And in the middle, public universities are squeezed between incentives to increase tuition and pressures to maintain access and affordability. At the bottom, takeovers by private equity transform for-profit colleges into predatory organizations that leave disadvantaged students with massive loan debt and few educational benefits. At the top, ties to Wall Street help the most elite private schools achieve the greatest endowment growth through hedge fund investments and the support of wealthy donors. The turn to finance, however, has yielded wildly unequal results. Beginning in the 1980s, the government, colleges, students, and their families took on multiple new roles as financial investors, borrowers, and brokers. With federal and state funding falling short, the US higher education system has become increasingly dependent on financial markets and the financiers that mediate them. However, as Charlie Eaton reveals in Bankers in the Ivory Tower, finance has played a central role in the widening inequality in recent decades, both in American higher education and in American society at large. Exposes the intimate relationship between big finance and higher education inequality in America.Įlite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America while public universities have offered a major stepping-stone to new economic opportunities.
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