Passing more of the cost of college on to students (who incur additional debt in the process) means that more of the revenue used to finance higher education is “unsecured.” In California, which is leading the trend towards privatization, more than half of the financing for public colleges now comes from tuition dollars, not state funding. That means administrators are free to use student fees to finance development projects such as luxury stadiums. As a result, public universities in that state are already paying $1 billion each year in interest alone to Wall Street. This neoliberal restructuring is not a withdrawal of state support so much as it is an active program of turning higher education over to financiers and manager-elites. More than twenty years ago, in The University in Ruins, Bill Readings wrote that, as universities lost their status as bastions of national culture, they would become “bureaucratic corporations.”
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 