High winds intersecting with historic drought levels are contributing to the dangerous conditions that sparked the multiple fires raging in the Los Angeles area. Dr. Helen Holmlund, an assistant professor of biology at Pepperdine University, joins CBS News with more on the extreme conditions.
Related link:
Viral Video Shows Franklin Fire Raging Outside Pepperdine University Library Doors (Weather Channel)
Thinking about climate change and international study (Bryan Alexander)
Social philosopher Herbert Spencer
was wrong in many respects when he coined the term survival of the fittest to discuss human behavior and Victorian social policies. But
social scientists would not be wrong today in comparing humans to other organisms, or to understanding (but not necessarily agreeing with) Spencer's application of survival of the fittest, especially as the guardrails of government and religion are weakened.
Humans may appear sophisticated in some ways, but we are animals, nevertheless. Many of the laws of human behavior are consistent with the laws of nature, despite commonly held beliefs about human civilization that seemingly make us different. Yet like other animals, humans are prone to disease and vulnerable to the environment. We can adapt to change, and survive using a variety of means which may comport to our values or cause cognitive dissonance. Humans imitate, innovate, manipulate, connive, and steal. Non-human organisms, including viruses, bacteria, fungi, and more complex beings, like insects and rodents, can also adapt, and have so for millions of years, much longer than we have. We live in an ecosystem, and in communities. When other organisms thrive or die, it affects us.
This new social reality (or a return to older social realities) should become more apparent in the coming years as humans across the globe deal with a number of existential issues, including war, famine, and disease--and the human-induced climate change that will pour fuel on these issues. Not only must we reexamine Herbert Spencer, we must also reexamine Thomas Malthus and determine what aspects of his theories on population may be coming back to life, and what aspects may not be as relevant.
Related links:
The US Working-Class Depression: "Let's all pretend we couldn't see it coming."Can US higher education do much to reduce climate change, either as a leader or as a teacher? The answer so far is no. That's not to say that there aren't universities (like Rutgers) doing outstanding climate change research or students concerned about the planet's future. There are. But that research and resistance is outweighed by those who control higher education, trustees and endowment managers, and their financial interests.
While devastating occurrences like Hurricane Helene (and possibly Hurricane Milton) serve as high-rated entertainment, news coverage also makes the stakes seemingly more visible to those who are not directly affected.
For many, hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, and heat waves are quickly forgotten or remembered merely as single acts of god or seasonal anomalies, not as ongoing acts of greedy rich men. And melting icebergs and disappearing islands are something most Americans don't see, at least firsthand. Generations of data and information are ignored by those who are poorly educated and those who claim to be educated, but uneducated morally.
Predictions of more global conflicts and an estimated 1.2 billion climate chaos refugees are barely mentioned in the news, but they are looming.
Related links:
Thinking about climate change and international study (Bryan Alexander)The Era We Are In
We are living in a
neoliberal/libertarian era filled with technological change, emotional and behavioral change, and social change. An era resulting in alienation (disconnection/isolation) for the working
class and anomie (lawlessness) among elites and those who serve them. We are simultaneously moving forward with technology and backward with human values and principles. Elites are reestablishing a more brutal world, hearkening back to previous centuries--a world the Higher Education Inquirer has been observing and documenting since 2016. No wonder folks of the working class and middle class are anxious.
Manufactured College Mania
For years, authorities such as the New York Federal Reserve expressed the notion (or perhaps myth) that higher education was an imperative for young folks. They said that the wealth premium for college graduates was a million dollars over the course of a lifetime--ignoring the fact that a large percentage of people who started college never graduated--and that tens of millions of consumers and their families were drowning in student loan debt.
2U, Guild Education, and a number of online robocolleges reflected the neoliberal promise of higher education and
online technology to improve social mobility. The mainstream media were largely complicit with these higher ed schemes.
2U brought advanced degrees and certificates to the masses, using brand names such as Harvard, MIT, Yale, USC, University of North Carolina, and the University of Texas to promote the expensive credentials that did not work for many consumers.
Guild
Education brought educational opportunities to folks at Walmart, Target, Macy's and other Fortune 500 companies who would be replacing their workers with robotics, AI, and other technologies. But the educational opportunities were for credentials from subprime online schools like Purdue University Global. Few workers took the bait.
As 2U files for bankruptcy, it leaves a number of debt holders holding the bag, including more than $500M to Wilmington Trust, and $30M to other vendors and clients, including Guild Education, and a number of elite universities. Guild Education is still alive, but like 2U, has had to fire a quarter of its workers, even downsizing its name to Guild, as investor money dries up. It continues to spend money on its image, as a Team USA sponsor.
The online robocolleges (including Liberty University, Grand Canyon University, University of Phoenix, Purdue University Global, and University of Arizona Global) brought adult education and hope to the masses, especially those who were underemployed. In many cases, it was false hope, as they also brought insurmountable student debt to American consumers. Billions and billions in debt that cannot be repaid, now considered toxic assets to the US government.
Along the way there have been important detractors in popular culture, especially on the right. Conservative radio celebrity Dave Ramsey, railed against irresponsible folks carrying lots of debt, including student loan debt. He was not wrong, but he did not implicate those who preyed on student consumers. On the left, the Debt Collective also railed against student loan debt, long before the right, but they were often ignored or marginalized.
Adapting to a Brutal System
The system works for elites and some of those who serve them, but not for others, even some of the middle class. Good jobs once at the end of the education pipeline have been replaced by 12-hour shifts, 60 hour work weeks, bullsh*t jobs, and gig work.
Working-class
Americans are living shorter lives, lives in some cases made worse not so much by lack of education, but by
the destruction of union jobs, and by social media, and other intended and unintended
consequences of technology and neoliberalism. Millions of folks, working class and some middle class, who have invested in higher education and have overwhelming debt and fading job prospects, feel like they have been lied to.
We also have lives made more sedentary and solitary by technology. Lives made more hectic and less tolerable. Inequality making lives too easy for those with privilege and lives too difficult for the working class to manage. Lives managed by having fewer relationships and fewer children. Many smartly choosing not to bring children into this new world. All of this manufactured by technology and human greed.
The College Dream is Over...for the Working Class
There are two competing messages about higher education: the first that college brings opportunity and wealth and the second, that higher education may bring debt and misery. The truth is, these different messages are meant for two groups: pushing brand name schools and student loans for the most ambitious middle class/working class and a lesser form of education for the struggling working class.
In 2020, Gary Roth said that the college dream was over. Yet the socially manufactured college mania continues, flooding the internet with ads for college and college loans, as social realities point to a future with fewer good and meaningful jobs even for those with degrees. Higher education will continue to work for some, but should every consumer, especially among the struggling working class, believe the message is for them?
Related links:
More than half of college grads are stuck in jobs that don't require degrees (msn.com)
AI-ROBOT CAPITALISTS WILL DESTROY THE HUMAN ECONOMY (Randall Collins)
Guild Education: Enablers of Anti-Union Corporations and Subprime College Programs
College Mania!: An Open Letter to the NY Fed (2019)
"Let's all pretend we couldn't see it coming": The US Working-Class Depression (2020)
The "disrupters" (21st century robber barons) have enabled an alienating and anomic system that is highly dysfunctional for most of the planet, using "algorithms of oppression." And this cannot be solved with data alchemy, marketing, and other forms of sophistry.
Put down your iPhone for a minute and ponder these rhetorical questions:
Warm Koolaid (2016) signified corporate America's use of myths and distractions to sedate the masses.
Who will hear the warnings and do something constructive for our future? Or is this Covid crisis another opportunity for the rich to cash in on the tragedy?
"An economy based on mass deception, exploitation, degradation and oppression, violence, war, and massive environmental destruction...is unsustainable."
In 2013, Futurist Bryan Alexander aptly talked about peak college enrollment in the United States. And over the last decade or so, higher education enrollment has declined in almost every state. Now at least 18 US states have experienced enrollment drops greater than 20 percent--and five more are close to that threshold.
People can watch the College Meltdown in real time at thelayoff.com.
Enrollment declines are the result of several interrelated economic and demographic shifts. Reduced populations of college age people, economic distress, growing inequality, and migration are some of the interacting factors. College is expensive and time consuming for working folks.
While programs like College Promise can help with shoring up community college enrollment, they cannot make up for deep social and economic problems. Online learning has made school more convenient, but the quality and value of several of America's robocolleges (colleges largely free of full-time instructors) is often substandard.
For many working-class families, college is no longer perceived as the golden ticket to upward social mobility. And a growing educated underclass, based on their own personal experiences with underemployment and student loan debt, are skeptical about the value of higher education for their children--if they choose to have children. Many are not.
Without significant change, we estimate that the 2026-27 enrollment cliff is likely to put almost every US state above a 25 percent decline over the last 15 years. With another economic meltdown, the numbers could get worse without major reform--smart social reform--not reform that lines the pockets of the rich and powerful.
Though consumer demand for college has declined significantly, college costs have not. Increasing federal funding, though, especially to subprime robocolleges like Purdue University Global, Liberty University, University of Phoenix, and University of Arizona Global Campus may not lead to lower college prices, better quality curriculum, or better jobs at the end of the pipeline.
In order to streamline the Higher Education Inquirer, we have removed the HEI archive from the right panel of the blog; information that could only be seen in the non-mobile format.
The HEI archive has included a list of important books and other sources, articles on academic labor, worker movements, and labor actions, student loan debt, debt forgiveness, borrower defense to repayment and student loan asset-backed securities, robocolleges, online program managers, lead generators, and the edtech meltdown, enrollment trends at for-profit colleges, community colleges, and small public and private universities, layoffs and closings of public and private institutions, consumer awareness and organizational transparency and accountability, neoliberalism, neo-conservativism, neo-fascism and structural racism in higher education, and strategic corporate research.
HEI Resources.JPG)
2025 promises to be a disruptive year in higher education and society, not just in DC but across the US. While some now can see two demographic downturns, worsening climate conditions, and a Department of Education in transition, there are other less predictable and lesser-known trends and developments that we hope to cover at the Higher Education Inquirer.
The Trump Economy
Folks are expecting a booming economy in 2025. Crypto and AI mania, along with tax cuts and deregulation, mean that corporate profits should be enormous. The Roaring 2020s will be historic for the US, just as the 1920s were, with little time and thought spent on long-range issues such as climate change and environmental destruction, economic inequality, or the potential for an economic crash.
A Pyramid, Two Cliffs, a Wall and a Door
HEI has been reporting about enrollment declines since 2016. Smaller numbers of younger people and large numbers of elderly Baby Boomers and their health and disability concerns spell trouble ahead for states who may not consider higher education a priority. We'll have to see how Republican promises for mass deportations turn out, but just the threats to do so could be chaotic. There will also be controversies over the Trump/Musk plan to increase the number of H1B visas.
The Shakeup at ED
With Linda McMahon at the helm of the Department of Education, we should expect more deregulation, more cuts, and less student loan debt relief. Mike Rounds has introduced a Senate Bill to close ED, but the Bill does not appear likely to pass. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts may take a hit. However, online K12 education, robocolleges, and surviving online program managers could thrive in the short run.
Student Loan Debt
Student loan debt is expected to rise again in 2025. After a brief respite from 2020 to late 2024, and some receiving debt forgiveness, untold millions of borrowers will be expected to make payments that they may not be able to afford. How this problem affects an otherwise booming economy has not been receiving much media attention.
Policies Against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
This semester at highly selective institutions, Black first-year student enrollment dropped by 16.9 percent. At MIT, the percentage of Black students decreased from 15 percent to 5 percent. At Harvard Law School, the number of Black law students has been cut by more than half. Florida, Texas, Alabama, Iowa and Utah have banned diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices at public universities. Idaho, Indiana and Kansas have prohibited colleges from requiring diversity statements in hiring and admissions. The resistance so far has been limited.
Failing Schools and Strategic Partnerships
People should expect more colleges to fail in the coming months and years, with the possibility that the number of closures could accelerate. Small religious schools are particularly vulnerable. Colleges may further privatize their operations to save money and make money in an increasingly competitive market.
Campus Protests and Mass Surveillance
Protests may be limited out of fear of persecution, even if there are a number of legitimate issues to protest, to include human induced climate change, genocide in Palestine, mass deportations, and the resurgence of white supremacy. Things could change if conditions are so extreme that a critical mass is willing to sacrifice. Other issues, such as the growing class war, could bubble up. But mass surveillance and stricter campus policies have been emplaced at elite and name brand schools to reduce the odds of conflict and disruption.
The Legitimization of Robocollege Credentials
Online higher education has become mainstream despite questions of its efficacy. Billions of dollars will be spent on ads for robocolleges. Religious robocolleges like Liberty University and Grand Canyon University should continue to grow and more traditional religious schools continue to shrink. University of Southern Hampshire, Purdue Global and Arizona Global will continue to enroll folks with limited federal oversight. Adult students at this point are still willing to take on debt, especially if it leads to job promotions where an advanced credential is needed.
Apollo Global Management is still working to unload the University of Phoenix. The sale of the school to the Idaho Board of Education or some other state organization remains in question.
AI and Cheating
AI will continue to affect society, promising to add more jobs and threatening to take others. One less visible way AI affects society is in academic cheating. As long as there have been grades and competition, students have cheated. But now it's become an industry. Even the concept of academic dishonesty has changed over the years. One could argue that cheating has been normalized, as Derek Newton of the Cheat Sheet has chronicled. Academic research can also be mass produced with AI.
Under the Radar
A number of schools, companies, and related organizations have flown under the radar, but that could change. This includes Maximus and other Student Loan Servicers, Guild Education, EducationDynamics, South University, Ambow Education, National American University, Perdoceo, Devry University, and Adtalem.
Related links:
The Roaring 2020s and America's Move to the Right Dozens of Religious Schools Under Department of Education Heightened Cash MonitoringThe US Working-Class Depression: "Let's all pretend we couldn't see it coming."
Capital One and Discover Financial Services have publicly announced plans to merge. The deal worth a reported $35B would give this new entity greater power, competing (or colluding) on a higher level with JP Morgan Chase, Visa, and Mastercard.
For working people who know anything about finance and debt, and have debt themselves, this should be frightening. Together, both banks hold about 400 million credit cards.
Capital One and Discover are both banks and high-interest credit card lenders. That means they are issued cheap money from the US Federal Reserve and lend it to naive and desperate consumers.
Discover student loans are used by college students who have used up their Pell Grants and federal loans and are working (and borrowing) to graduate or extend their education. The interest rates can exceed 12 percent.
Capital One does not have student loans, but college students use credit cards from both of these companies to make their way through school, paying the price later.
While there may be regulatory challenges for the Capital One-Discover deal, it's not likely that the merger, or any other financial consolidation, will be prevented--no matter how onerous it is to consumers.
Related links:
"Let's all pretend we couldn't see it coming" (The US Working-Class Depression)[Editor's Note: What we saw today at the US Supreme Court--with the end of affirmative action in college enrollment--is horrible but not shocking. The History of Higher Education in the US over the last four centuries is worse than horrible--from a People's perspective. In many cases it has been horrifying. Some of it has been documented. Much of it has not. No one has documented the full-length of the terrain, the voyage that got us here, or to what may lie ahead. Looking in the mirror, and at the injustice, what do you see?]
A People's History of US Higher Education is sorely needed, not as a purely academic work to gather dust on shelves, or as internet click bait, but as a way to assess how our nation moves forward as a democracy--or as something less. To make history, it's helpful to know (real) history: the history of working-class (and middle-class) struggles.
The college and university industry faces enormous challenges in the coming years, and an elitist perspective that is taught in higher education perpetuates this societal mess: one of monumental (and widely acceptable) selfishness and greed, increasing inequality (see graph below) and reduced social mobility, decreasing life expectancy, lack of transparency and accountability followed by trillions in government bailouts to the rich, and profound environmental destruction.
A Sketch of the Current Terrain
At the front end of the higher ed pipeline, the US is not producing enough domestic students with the resources or skills to succeed in college and beyond. Much of this is related to "savage inequalities" in the K-12 system (and throughout society) that have never been remedied. And in 2026 we expect an enrollment cliff to occur, a ripple effect of the 2008 Great Recession.
Community colleges and second-tier state universities--once considered the backbone
of increasing democracy and social mobility, have faced declining revenues, lower enrollment, and public defunding for more than a decade.
Adjuncts have become the "new faculty majority"--a trend moving that way for several decades--with little resistance. Labor has had a few recent victories at elite schools, but it remains to be seen how strong this movement will become and whether it will spread to lower rung institutions.
Drug and alcohol abuse, sexual coercion and assault, bullying, and other forms of violence and brutality are long-standing parts of the US higher ed landscape that have not been fully dealt with.
Millions of folks are learning exclusively online. Subprime robocolleges (like the University of Phoenix, Purdue University Global, and University of Arizona Global Campus) and Online Program Managers (OPMs) have replaced traditional universities with little information about their value or effectiveness. Those schools flood the internet with targeted ads.
White supremacy and anti-intellectualism have regained popularity, with the higher education policies of Ron DeSantis in Florida, Greg Abbott in Texas, and Sarah Huckabee-Sanders in Arkansas. The Supreme Court has also spoken recently--ending affirmative action for people of color. Legacies and other meritless preferences for the more rich and powerful remain.
Mergers, acquisitions, and campus closings are commonplace as schools compete for a smaller number of students and an even smaller number that can pay the full amount for tuition, room and board, fees, and living expenses.
Elite universities are financial and industrial centers, scooping up (and stealing) land, investing billions overseas and paying few taxes, and hiring foreign workers instead of Americans.
At the end of the pipeline, US higher education may be educating the world's elites, but higher ed and the larger society are not producing enough skilled workers/good jobs for Americans. There is a growing educated underclass, people who are working but are not working in areas that they had hoped for. There are many bullsh*t jobs out there. And many gig jobs with no benefits. And there are jobs that require long hours and difficult conditions, forcing people to choose between the personal and professional. Some folks are doubling down for career advancement, borrowing (sometimes unwisely) for graduate school.
Student loan debt makes college graduates captive to the corporations who are willing to hire them--and subject to dismissal whenever they are no longer helping them make a profit. Even at non-profits this is the case. Crushing debt results in people who decide (logically) not to marry, not to have children--at the expense of being labeled as criminals and deviants. The Republican Supreme Court will soon weigh in on the subject and likely determine that debt relief would not be fair to others--presumably the wealthy and powerful that the Justices represent.
Let's be clear. Higher education in the United States has always reflected and reinforced a larger (sick) society and its ills. Its beginnings and much of
its history are deeply rooted in white supremacy, patriarchy, and
classism-- through land theft, genocide, worker oppression, and exclusion.
There have been many excellent critical accounts of higher education over the last century, from Upton Sinclair's The Goosestep (1923) to Craig Steven Wilder's Ebony and Ivy (2013) to Gary Roth's The Educated Underclass (2019). Recent books have also examined elite universities, state universities, and for-profit colleges and their predatory practices. But few if any assess the dark landscape from start to finish.
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A Sketch of Where the US Has Been
In the 1600s and 1700s, elite eastern schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, and Georgetown were constructed on stolen land. The leaders of the exclusive white male schools held people captive in order to keep the schools running. All the students were white men or people who had to assimilate into the world of white supremacy. The schools also taught religious ideologies to rationalize their crimes against humanity. What was it like for an indigenous person, an enslaved person, or a servant at one of these schools? How brutal was college life in those times?
Government intervention was essential to increasing opportunity. After the Civil War, Historically Black Colleges and Universities enabled some African Americans to get a higher education. State universities and teacher's colleges also emerged with the promise of educating and empowering more citizens. And even then, land for state universities came from land theft of indigenous nations. Financial and industrial robber barons (men who stole wholesale from workers and their families), subsidized and controlled elite higher private higher education. These men included Leland Stanford, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie.
Government funding through the post-World War II GI Bill increased enrollment (but disproportionate opportunity for white men) during the late 1940s and 1950s. The 1960s reflected a time of rebellion, greater access, and a movement toward equality. The Black Panthers, for example, challenged white supremacy at Merritt College and San Francisco State. But those days seem to be from a bygone era--a moment of opportunity lost. We do have some accounts of students and teachers, but is there one place we can find what life was like in junior colleges and lesser known state universities?
Were the 1960s an anomaly? In 2023, it certainly appears so. For those activists who remember those times well enough, and remember the progress, it may be disheartening. Many citizens today are too young or not as well informed. Over the decades, even more have been disinformed--lied to--by elitist revisions of history.
Battling the Business of Higher Education
Since the 1980s, US higher education has increasingly reflected and reinforced a nation of privatization, government austerity and lack of oversight, and social class exclusion. Elite credentials are used to discriminate in career fields (like law) where there is an oversupply; other careers (like nursing) are also hamstrung by hyper-credentialism--creating artificial shortages.
Progressive organizations have been largely ineffective in battling strengthening corporate forces on campus. The Fed and other organizations continue to sell the idea of more higher education for all, as millions face a lifetime of debt peonage. There have been some heroes on the People's side, but they have been largely ignored by the mainstream media--which largely writes from an elitist perspective.
We are now more than four decades into this neoliberal era. Higher education has changed, yet it still reflects much of what is wrong with America. Working class folks, and even many middle-class consumers are increasingly wary of higher education--whether it's worth buying into. In some cases, edtech has reduced our Quality of Life. Is there anyone with enough energy, resources, and courage to document it all? And can it be done from the perspective of the People--for the good of the People?
Related links:
HEI Resources
US Higher Education and the Intellectualization of White Supremacy
One Fascism or Two?: The Reemergence of "Fascism(s)" in US Higher Education
The Tragedy of Human Capital Theory in Higher Education (Glen McGhee)
The College Dream is Over (Gary Roth)
I Went on Strike to Cancel My Student Debt and Won. Every Debtor Deserves the Same. (Ann Bowers)
(Updated November 28, 2022)
While for-profit colleges, community colleges, and small private schools received the most attention in the first iteration of the College Meltdown, regional public universities (and a few flagship schools) have also experienced financial challenges, reorganizations, and mergers, enrollment losses, layoffs and resignations, off-campus learning site closings and campus dorm closings, lower graduation rates, and the necessity to lower admissions standards. They are not facing these downturns, though, without a fight.
State universities, for example, are attempting to maintain or boost their enrollment through marketing and advertising--sometimes with the assistance of helpful, yet sometimes questionable online program managers (OPMs) like 2U and Academic Partnerships and lead generators such as EducationDynamics.
Academic Partnerships claims to serve 50 university clients. HEI has identified 25 of them.
Google ads also follow consumers across the Web, with links to enrollment pages. And enrollment pages include cookies to learn about those who click onto the enrollment pages. Schools share the information that consumers provide with Google Analytics and Chartbeat.
Advanced marketing will not improve institutional quality directly but it may raise awareness of these state schools to targeted audiences. Whether this becomes predatory may be an issue worth examining.
In order to stay competitive, state universities have to have a strong online presence and spend an inordinate amount of money on marketing and advertising. Ohio University and other schools now offer programs that are 100 percent online.
Despite marketing and enrollment appeals like this, we believe the financial situation could worsen at non-flagship state universities when austerity is reemployed--something likely to happen during the next economic downturn.
While state flagship universities have multiple revenue streams, they are often unaffordable for working families. Elite state universities, also known as the Public Ivies, have increasingly shut out state residents--in favor of people from out of state and outside the US--who are willing to pay more in tuition.
Aaron Klein at the Brookings Institution calls this significant (and dysfunctional) out-of-state enrollment pattern as The Great Student Swap.
State Universities with more than 4000 foreign students include UC San Diego, University of Illinois, UC Irvine, University of Washington, Arizona State University, Purdue University, Ohio State University, Michigan State University, and UC Berkeley.
People fortunate enough to attend large state universities as undergrads may feel alienated by large and impersonal classrooms led by graduate assistants and other adjuncts. There are also significant and often under-addressed social problems related to larger universities, including hunger, substance abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, hazing and sexual assault.
Online only versions of flagship schools may not be of the same quality as their brick and mortar counterparts. Purdue University Global and University of Arizona Global Campus, for example, are open enrollment schools for working adults which produce questionable student outcomes. These "robocollege" schools hire few full-time instructors and often spend a great deal of their resources on marketing and advertising.
EducationDynamics is a lead generator for "robocolleges" such as Purdue University Global and University of Arizona, Global Campus.
Purdue University Global has used questionable marketing and advertising.
The Higher Education Inquirer has already noticed the following schools in the Summer and Fall 2022 that received media scrutiny for lower enrollment, financial problems, or labor issues:
