This is grievously wrong. Like, "tides push the moon around" wrong. And it's not hard to be right - There's plenty for Jacobin to be mad about when it comes to colleges and universities (Land Grant Universities exist to colonize hostile native land and give incentive for settlers to occupy the West, for example). And in being as wrong as it is, it paints up some really weird targets ("Part of what the debt is doing is serving a disciplinary function") and misses the big, obvious problem, namely capitalism.

There's no secret here. There's no weird Reagan-fed conspiracy. There are fundamental, congressional and capitalist causes for the current state of education.

- 1976: Congress prohibits discharge of student loan debt in bankruptcy, ensuring that any debt incurred by going to college will be paid off short of "undue hardship" (which has gotten increasingly hard to establish) or death.

- 1983: US News & World Report introduce the college rankings, which make no allowances whatsoever for value or outcomes. Three generations of college students grow up under a metric that literally argues that money is no object.

- 1987: Alan Greenspan becomes chairman of the Federal Reserve, introducing nineteen years of easy money policy. Loans become preposterously cheap and a massive wave of campus building ensues. NOTE THAT THIS DOES NOT INVOLVE ACQUISITION: Universities, across the board, decreases their land from the 1860s to the modern era as a way to subsidize tuition. There is not a university out there, other than Stanford, that isn't a bizarre swiss-cheesed matrix of shot-full-of-holes plots.

- 1992: Congress introduces the FAFSA, streamlining and broadening the available debt to students. It becomes much easier to get into debt and just as impossible to get out of it.

- 1993 Congress introduces the Federal Direct Student Loan Program, allowing direct loans from the government to students. These loans are guaranteed (the government will get its money) AND they can be sent to collections upon default (students can be made to pay twice).

I attended college in two decades across 30 years. The whole idea of college as "exploitive" is true within the realm of diploma mills but across public and traditional universities and colleges it has a lot more to do with the fact that "college" has been marketed like summer camp since Animal House came out. I mean look - I filled out the first FAFSA. I went "wow, I don't like these rates" but I also got to go "and also I don't need them." As a white male I was able to pay for college with credit cards and inheritance mostly and then retest and get a frickin' stipend so I totally lucked out.

But not entirely: only 40% of public university students pay full price. The real money-maker for colleges and universities is foreign students, who always pay full price. Hey what's been going on with them:

_______________________

That article uses the phrase "Fordist" four times. I had to look it up. It appears as if Jacobin Magazine is bent out of shape about education for the proletariat which is a little weird for a bunch of socialists. But then, picking on the lazy river is a decidedly 2004 take. Trust me, I was there, designing colleges with lazy rivers.

And again, this data is out there and available. Jeff Selingo has made like three books out of it. There's no shortage of grad students writing angry academic screeds about the evils of academia. It's been frickin' 10 years since NY Law prevailed against its students.

What changes is, first, who the institution is understood to serve. In other countries, institutions are thought of as having this mandate to serve local students, to serve students who are seeking different kinds of education.

And in the US, competitive institutions have to sing for their supper. Selingo actually suggested examining the endowment of any university you were thinking of attending because the health of their investment portfolio determines how many students have to pay their way and how hard that university has to hustle for tuition (the investor's benchmark is Yale, which grew from $1.3b to $42b under 20 years of David Swenson - 54% of Yale students receive need-based grants). They are as huge and expensive as they are because they remain the premier institutions worldwide; an American degree may be no better than an Estonian one but it commands vastly more cache and prestige for those international families that are primarily concerned with being impressive. But again, this is a weird take for a Swarthmore grad. My mother's a Swarthmore grad, I dated a Swarthmore grad - it's for people who want to pay as if they were at Harvard but face a job market as if they went to the Art Institute.

The big news with US Colleges and Universities is they're eating shit. GenZ has taken an appraisal of the value proposition and noped out. Friend's daughter just got into a highly competitive program - they get 200 applicants and have room for 15 students. It's at a community college, they graduate dental assistants, and your $20k of education gets you a starting salary of around $85k a year. Meanwhile the midwifery program just lost 1 of 8 graduates (at $60k a year) because that student decided she'd never make her money back. She ain't wrong. I think it's 50/50 they teach out that program next year.

The difficulty colleges and universities face is that they've had 40 years under the same model as medicine - money is no object, anything to save a life. But for the past ten, the medicine has been ineffective so students are skipping their insulin. It's going to collapse. It's overdue. But none of it is malevolence, just end-stage capitalism.