From Lapham's Quarterly:
A Speculative Endeavor
Higher education in the United States is a speculative endeavor. It offers a means of inching toward something that does not quite exist but that we very badly want to realize—enlightenment, higher wages, national security. For individuals, it provides the lure of upward mobility, an illusion of escape from the lowest rungs of the labor market. For the federal government, it has charted a kind of statecraft, outlining its core commitments to military strength and economic growth, all the while absolving the state of the responsibility for ensuring that all its subjects have dignified means to live. We are told the path to decent wages and social respect must route through college.
The metric of higher education is credit; it runs on the belief of future value amid present uncertainty. This has readily lent to the industry’s financialization, the elaborate ways of using money to make more money rather than to produce goods and services. Today financialized systems of higher education mean that colleges and universities operate as investors or borrowers or both. University revenues increasingly come from financial activities, such as profits from endowment investments, real estate acquisitions, or leveraging student tuition. Simultaneously, financial costs—such as debt, interest, and fees—command a growing portion of university expenditures. Many universities allocate as much money to debt service as they do to entire departments; in 2020–21 the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s debt-service budget was ten times the size of its student financial-aid budget. Similarly, students become either borrowers, taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt to fund their tuition, or investors, betting on future earnings, thanks to the education they are accruing. For institutions and individuals alike, financialization compresses education into a means of accumulation.
Rising tuition and reduced public investment have created an ever-worsening student-debt crisis in the United States today, but students and families have struggled to pay for college since the nation’s founding. Federal support for higher education has primarily manifested as tuition subsidies for students and their families rather than directly funding colleges, thereby rendering tuition obsolete. Before the Civil War, colleges operated predominantly as cloistered institutions where the elite could learn Latin and Greek and be trained as ministers. Often privately financed by wealthy donors, many of the largest and most prestigious schools, including Yale and Georgetown, were funded by profits from slavery and colonial exploits. With little public support, these universities were generally expensive to attend—in 1860 the cost of attending a college in the East represented a skilled worker’s entire annual income—and as a result were open mostly to the moneyed, or at least those who could sacrifice years of lost wages in pursuit of a degree. The 1862 Morrill Act, which created the country’s land-grant universities, marked the federal government’s first intervention and investment in the nation’s higher education system. The legislation relied on the expropriation of nearly eleven million acres of Native lands, which were transferred to state governments. In exchange for the Native land titles, the U.S. government promised Indigenous nations all of $400,000. In reality, it paid far less and in many cases nothing at all. Today those tracts are estimated to be worth $500 million. Over time the plundered lands became a special kind of credit factory: universities.
Throughout the nineteenth century, these newly founded universities heralded the ascendancy of science and industry, twinkling with a Baconian spirit of “useful knowledge.” Lands would be surveyed, ships would be built, and corn would rise taller. The academic institutions were also framed as a matter of national security. In the aftermath of the Civil War, universities were envisioned as a substitute for food systems previously run by Southern plantations and on slave labor. Northern abolitionists, such as Republican representative Justin Morrill of Vermont, who sponsored the land-grant legislation, saw these universities’ focus on agricultural science as a means of ensuring that the United States could sell crops even after the end of slavery. In 1890 a second Morrill Act established institutions specifically for African Americans.
But what likely cemented the role of the university as a mainstay of American statecraft was its mirage of democracy. Universities inspired not just visions of better soil tilling but also the means of upward mobility for even the most calloused hands. The sons (and some daughters) of white farmers could go to college and grab handfuls of the golden knowledge it offered. Between 1890 and 1940 the doors swung open and enrollment in higher education increased fivefold. The vision was perhaps more powerful than its reality: only a slim minority of Americans ever enrolled in college. In 1940 not even 10 percent of the nation’s eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds attended college....
....MUCH MORE
