Raw Deals in Higher Education

In a 2022 interview with Gary Stocker of College Vialbility App, we discussed the idea of bad deals in higher education. And as the College Meltdown advances, we expect many more bad deals to occur, both for institutions and consumers.   

Already, in early 2025, we have seen documentation of the collapse of St. Augustine University, a 146-year old HBCU in North Carolina. We expect many more collapses and closures like this, and difficult mergers, to occur in the coming years. The immense greed we saw in for-profit higher education a decade ago we'll see in public and non-profit private education.

HEI will attempt to document these events not merely as news, but as part of a larger pattern of criminality in US higher education, not just at the institutional level, but at the state and federal level, and with predatory banks and other investors who are working on these deals behind the scenes.  We also plan to explain how this predatory behavior damages communities. Communities with people.  

 

Reinventing Solidarity (New Labor Forum)

It's been a new day in the United Auto Workers since the election of Shawn Fain as president in 2023, with the union carrying out an aggressive organizing and political program that has established the UAW as a major presence in American life. New Labor Forum's Micah Uetricht spoke to Jonah Furman, a top aide to Fain, about the union's strategy, its various wins and losses among nonunion auto manufacturers in the American South, its relationship to the Democratic Party under President Joe Biden, and the impact of a Donald Trump presidency on the union and labor as a whole.

Reinventing Solidarity is a podcast produced by New Labor Forum (NLF), a national labor journal of the Murphy Institute at CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. The podcast features scholars, activists, and artists on the front lines of movements for social and economic justice, and asks essential questions about race, class, gender, and the role of organized labor and social justice organizations in creating a radically different world—one with solidarity, equality, and sustainability at its heart. Reinventing Solidary is hosted by NLF Editor-at-Large Micah Uetricht with co-hosts Kafui Attoh, Ruth Milkman, Samir Sonti, and Sean Sweeney.