For colleges and universities this year, back to school has been tumultuous. For universities, this crisis has been long in the making, its vectors not just the spray of coronavirus-laden droplets unleashed over the past months but also jagged budget lines plunging across decades. During the past 30 years, per-pupil public funding for higher education has declined more than 30 percent. Ten years after the Great Recession, annual state funding for public colleges is still $6.6 billion below 2008 levels. As the federal government has dialed back funds, universities have turned to debt financing to keep their doors open.
As UC Merced sociologist Charlie Eaton and his colleagues have reported, the financialization of higher education has meant that “less wealthy public and private colleges are using institutional debt towards maximizing commercial revenues, while at the wealthiest institutions it was oriented toward maximizing financial revenues.” Universities, in other words, are becoming increasingly more like country clubs (however aspirational) with an interest in education or investment banks that run degree programs.
Read more about student and college debt in The Nation article here.
