Politics thwart colleges’ role in upward mobility
By Suzanne Mettler
The American system of higher education is in crisis. Over the past 30 years, it has gone from facilitating upward mobility to exacerbating social inequality. College-going, once associated with opportunity, now engenders something that increasingly resembles a caste system: It takes Americans who grew up in different social strata and widens the divisions among them. The consequences are vast, including differences among graduates in employment rates and lifetime earnings, in health, and in civic engagement.
The rise of for-profit colleges, changes in federal student aid, and the demise of state funds for public colleges and universities have helped produce these circumstances. But at its core, this transformation represents a political failure, a breakdown of representative government that no longer provides effective mechanisms by which Americans can pursue a better life. Higher-education policies that worked well in the past to mitigate inequality are still in place, but they have deteriorated and gone off course. Thus we are squandering one of our finest accomplishments and historic legacies, a system of higher education that was long characterized by excellence and wide accessibility.
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