The Prestige of Partnership — and the Problem of Unclear Payoff

For more than a decade, 2U has presented itself as a premier intermediary between elite universities and the expanding global audience for online higher education. The company’s roster of partners includes some of the most recognizable names in academia, as well as a growing list of selective, mid-tier, and international institutions. On its public site, 2U highlights collaborations with universities such as Yale, Northwestern, North Carolina–Chapel Hill, Pepperdine, Maryville, and the University of Surrey. The message is unmistakable: if universities of this caliber trust 2U with their online programs, then students should as well.

These partnerships have fueled the impression that 2U-supported programs deliver high-quality, academically rigorous education backed by prestigious institutional brands. For many learners, especially working adults, international students, and career switchers, such arrangements offer a seemingly ideal blend: the name of an elite university, the flexibility of online learning, and access to fields where credentials are increasingly necessary.

Yet beneath the glossy presentation and impressive partner list, fundamental questions remain unanswered. Despite working with many of the world’s most respected institutions, 2U still does not provide sufficient data to determine the true value of the programs it supports. Even as universities lend their names and curricula, the real-world outcomes of students enrolled in 2U-powered programs remain opaque.

The core difficulty lies in the mismatch between the prestige of the institution and the limited transparency around program performance. For years, 2U issued annual “Transparency and Outcomes” reports designed to demonstrate impact and accountability across its portfolio. But the most recent report available to the public is from 2023. In the fast-moving world of online education—where competition has intensified, student expectations have shifted, and 2U itself has undergone significant financial turmoil—data that old is no longer a reliable indicator of the current state of programs.

This lack of updated reporting is especially notable given 2U’s recent trajectory. After years of rising debt and declining investor confidence, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2024. Although it has since emerged under new ownership with a streamlined balance sheet, questions persist about its future direction, the stability of its services, and whether its partnerships will endure in their current form. For universities, outsourcing key functions such as marketing, recruitment, student support, and technological infrastructure may expand enrollment and revenue, but it also raises concerns about the consistency and quality of the student experience—areas that become even more vulnerable when the partner company faces financial strain.

This structural opacity makes it nearly impossible for students, policymakers, or even universities themselves to determine whether these programs provide a meaningful return on investment. A degree or certificate bearing the name of Yale or Pepperdine may confer a level of brand recognition, but what does it signify in practice? Are students completing programs at comparable rates to on-campus peers? Are they finding jobs in their fields? Are they earning more than they would have without the credential? Are they satisfied with the instruction, advising, and support they receive? Without rigorous, current, and independently verified data, these remain open—and critical—questions.

The challenge is not solely financial or operational. It is also conceptual. The surge in online learning has created a vast gray zone between institutional brand and educational substance. While universities retain control over academic content, the underlying delivery mechanisms are increasingly intermediated by firms like 2U. Students may assume that an online master’s degree from a prestigious university carries the same weight as an on-campus equivalent, but the learning environments, student services, and community-building opportunities differ dramatically. In many cases, the online experience is shaped more by 2U’s systems and staff than by the university itself.

For prospective students, the implication is clear: a well-known university name is not a guarantee of value. For universities, the stakes are equally high. Partnering with a third-party company can expand their reach, but it can also blur the boundaries of academic identity and accountability. And for anyone tracking the direction of higher education more broadly, 2U’s situation serves as a cautionary example of how prestige can mask the absence of meaningful transparency—and how quickly the economics of online learning can shift.

Until 2U produces up-to-date, independently verifiable data about program quality and student outcomes, the value of its offerings remains an open question. The partnerships look impressive. The marketing is compelling. But the evidence is missing.

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Sources

2U Partners Page
2U 2023 Transparency and Outcomes Report
2U announcements on new degree partnerships and expansions
Washington Post coverage of 2U’s 2024 bankruptcy filing
PR Newswire statements on 2U’s financial restructuring and emergence as a private company

College Mania: The Spell is (Almost) Broken, But Hyper-Credentialism Remains

For decades, America was gripped by college mania, a culturally and structurally manufactured frenzy that elevated higher education to near-mythical importance. Students, families, and society were swept up in the belief that a college degree guaranteed status, financial security, and social validation. This was no mere aspiration; it was a fevered obsession, fueled by marketing, rankings, policy incentives, and social pressure. Today, the spell is breaking, but the demand for credentials persists.

Historically, the term “college mania” dates to the 19th century, when historian Frederick Rudolph used it to describe the fervent founding of colleges in the United States, driven by religious zeal and civic ambition. Over time, the mania evolved. Postwar expansion of higher education through the GI Bill normalized college attendance as a societal expectation. Rankings, elite admissions, and media coverage transformed selective schools into symbols of prestige. By the early 2000s, for-profit colleges exploited the frenzy, aggressively marketing to students while federal and state policy incentivized enrollment growth over meaningful outcomes.

The early 2010s revealed the fragility of this system in what I have described as the College Meltdown: structural dysfunction, declining returns on investment, predatory practices, and neoliberal policy failures exposed the weaknesses behind the hype. At its height, college mania spun students and families into a cycle of aspiration, anxiety, and debt.

Now, even students at the most elite institutions are disengaging. Many do not attend classes, treating lectures as optional, prioritizing networking, internships, or social signaling over actual learning. This demonstrates that the spell of college mania is unraveling: prestige alone no longer guarantees engagement or meaningful educational outcomes. Families are questioning the value of expensive degrees, underemployment is rising, and alternative pathways, including vocational training, apprenticeships, and nontraditional credentials, are gaining recognition.

Yet the paradox remains: for many jobs, credentials are still required. Nursing, engineering, teaching, accounting, and countless professional roles cannot be accessed without degrees. The waning mania does not erase the need for qualifications; it simply exposes how much of the cultural obsession — the anxiety, overpaying, and overworking — was socially manufactured rather than inherently necessary for employment. Students are now forced to navigate this tension: pursuing credentials while seeking value, purpose, and meaningful learning beyond the symbol of the degree itself.

The breaking of the spell is not unique to higher education. History demonstrates that manias — economic, social, or cultural — rise and fall. College mania, once fueled by collective belief and systemic reinforcement, is now unraveling under the weight of its contradictions. Institutions must adapt by emphasizing authentic education rather than prestige, while policymakers can prioritize affordability, accountability, and outcomes. Students, in turn, may pursue paths aligned with practical skills, personal growth, and career readiness rather than chasing symbolic credentials alone.

The era of college mania may be ending, but with the spell broken comes an opportunity. Higher education can be reimagined as a system that serves public good, intellectual development, and genuine opportunity, balancing the need for credentials with the pursuit of meaningful education.

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Sources:

Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (1962).
Frank Bruni, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania (2015).
Dahn Shaulis, Higher Education Inquirer, “College Meltdown and the Manufactured Frenzy” (2011–2025).
Stanford Law Review, Private Universities in the Public Interest (2025).
Higher Education Handbook of Theory & Research, Volume 29 (2024).
Recent reporting on student engagement, class attendance, and labor-market requirements for degrees, 2023–2025.

Same Predators, New Logo: PXED — A $22 Billion Student‑Debt Gamble Investors Should Beware

Warning to Investors: Phoenix Education Partners (PXED) may present itself as a cutting‑edge solution in career-focused higher education, but it’s built on the same extractive infrastructure that powered the University of Phoenix. With nearly a million students still owing an estimated $22 billion in federal loans, backing PXED isn’t just a financial bet — it’s a moral and reputational risk.

PXED’s leadership includes powerful private-equity players: Martin H. Nesbitt (Co‑CEO of Vistria, PXED trustee, and friend of Barak Obama), Adnan Nisar (Vistria), and Theodore Kwon and Itai Wallach (Apollo Global Management). Also in the mix is Chris Lynne, PXED’s president and a former Phoenix CFO intimately familiar with UOP’s controversial enrollment and marketing strategies. These are not educational reformers — they are dealmakers aiming to extract value from a student-debt pipeline.

[Image: Power Player Marty Nesbitt]

Higher Education Inquirer’s College Meltdown Index highlights how PXED fits into a broader financialization of higher education. Rather than reforming the University of Phoenix, its backers have resurrected it under a new brand — one that continues to enroll vulnerable adult learners, harvest federal aid, and operate with considerably less public oversight. 

Whistleblowers previously documented that Phoenix pressured recruitment staff to falsify student credentials, enrolling people who wouldn’t otherwise qualify for federal aid. Courses were allegedly kept deliberately easy — not to teach, but to keep students “active” enough to trigger aid disbursements. Internal marketing also exaggerated job prospects and corporate partnerships (e.g., with Microsoft and AT&T) to entice students. 

PXED may lean on a three‑year default rate (often cited around 12–13%), but that number is deeply misleading. Many UOP students stay stuck in deferment, forbearance, or income-driven repayment, masking the real long-term risk of non-payment. This is not just a short-term liability — it’s a potentially massive, multiyear financial exposure for PXED’s backers.

There was a significant FTC settlement that canceled $141 million in student debt and refunded $50 million to some students. But the scale of harm far exceeds that payout. Untold numbers of borrowers still have unresolved Borrower Defense claims, and the reputational risk remains profound.

Beyond financial concerns, there’s a major ethical dimension. HEI’s Divestment from Predatory Education argument makes a compelling case that investing in companies like PXED — or in loan servicers that profit from student debt — is not just risky, but morally indefensible. According to HEI, institutional investors (including university endowments, pension funds, and foundations) are complicit in a system that monetizes students’ aspirations and perpetuates financial harm. 

For investors, the message is clear: Phoenix is not merely an education play — it’s a high-stakes, ethically fraught extraction machine built on a legacy of indebtedness and regulatory vulnerability.

Unless PXED commits to real transparency, independent reporting on student outcomes, and accountability mechanisms — including reparations or debt relief — it should be approached not as a social-growth story, but as a dangerous gamble.

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Sources

• HEI. “Divestment from Predatory Education Stocks: A Moral Imperative.” Higher Education Inquirer

• HEI. “The College Meltdown Index: Profiting from the Wreckage of American Higher Education.” Higher Education Inquirer

• HEI. “What Do the University of Phoenix and Risepoint Have in Common? The Answer Is a Compelling Story of Greed and Politics.” Higher Education Inquirer

• HEI. “University of Phoenix Uses ‘Sandwich Moms’ to Sell a Debt Trap.” Higher Education Inquirer

• HEI. “New Data Show Nearly a Million University of Phoenix Debtors Owe $21.6 Billion.” Higher Education

Hyper Credentialism and the Neoliberal College Meltdown (Glen McGhee and Dahn Shaulis)

In the neoliberal era, higher education has become less a public good and more a marketplace of promises. The ideology of “lifelong learning” has been weaponized into an endless treadmill of hyper-credentialism — a cycle in which students, workers, and institutions are trapped in perpetual pursuit of new degrees, certificates, and micro-badges.

From Education to Signaling

Once, a college degree was seen as a path to citizenship and critical thought. Today, it’s a market signal — and an increasingly weak one. The bachelor’s degree no longer guarantees stable employment, so the system produces ever-more credentials: master’s programs, micro-certificates, “badges,” and other digital tokens of employability.

This shift doesn’t solve economic precarity — it monetizes it. Workers internalize the blame for their own stagnating wages, believing that the next credential will finally make them “market ready.” Employers, meanwhile, use credential inflation to justify low pay and increased screening, outsourcing the costs of training onto individuals.

A Perfect Fit for Neoliberalism

Hyper-credentialism is not a side effect; it’s a feature of the neoliberal education economy. It supports four pillars of the model:

Privatization and Profit Extraction – Public funding declines while students pay more. Each new credential creates a new revenue stream for universities, online program managers (OPMs), and ed-tech corporations.

Individual Responsibility – The structural causes of unemployment or underemployment are reframed as personal failures. “You just need to upskill.”

Debt Dependency – Students and workers finance their “reskilling” through federal loans and employer-linked programs, feeding the student-debt industry and its servicers.

Market Saturation and Collapse – As more credentials flood the market, each becomes less valuable. Institutions respond by creating even more credentials, accelerating the meltdown.

The Education-Finance Complex

The rise of hyper-credentialism is inseparable from the growth of the education-finance complex — a web of universities, private lenders, servicers, and Wall Street investors.
Firms like 2U, Coursera, and Guild Education sell the illusion of “access” while extracting rents from students and institutions alike. University administrators, pressured by enrollment declines, partner with these firms to chase new markets — often by spinning up online master’s programs with poor outcomes.

The result is a debt-driven ecosystem that thrives even as public confidence collapses. The fewer good jobs there are, the more desperate people become to buy new credentials. The meltdown feeds itself.

Winners and Losers

Winners: Ed-tech executives, university administrators, debt servicers, and the politicians who promote “lifelong learning” as a substitute for wage growth or labor rights.

Losers: Students, adjunct faculty, working-class families, and the public universities hollowed out by austerity and privatization.

The rhetoric of “upskilling” and “personal growth” masks a grim reality: a transfer of wealth from individuals to financialized institutions under the guise of opportunity.

A System That Can’t Redeem Itself

As enrollment declines and public trust erodes, the industry doubles down on micro-credentials and “stackable” pathways — small fixes to a structural crisis. Each badge, each certificate, is sold as a ticket back into the middle class. Yet every new credential devalues the old, producing diminishing returns for everyone except those selling the product.

Hyper-credentialism thus becomes both the symptom and the accelerant of the college meltdown. It sustains the illusion of mobility in a collapsing system, ensuring that the blame never reaches the architects of austerity, privatization, and financialization.

Sources and Further Reading

Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution.

Giroux, Henry. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education.

Cottom, Tressie McMillan. Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy.

The Higher Education Inquirer archives on the college meltdown, OPMs, and the debt economy.

When Was Higher Education Truly a Public Good? (Glen McGhee)

Like staring at the Sun too long, that brief window in time, when higher ed was a public good, has left a permanent hole for nostalgia to leak in, becoming a massive black hole for trillions of dollars, and a blind-spot for misguided national policies and scholars alike. 

The notion that American higher education was ever a true public good is largely a myth. From the colonial colleges to the neoliberal university of today, higher education has functioned primarily as a mechanism of class reproduction and elite consolidation—with one brief, historically anomalous exception during the Cold War.

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Colonial Roots: Elite Reproduction in the New World (1636–1787)

The first American colleges—Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Princeton, and a handful of others—were founded not for the benefit of the public, but to serve narrow elite interests. Their stated missions were to train Protestant clergy and prepare the sons of wealthy white families for leadership. They operated under monopoly charters and drew funding from landowners, merchants, and slave traders.

Elihu Yale, namesake of Yale University, derived wealth from his commercial ties to the East India Company and the slave trade. Harvard’s early trustees owned enslaved people. These institutions functioned as “old boys’ clubs,” perpetuating privilege rather than promoting equality. Their educational mission was to cultivate “gentlemen fit to govern,” not citizens of a democracy.

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Private Enterprise in the Republic (1790–1860)

After independence, the number of colleges exploded—from 19 in 1790 to more than 800 by 1880—but not because of any commitment to the public good. Colleges became tools for two private interests: religious denominations seeking influence, and land speculators eager to raise property values.

Ministers often doubled as land dealers, founding small, parochial colleges to anchor towns and boost prices. State governments played a minimal role, providing funding only in times of crisis. The Supreme Court’s 1819 Dartmouth College decision enshrined institutional autonomy, shielding private colleges from state interference. Even state universities were created mainly out of interstate competition—every state needed its own to “keep up with its neighbors.”

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Gilded Age and Progressive Era: Credential Capitalism (1880–1940)

By the late 19th century, industrial capitalism had transformed higher education into a private good—something purchased for individual advancement. As family farms and small businesses disappeared, college credentials became the ticket to white-collar respectability.

Sociologist Burton Bledstein called this the “culture of professionalism.” Families invested in degrees to secure middle-class futures for their children. By the 1920s, most students attended college not to seek enlightenment, but “to get ready for a particular job.”

Elite universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton solidified their dominance through exclusive networks. C. Wright Mills later observed that America’s “power elite” circulated through these same institutions and their associated clubs. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital helps explain this continuity: elite universities convert inherited privilege into certified merit, preserving hierarchy under the guise of meritocracy.

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The Morrill Acts: Public Promise, Private Gains (1862–1890)

The Morrill Act of 1862 established land-grant colleges to promote “practical education” in agriculture and engineering. While often cited as a triumph of public-minded policy, the act’s legacy is ambivalent.

Land-grant universities were built on land expropriated from Indigenous peoples—often without compensation—and the 1890 Morrill Act entrenched segregation by mandating separate institutions for Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. Even as these colleges expanded access for white working-class men, they simultaneously reinforced racial and economic hierarchies.

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Cold War Universities: The Brief Public Good (1940–1970)

For roughly thirty years, during World War II and the Cold War, American universities functioned as genuine public goods—but only because national survival seemed to depend on them.

The GI Bill opened college to millions of veterans, stabilizing the economy and expanding the middle class. Massive federal investments in research transformed universities into engines of technological and scientific innovation. The university, for a moment, was understood as a public instrument for national progress.

Yet this golden age was marred by exclusion. Black veterans were often denied GI Bill benefits, particularly in the South, where discriminatory admissions and housing policies blocked their participation. The “military-industrial-academic complex” that emerged from wartime funding created a new elite network centered on research universities like MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley.

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Neoliberal Regression: Education as a Private Commodity (1980–Present)

After 1970, the system reverted to its long-standing norm: higher education as a private good. The Cold War’s end, the tax revolt, and the rise of neoliberal ideology dismantled the postwar consensus.

Ronald Reagan led the charge—first as California governor, cutting higher education funding by 20%, then as president, slashing federal support. He argued that tuition should replace public subsidies, casting education as an individual investment rather than a social right.

Since 1980, state funding per student has fallen sharply while tuition at public universities has tripled. Students are now treated as “customers,” and universities as corporations—complete with branding departments, executive pay packages, and relentless tuition hikes.

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The Circuit of Elite Network Capital

Today, the benefits of higher education flow through a closed circuit of power that links elite universities, corporations, government agencies, and wealthy families.

1. Elite Universities consolidate wealth and prestige through research funding, patents, and endowments.

2. Corporations recruit talent and license discoveries, feeding the same institutions that produce their executives.

3. Government and Military Agencies are staffed by alumni of elite universities, reinforcing a revolving door of privilege.

4. Elite Professions—law, medicine, finance, consulting—use degrees as gatekeeping mechanisms, driving credential inflation.

5. Wealthy Families invest in elite education as a means of preserving status across generations.

What the public receives are only residual benefits—technologies and medical innovations that remain inaccessible without money or insurance.

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Elite Network Capital, Not Public Good

The idea of higher education as a public good has always been more myth than reality. For most of American history, colleges and universities have functioned as institutions of elite reproduction, not engines of democratic uplift.

Only during the extraordinary conditions of the mid-20th century—when global war and ideological conflict made mass education a national imperative—did higher education briefly align with the public interest.

Today’s universities continue to speak the language of “public good,” but their actions reveal a different truth. They serve as factories of credentialism and as nodes in an elite network that translates privilege into prestige. What masquerades as a public good is, in practice, elite network capital—a system designed not to democratize opportunity, but to manage and legitimize inequality.

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Sources:
Labaree (2017), Bledstein (1976), Bourdieu (1984, 1986), Mills (1956), Geiger (2015), Thelin (2019), and McGhee (2025).

When Parenthood Feels Like a Trap: Regret, Trumpism, and the Educated Underclass

The recent MSN article “I Regret Having Children — It Has Stripped My Life of Meaning” is not just a private confession. It is a mirror reflecting a collapsing social order — one where parenting, education, and labor are all defined by debt, exhaustion, and disillusionment.

In today’s America, the family, the school, and the workplace no longer promise progress; they reproduce precarity. The personal regret of parents becomes a collective symptom of a society that demands self-sacrifice but offers little reciprocity.

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The Privatization of Care and the Myth of the “Good Parent”

Since the Reagan era, neoliberal ideology has reduced social problems to personal failures. Families are told to work harder, plan better, and be grateful — while the state retreats from childcare, healthcare, and education.

Parenting, once understood as a shared civic project, is now a private ordeal. The “good parent” myth demands endless self-denial while ignoring the structural forces that make family life unsustainable: stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, unaffordable education, and the erosion of community networks.

The parent who whispers, “I regret having children,” isn’t rejecting love — they are acknowledging betrayal. They were promised fulfillment through family, but abandoned by a system that commodifies care and isolates suffering.

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The Dobbs Decision and the Politics of Coerced Parenthood

The 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling — which overturned Roe v. Wade — deepened this betrayal. By stripping away the constitutional right to abortion, the Supreme Court forced millions into unwanted pregnancies under conditions of economic and emotional strain.

This was no accident of jurisprudence. It was the political offspring of neoliberal neglect and Trump-era authoritarianism — a regime that exalts “family values” while defunding the social infrastructure that makes family life possible.

Dobbs represents coerced parenthood in a nation without paid leave, affordable childcare, or universal healthcare. It is the culmination of a system that insists on reproduction but refuses responsibility — transforming bodily autonomy into a political battleground while leaving families to fend for themselves.

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Trumpism, Despair, and Manufactured Nostalgia

Trumpism feeds on the despair that neoliberalism creates. It promises to restore “traditional America” — stable jobs, strong families, obedient children — but it offers only resentment as consolation.

When exhausted parents or debt-ridden graduates look for meaning, Trumpian populism channels their frustration toward scapegoats: immigrants, educators, feminists, the poor. It converts structural despair into cultural war.

Trump’s America is a paradox: it glorifies the family while destroying the material base that sustains it. It preaches “Make America Great Again” while keeping its base desperate, indebted, and emotionally dependent on rage.

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The Rise of the Educated Underclass

Nowhere is this contradiction clearer than in the making of the educated underclass — the millions of Americans who did everything “right” but found the social contract shredded beneath them.

They earned degrees, followed career advice, and invested in the myth of meritocracy. Yet decades of wage stagnation, precarious employment, and student debt have left them economically fragile and politically disoriented.

Many are parents who believed education would secure their children’s futures. Instead, they see their own children inheriting instability — locked out of homeownership, burdened with loans, and facing a world where credentials no longer guarantee dignity.

This educated underclass, spanning teachers, social workers, adjunct professors, nurses, and mid-level professionals, represents the human fallout of the neoliberal university and the marketized economy it feeds. Their disillusionment — like parental regret — is both personal and systemic.

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Higher Education as a Debt Factory

Colleges once promised upward mobility; now they manufacture anxiety and debt. The family that sacrifices for tuition does so on faith that a degree still matters. But as corporate consolidation and automation erode stable work, that faith collapses.

Parents, particularly those from the working and lower-middle class, internalize this collapse as failure — not recognizing that the problem lies in a system that sells hope on credit. Their children, emerging into a gig economy with record debt, form the next generation of the educated underclass: credentialed, precarious, and politically volatile.

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Regret as a Rational Response

In this context, parental regret is not deviance — it is rational. It reflects the exhaustion of trying to raise children, pay loans, and sustain meaning in a society where everything, including love, has been commodified.

It reflects the psychic cost of neoliberalism’s lie: that education, work, and family can still deliver self-realization without collective solidarity or public investment.

And it warns of what happens when a nation loses faith not only in its institutions but in the very act of reproduction itself.

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Toward a Politics of Care and Repair

To break this cycle, we must confront the intertwined crises of reproduction, education, and inequality. A humane alternative would demand:

• Universal reproductive freedom — protecting the right not to bear children, and the resources to raise them with dignity.

• Tuition-free higher education and student debt relief — dismantling the educated underclass.

• Guaranteed childcare, healthcare, and paid leave — treating parenting as collective labor, not private suffering.

• Living wages and housing justice — reestablishing the economic base of real family life.

• Democratized higher education — ending the capture of universities by finance and corporate boards.

Only by restoring care as a public good — not a private burden — can we move beyond regret toward renewal.

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From Regret to Resistance

The parent who says, “I regret having children,” and the graduate who says, “My degree ruined my life,” are not failures. They are witnesses. Their grief exposes the moral bankruptcy of a system that exploits care, education, and aspiration for profit.

Trumpism thrives on that despair, offering nostalgia instead of justice. Neoliberalism rationalizes it, calling it “personal responsibility.”

But the truth is collective: meaning cannot survive where solidarity has been destroyed. The antidote to regret is not silence — it is organizing. It is rebuilding a society where care, education, and dignity are shared, not sold.

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Sources

• MSN News, “I Regret Having Children — It Has Stripped My Life of Meaning,” 2025.

• Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. ___ (2022).

• Donath, Orna. Regretting Motherhood: A Sociopolitical Analysis. North Atlantic Books, 2017.

• Fraser, Nancy. Cannibal Capitalism. Verso, 2022.

• Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos. Zone Books, 2015.

• Giroux, Henry. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Haymarket, 2014.

• Hochschild, Arlie. Strangers in Their Own Land. The New Press, 2016.

• Shaulis, Dahn. The College Meltdown (Higher Education Inquirer archives).

K-12 Virtual Education: A Broken Pipeline to College and Jobs

K12 Inc., now rebranded as Stride, is a Wall Street darling—but for students, it’s a nightmare. Critics call it “one of the worst charter schools in America,” with dropout rates soaring above 50% and graduation rates below 30%. Behind the glossy marketing and investor pitches, Stride operates as a pipeline not to opportunity, but to debt, dead-end jobs, and corporate profit.

Stride presents itself as an innovative online education platform, but the numbers tell a different story. Full-time virtual schools nationally graduate just 54.6% of students, compared to 85% in traditional public schools. K12/Stride’s virtual offerings hover around 56.3%, with blended programs faring slightly better at 80.9%. In some districts, however, the picture is grim: Kansas K12 charters reported graduation rates as low as 26.3%, while local brick-and-mortar schools achieved nearly 90%.

High student churn compounds the problem. Stride-powered schools report turnover of 50–57%, highlighting systemic disengagement and academic instability. Student-teacher ratios are extreme, sometimes exceeding 40:1, more than double the national average. Only a third of K12 schools met Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind, illustrating a chronic failure to deliver even basic accountability.

K-12 education is meant to be a pipeline—leading students into college, skilled careers, and financial stability. For students leaving Stride underprepared or without diplomas, that pipeline is broken. Many are pushed into low-wage work, forced into remedial college courses, or trapped in a credential system designed to extract debt rather than confer opportunity. In this way, Stride acts less as an educational institution and more as a conveyor belt funneling vulnerable youth into economic precarity.

Stride is backed by investors and private equity interests that profit from this dysfunction. Its glossy “Graduation Guarantee,” introduced in 2021, promises remediation for students who age out without graduating. But these measures are reactive, not systemic; they don’t address the structural incentives that prioritize profit over learning. Every public dollar flowing into Stride’s coffers is money extracted from communities, while many students exit the system with weak credentials and limited prospects.

The broader story is clear: billionaire-backed for-profit virtual schools like Stride are part of a national effort to privatize public education, monetize student debt, and commodify learning. They transform education from a public good into a profit center, leaving students and families to bear the real cost. Without accountability, oversight, and a renewed commitment to equitable public education, this pipeline—supposed to carry students toward opportunity—will continue to deliver them into debt, underemployment, and economic marginalization.

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Sources

• National Education Policy Center (2021). Virtual Schools in the U.S. nepc.colorado.edu

• Network for Public Education (2019). Are Online Charter Schools Good Options for Families? networkforpubliceducation.org

• SourceWatch. K12 Inc. sourcewatch.org

• Public Schools First NC. Online Charter Schools. publicschoolsfirstnc.org

• Education Week. 15 Months in Virtual Charter Hell. edweek.org

• Houston Chronicle (2025). Texas Expands Virtual School Enrollment Amid Accountability Concerns. houstonchronicle.com

• Stride Inc. (2021). Graduation Guarantee. investors.stridelearning.com

• Diane Ravitch Blog (2021). Teacher Reflects on Working for K12 Inc. dianeravitch.net

• Wikipedia. Stride, Inc. en.wikipedia.org

The Higher Education Inquirer: Six Hundred Thousand Views, and Still Digging

The Higher Education Inquirer has crossed another milestone, reaching more than 600,000 views over the past quarter. For a niche publication without corporate backing, this is a significant achievement. But the real measure of success is not in page views—it is in the stories that matter, the investigations that refuse to die even when the higher education establishment would rather they disappear.

Since its inception, HEI has taken the long view on the crises and contradictions shaping U.S. colleges and universities. We continue to probe the issues that mainstream media outlets often skim or ignore. These are not passing headlines; they are structural problems, many of them decades in the making, that affect millions of students, faculty, staff, and communities.

Among the stories we continue to pursue:

• Charlie Kirk and Neofascism on Campus: Tracing how right-wing movements use higher education as a recruiting ground, and how student martyrdom narratives fuel a dangerous cycle.

• Academic Labor and Adjunctification: Investigating the systemic exploitation of contingent faculty, who now make up the majority of the academic workforce.

• Higher Education and Underemployment: Examining how rising tuition, debt, and credentials collide with a labor market that cannot absorb the graduates it produces.

• EdTech, Robocolleges, and the University of Phoenix: Following the money as education technology corporations replace faculty with algorithms and marketing schemes.

• Student Loan Debt and Borrower Defense to Repayment: Tracking litigation, regulatory shifts, and the human toll of a $1.7 trillion debt system.

• U.S. Department of Education Oversight: Analyzing how federal enforcement waxes and wanes with political cycles, often leaving students exposed.

• Online Program Managers and Higher Ed Privatization: Investigating the outsourcing of core academic functions to companies driven by profit, not pedagogy.

• Edugrift and Bad Actors in Higher Education: Naming the profiteers who siphon billions from public trust.

• Medugrift and University Medicine Oligopolies: Connecting elite medical centers to systemic inequality in U.S. healthcare.

• Student Protests: Documenting student resistance to injustice on campus and beyond.

• University Endowments and Opaque Funding Sources: Pulling back the curtain on how universities build wealth while raising tuition.

• Universities and Gentrification: Exposing the displacement of working-class communities in the name of “campus expansion.”

• Ambow Education as a Potential National Security Threat: Tracking foreign-controlled for-profit education companies and their entanglements.

• Accreditation: Examining the gatekeepers of legitimacy and their failure to protect students.

• International Students: Covering the precarity of students navigating U.S. immigration and education systems.

• Student Health and Welfare: Looking at how universities fail to provide adequate physical and mental health support.

• Hypercredentialism: Interrogating the endless inflation of degrees and certificates that drain students’ time and money.

• Veritas: Pursuing truth in higher education, no matter how uncomfortable.

These are the stories that make HEI more than just a blog—they make it a watchdog. As higher education drifts deeper into corporatization and inequality, we will keep asking difficult questions, exposing contradictions, and documenting resistance.

The numbers are gratifying. But the truth is what matters.

Should Elites Get Bailed Out Again?

In 1929, when the stock market crashed, millions of Americans were plunged into unemployment, hunger, and despair. Yet the elites of Wall Street—whose reckless speculation fueled the disaster—often landed softly. By 1933, as the Great Depression deepened, nearly a quarter of the U.S. workforce was unemployed, thousands of banks had failed, and working families bore the brunt of the collapse. Ordinary people endured soup lines, Dust Bowl migration, and generational poverty. The government of Franklin D. Roosevelt eventually stepped in with reforms and safeguards like the FDIC and Glass-Steagall, but not before working-class Americans had paid the heaviest price.

Fast forward to 2008, when the global financial system once again teetered on collapse. This time, instead of letting the failures run their course, the U.S. government rushed to bail out Wall Street banks, auto manufacturers, and other corporate giants deemed “too big to fail.” Banks survived, CEOs kept their bonuses, and investors were shielded. Meanwhile, millions of working-class families lost their homes, jobs, and savings. Student loan borrowers, particularly those from working-class and minority backgrounds, never got a bailout. Adjunct faculty, contract workers, and gig laborers were left to navigate economic insecurity without systemic relief.

The pandemic brought the same story in a new form. Corporate bailouts, Federal Reserve interventions, and stimulus packages stabilized markets far more effectively than they stabilized households. Wall Street bounced back faster than Main Street. By 2021, the wealth of America’s billionaires had surged by more than $1.8 trillion, while ordinary workers struggled with eviction threats, childcare crises, and medical debt.

But the stakes are even higher today. U.S. elites are not only repeating past mistakes—they are doubling down on mass speculation across crypto, real estate, and equity markets. The rise and collapse of speculative cryptocurrencies revealed how wealth can be created and destroyed almost overnight, with everyday investors bearing the losses while venture capitalists and insiders cashed out early. Real estate speculation has driven housing prices beyond the reach of millions of working families, fueling homelessness and displacement. Equity markets, inflated by cheap debt and stock buybacks, have become disconnected from the real economy, rewarding executives while leaving workers behind.

This speculative frenzy is not just an economic issue—it is an environmental one. Fossil fuel corporations and their financiers continue to reap profits from industries that accelerate climate change, deforestation, and resource depletion. The destruction of ecosystems, the intensification of climate disasters, and the burden of environmental cleanup all fall disproportionately on working-class and marginalized communities. Yet when markets wobble, it is these same polluting elites who position themselves first in line for government protection.

The Federal Reserve has played a decisive role in this cycle. By keeping interest rates artificially low for years, it fueled debt-driven speculation in housing, equities, and corporate borrowing. When inflation spiked, the Fed shifted gears, raising rates at the fastest pace in decades. This brought pain to households through higher mortgage costs, rising credit card balances, and job insecurity—but banks and investment firms continued to receive lifelines through emergency lending facilities. The Fed’s interventions have too often prioritized elite stability over working-class survival.

Political leadership has compounded the problem. Under Donald Trump's first term, deregulation accelerated, with key provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act rolled back in 2018. Banks gained greater leeway to take risks, and oversight of mid-sized institutions weakened—a decision that later contributed to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023. Trump’s tax cuts overwhelmingly favored corporations and the wealthy, further concentrating wealth at the top while leaving the federal government less able to respond to future crises. In his second term, Trump and his allies signal that they would pressure the Fed to prioritize markets over workers and strip down remaining regulatory guardrails.

The logic of endless bailouts assumes that the survival of elites ensures the survival of the economy. But history proves otherwise. Whether in 1929, 2008, or 2020, the repeated subsidization of corporations and financial elites entrenches inequality, fuels reckless risk-taking, and leaves working families with the bill. The banks, crypto funds, and private equity firms that profit most during boom times rarely share their gains, yet they demand protection in busts.

And the problem is no longer just domestic—it is geopolitical. While U.S. elites depend on bailouts, rival powers are recalibrating. China is building alternative banking systems through the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Belt and Road Initiative. Russia, sanctioned by the West, is tightening its economic ties with China and other non-Western states. India and Brazil, key players in the BRICS bloc, are exploring alternatives to U.S. dollar dominance. If the U.S. continues to subsidize private failure with public money, it risks undermining its own global credibility and ceding economic leadership to rivals.

National security is directly tied to economic and environmental stability. A U.S. that repeatedly bails out elites while leaving ordinary citizens vulnerable erodes trust not only at home but abroad. Allies may question American leadership, while adversaries see opportunity in its fragility. If the U.S. financial system is perceived as permanently rigged—propping up elites while disempowering its workforce—it will accelerate the shift of global influence toward China, Russia, India, and Brazil.

Perhaps it’s time to let the system fail—not in the sense of mass suffering for ordinary people, but in the sense of refusing to cushion elites from the consequences of their own decisions. If banks gamble recklessly, let them face bankruptcy. If private equity firms strip-mine industries, let them collapse under their own weight. If universities chase speculative growth with predatory lending and overpriced credentials, let them answer for it in the courts of law and public opinion.

Failure, though painful, can also be cleansing. Without bailouts, institutions would be forced to reckon with structural flaws instead of papering them over. Alternatives could emerge: community-based credit unions, worker-owned cooperatives, public higher education funded for the public good rather than private profit, and serious investment in green energy and sustainable development.

The real question is not whether elites deserve another bailout. The real question is whether the United States can afford to keep subsidizing them while undermining its working class, its environment, and its national security. For too long, workers, students, and families have shouldered the costs of elite failure. The survival of the U.S. economy—and its place in the world—may depend not on saving elites, but on building something stronger and fairer in their place.

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Sources:

• Congressional Budget Office, The 2008 Financial Crisis and Federal Response

• Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Bank Failures During the Great Depression

• Institute for Policy Studies, Billionaire Wealth Surge During COVID-19

• Federal Reserve, Monetary Policy and Emergency Lending Facilities

• Brookings Institution, Bailouts and Moral Hazard

• BRICS Policy Center, Alternative Financial Governance Structures

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2023 Synthesis Report

• National Association of Realtors, Housing Affordability Data

• Public Law 115-174, Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act (2018)

Truth as Therapy for Higher Education

Anosognosia is the inability to recognize one’s own illness or disability. In higher education, it describes the chronic denial of a system in crisis—one that refuses to admit its own collapse.

For decades, U.S. higher education has been sold as the great equalizer. The story was simple: borrow, study, graduate, succeed. But the data show the opposite. What we are witnessing is a long college meltdown, masked by denial at the highest levels of government, university administrations, and Wall Street.

The Debt Trap

• Outstanding student loan debt now exceeds $1.77 trillion, burdening more than 43 million Americans.

• Nearly 20 percent of borrowers are in default or serious delinquency.

• Black borrowers, especially Black women, carry the heaviest burdens and are least likely to see upward mobility from their degrees.

• Many in income-driven repayment programs will never pay off principal, living in a permanent state of debt peonage.

Universities and policymakers insist debt is an “investment.” But for millions, it is a generational shackle.

The Exploited Faculty

• More than 70 percent of college instructors are contingent.

• Adjuncts often earn less than $3,500 per course, with no healthcare, no retirement, and no security.

• Roughly one in four adjuncts relies on public assistance.

Universities still market themselves as communities of scholars. In reality, they operate on the same exploitative labor practices as Uber or Amazon.

The Employment Mismatch

• Four in ten recent grads work in jobs that don’t require a degree.

• One-third of graduates say their work is unrelated to their major.

• Median real wages for college graduates have been flat for 25 years.

Still, higher ed pushes “lifelong learning” credentials, turning underemployment into a new revenue stream.

Prestige as Denial

• At Ivy League universities, 40 percent of students come from the top 5 percent of households.

• Fewer than 5 percent come from the bottom fifth.

• Endowments soar—Harvard’s sits at $50 billion—but tuition relief and faculty wages barely budge.

This is not mobility. It is a hereditary elite cloaked in the language of meritocracy.

Climate Contradictions

• Universities promote sustainability but invest billions in fossil fuels.

• Campus expansion and luxury amenities drive up emissions, water use, and labor exploitation.

Even here, anosognosia reigns: branding over reality.

The Meltdown Denied

The college meltdown has been unfolding for more than a decade:

• Small liberal arts colleges shuttering.

• Regional publics bleeding enrollments.

• For-profits morphing into “nonprofits” while still funneling money to investors.

• State funding eroded, shifting the cost to students and families.

But instead of confronting the collapse, higher ed leaders rely on rhetoric: “innovation,” “resilience,” “access.” Like anosognosia, denial itself becomes survival.

The Human Cost

The denial is not harmless. It is measured in:

• The indebted graduate delaying family formation and homeownership.

• The adjunct commuting across counties to string together courses while living below the poverty line.

• The working-class family betting their savings on a degree that will not deliver mobility.

The meltdown is here. Higher education’s inability—or refusal—to admit it ensures the damage will deepen.

Truth and Healing 

Anosognosia prevents healing because it prevents recognition of the problem. U.S. higher education cannot admit its own disease, so it cannot begin recovery. Until it does, students, families, and workers will bear the costs of a system in denial.

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Sources

• Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit (2025)

• National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Digest of Education Statistics (2023)

• American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession (2024)

• Pew Research Center, The Rising Cost of Not Going to College (2023 update)

• The Century Foundation, Adjunct Project (2022)

• Chetty et al., Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility (2017, with updates)

• IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System), U.S. Department of Education

• Harvard Management Company, Endowment Report (2024)

• Higher Education Inquirer, College Meltdown archive (2018–2025)

LAVC Media Arts Faculty Stripped of Administrative Roles Amid Fraud Scandal (LACCD Whistleblower)

Faculty members in the Los Angeles Valley College (LAVC) Media Arts Department implicated in decades of fraud and misconduct have been removed from administrative positions, though they remain in teaching roles.

Over the summer, longtime department head Eric Swelstad, who had led Media Arts since 2008, was replaced as chair by Chad Sustin, a full-time professor of Cinema and Media Arts. The change followed a notification from the LACCD Whistleblower Movement to new Chancellor Alberto J. Roman, alleging that Swelstad falsely claimed membership in the Writers Guild of America – West for more than 20 years and used this misrepresentation in official LACCD promotional materials.

Sustin, a tenured faculty member since 2016 and a former Technicolor post-producer, now leads the department.

The reshuffling comes amid years of internal turmoil. In 2022, full-time cinema professor Arantxa Rodriguez resigned and was replaced by Jonathan Burnett as assistant professor. Rodriguez had previously been implicated in department infighting and, alongside Swelstad, was named as a co-defendant in a 2008 case alleging failure to provide advertised technical training and education. Burnett’s hiring bypassed longtime adjunct and former grant director Dan Watanabe.

Watanabe previously administered several Media Arts training grants, the last of which—ICT & Digital Media, LA RDSN—was reported as fraudulent in 2016. The 2013 grant proposal promised courses such as The Business of Entertainment, Advanced Digital Editing, Photoshop, and After Effects. Yet once funding was approved, The Business of Entertainment and Advanced Digital Editing were archived by LAVC’s Academic Curriculum Committee and Senate. Photoshop and After Effects were offered only minimally, with After Effects disappearing after 2015 and Photoshop shifting to online-only by 2017.

Students reported the suspected fraud to the State of California in 2016, prompting a review of the grant. Renewal applications submitted by Watanabe in 2018 and 2021 were both denied.

Grant Record (Denied Renewal, 2018):

• Project Title: ICT & Digital Media – LA RDSN (Renewal)

• Funding Agency: CCCCO EWD

• Grant Amount: $165,000

• Funding Period: Oct. 1, 2018 – June 30, 2019

• Project Director: Dan Watanabe

• Description: Proposed renewal of the Deputy Sector Navigator grant under the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, focused on curriculum development and alignment with universities and K–12 schools.

https://services.laccd.edu/districtsite/Accreditation/lavc/Standard%20IVA/IVA1-02_Grants_History.pdf

Despite this, Watanabe (who was also passed over for a full-time position at Los Angeles Pierce College) remains an adjunct faculty member slated to teach Cinema 111, Developing Movies – a field he reportedly last worked in twenty years ago. Arantxa Rodriguez and Eric Swelstad have both been scheduled to teach Fall 2025. Despite falsifying his credentials as a member of the Writer's Guild of America – West, and implying he was a Primetime Emmy Winner (he in fact was the director of a movie that received a local Los Angeles Emmy in the 1990s), he is slated to teach Cinema 101 and screenwriting core class Media Arts 129. Rodriguez will a remote History of Film Class. 

Reportedly the new full-time faculty in the department have started working to reverse the damage. Fall 2025 schedule includes Media Arts 112, Creative Sound Design Workshop.