state budgets. Private nonprofit or for-profit institutions take the remaining subsidies, denying public universities crucial funding.5 This paper will outline the choices and events that created the current failure of public higher education. 1 Ma, Jennifer and Matea Pender. Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2022. New York: College 2 Mitchell, Michael, Michael Leachman, Kathleen Masterson, and Samantha Waxman. Unkept Promises: to Higher Education Threaten Access and Equity. Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 3 National Center for Education Statistics. Total undergraduate fall enrollment in degree-granting postsecondary institutions, by attendance status, sex of student, and control and level of institution: Selected years, 1970 2030. Digest of Education Statistics, 2021. 4 Maclean, Nancy. Democracy in Chains. Penguin Random House: New York, 2018. 5 Eaton, Charlie, Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education. University of Chicago Press, 2022.