"The 'Caste System' That Is Now Higher Education in the United States"

"The seminal moment for Mettler was Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. Gone were the days when a Republican president might utter the line 'No qualified student who wants to go to college should be barred by lack of money,' as Richard Nixon did in 1970. Emboldened by a decisive victory, Reagan slashed student aid in his very first budget, and so began the great slide that Mettler chronicles in wonkish detail. Pell grants for lower-­income students didn’t keep pace with the inexorable climb in tuition, putting college out of reach of many, and private lenders elbowed their way into an ever-more-­central role in the student-loan business.

"Congress, meanwhile, would occasionally hold hearings to allow elected ­officials to wring their hands over the growing scandal in for-profit higher education, but like any multibillion industry, its leading proponents answered by throwing around money in Washington. The Apollo Group (the University of Phoenix), for instance, made $11 million in political donations in 2007 and 2008, Mettler reports—about double the campaign contributions of Goldman Sachs, Time Warner and Walmart that election cycle. In her telling, John Boehner is speaker of the House largely because the for-profit colleges and private student-loan bankers gave so generously to his leadership PAC during his years as chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

"Things have improved under Obama, Mettler reports, but there’s only so much even someone who campaigned on reforming higher education can do with a polarized Congress where the financial power of the for-profit educational institutions has neutralized even some Democrats."

Gary Rivlin in The New York Times reviews Suzanne Mettler's Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream.


Thomas Frank in Salon chimes in on similar issues.