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After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It
From Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Will Bunch, the epic untold story of college—the great political and cultural fault line of American life
"This book is simply terrific." —Heather Cox Richardson, publisher of the "Letters from an American" Substack
"A must-read." —Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains
Today there are two Americas, separate and unequal, one educated and one not. And these two tribes—the resentful “non-college” crowd and their diploma-bearing yet increasingly disillusioned adversaries—seem on the brink of a civil war. The strongest determinant of whether a voter was likely to support Donald Trump in 2016 was whether or not they attended college, and the degree of loathing they reported feeling toward the so-called “knowledge economy of clustered, educated elites. Somewhere in the winding last half-century of the United States, the quest for a college diploma devolved from being proof of America’s commitment to learning, science, and social mobility into a kind of Hunger Games contest to the death. That quest has infuriated both the millions who got shut out and millions who got into deep debt to stay afloat.
In After the Ivory Tower Falls, award-winning journalist Will Bunch embarks on a deeply reported journey to the heart of the American Dream. That journey begins in Gambier, Ohio, home to affluent, liberal Kenyon College, a tiny speck of Democratic blue amidst the vast red swath of white, post-industrial, rural midwestern America. To understand “the college question,” there is no better entry point than Gambier, where a world-class institution caters to elite students amidst a sea of economic despair.
From there, Bunch traces the history of college in the U.S., beginning with the first technical schools, through the landmark GI Bill, and the culture wars of the 60’s and 70’s, which found their start on college campuses. We see how resentment of college-educated elites morphed into a rejection of knowledge itself—and how the explosion in student loan debt fueled major social movements like Occupy Wall Street. Bunch then takes a question we need to ask all over again—what, and who, is college even for?—and pushes it into the 21st century by proposing a new model that works for all Americans.
The sum total is a stunning work of journalism, one that lays bare the root of our political, cultural, and economic division—and charts a path forward for America.
"This book is simply terrific." —Heather Cox Richardson, publisher of the "Letters from an American" Substack
"A must-read." —Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains
Today there are two Americas, separate and unequal, one educated and one not. And these two tribes—the resentful “non-college” crowd and their diploma-bearing yet increasingly disillusioned adversaries—seem on the brink of a civil war. The strongest determinant of whether a voter was likely to support Donald Trump in 2016 was whether or not they attended college, and the degree of loathing they reported feeling toward the so-called “knowledge economy of clustered, educated elites. Somewhere in the winding last half-century of the United States, the quest for a college diploma devolved from being proof of America’s commitment to learning, science, and social mobility into a kind of Hunger Games contest to the death. That quest has infuriated both the millions who got shut out and millions who got into deep debt to stay afloat.
In After the Ivory Tower Falls, award-winning journalist Will Bunch embarks on a deeply reported journey to the heart of the American Dream. That journey begins in Gambier, Ohio, home to affluent, liberal Kenyon College, a tiny speck of Democratic blue amidst the vast red swath of white, post-industrial, rural midwestern America. To understand “the college question,” there is no better entry point than Gambier, where a world-class institution caters to elite students amidst a sea of economic despair.
From there, Bunch traces the history of college in the U.S., beginning with the first technical schools, through the landmark GI Bill, and the culture wars of the 60’s and 70’s, which found their start on college campuses. We see how resentment of college-educated elites morphed into a rejection of knowledge itself—and how the explosion in student loan debt fueled major social movements like Occupy Wall Street. Bunch then takes a question we need to ask all over again—what, and who, is college even for?—and pushes it into the 21st century by proposing a new model that works for all Americans.
The sum total is a stunning work of journalism, one that lays bare the root of our political, cultural, and economic division—and charts a path forward for America.
320 pages, Hardcover
Published August 2, 2022
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December 21, 2022
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Will Bunch poses a number of pressing questions here and proposes some interesting solutions too. The issues covered include:
Has the cost of higher education in America now made it a club for the richest families only?
Should colleges seek to expand a student’s broad education or should the primary focus be to prepare them for an identified career path?
And what about, so called, blue collar jobs – what’s the route for students wishing to learn a trade?
The author takes us through a history of further education in America from the end of WWII, explaining how the introduction of the G.I. Bill significantly expanded not only the number of students experiencing further education but also radically changing the age profile. He explains how sceptics were proved wrong in their prediction that many returning soldiers would simply accept the benefits on offer but would fail to complete their courses. Then when the baby boomer generation, spawned by the war’s conclusion, was added to the mix an exponential growth in the overall number of students attending college was confirmed. The result was, of course, a huge expansion in the number and scale of colleges.
The immediate post war era was a time in which egalitarian aims held sway over those seeing the profit potential on offer. But a string of student protests in the late 1960’s - regarding the draft, civil rights issues, discrimination and woman’s liberation - created an atmosphere in which some saw education as a threat (to white supremacy, for example) rather than something offering a positive benefit to society. Bunch digs into the political debates and machinations of the time to explain how this has driven the country to the position it finds itself in today. Essentially this requires students to who don’t come from wealthy families to take on significant debt in order to fund a degree course that will give them access to the most remunerative job opportunities.
The average debt facing graduating students is said to be circa $30k. And with repayment required to commence within six months of graduation the financial pressures are quick to take hold. The author states that this demonstrates how the majority of would be college students face the dilemma of whether to gamble on their ability to quickly secure a well paying job after completing their course or to miss out on the opportunity such an education offers. To emphasise this point, he supplies brief case studies of a range of individuals who have one way or another become disenfranchised by their experience.
There’s a good deal of political history here, mixed into the story, and it’s clear that Bunch has little time for Donal Trump and, in fact, the GOP in general. On top of this, he stresses the point that cheating and dodgy dealing have been rife in terms of allowing cash rich families to inveigle routes into the most high profile colleges for their offspring. Amongst those cited in this respect are Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. And what is stressed throughout is that a college degree isn’t simply a ‘nice to have’ in the current knowledge based economy, it now offers what a high school diploma did 80 years ago. In other words, the route to these high paying careers is only now open to those with a college degree.
In terms of a way forward, a number of steps are proposed which would, the author says, open up the opportunity of a college education to a much wider population. He also suggests that the introduction of a ‘gap year’ for students at around the age of 18 - i.e. after high school and before college - might recreate the environment achieved post the G.I. Bill by bringing students into higher education with a broader view of life. This gap year might take the form of compulsory non-military public service. There are also suggestions concerning the set-up (or rather expansion) of institutions for training those who are intent on a specific trade and have no interest in a broader education.
Finally, there is a fairly comprehensive debate on the issue of who should pay for these proposed ‘improvements’ and whether higher education should be free to students or merely subsidised. Various options are explored but interestingly the English method is not amongst them. Here, the cost for students is capped and the phasing of any repayment of the government loan funding study and other associated costs is put on hold until a salary roughly equivalent to the national average is achieved, post university. Thereafter the amount of any repayment is governed by the salary level and if the loan is not fully repaid within 30 years it is written off. The reality is that many student will never fully repay these loans, so the excess cost falls to the general tax payer.
I found this book to be highly informative, opening my eyes to issues and possible solutions that I was previously blind to. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in a key issue facing all highly developed countries at this time.
My thanks to publishers William Morrow for supplying an e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Has the cost of higher education in America now made it a club for the richest families only?
Should colleges seek to expand a student’s broad education or should the primary focus be to prepare them for an identified career path?
And what about, so called, blue collar jobs – what’s the route for students wishing to learn a trade?
The author takes us through a history of further education in America from the end of WWII, explaining how the introduction of the G.I. Bill significantly expanded not only the number of students experiencing further education but also radically changing the age profile. He explains how sceptics were proved wrong in their prediction that many returning soldiers would simply accept the benefits on offer but would fail to complete their courses. Then when the baby boomer generation, spawned by the war’s conclusion, was added to the mix an exponential growth in the overall number of students attending college was confirmed. The result was, of course, a huge expansion in the number and scale of colleges.
The immediate post war era was a time in which egalitarian aims held sway over those seeing the profit potential on offer. But a string of student protests in the late 1960’s - regarding the draft, civil rights issues, discrimination and woman’s liberation - created an atmosphere in which some saw education as a threat (to white supremacy, for example) rather than something offering a positive benefit to society. Bunch digs into the political debates and machinations of the time to explain how this has driven the country to the position it finds itself in today. Essentially this requires students to who don’t come from wealthy families to take on significant debt in order to fund a degree course that will give them access to the most remunerative job opportunities.
The average debt facing graduating students is said to be circa $30k. And with repayment required to commence within six months of graduation the financial pressures are quick to take hold. The author states that this demonstrates how the majority of would be college students face the dilemma of whether to gamble on their ability to quickly secure a well paying job after completing their course or to miss out on the opportunity such an education offers. To emphasise this point, he supplies brief case studies of a range of individuals who have one way or another become disenfranchised by their experience.
There’s a good deal of political history here, mixed into the story, and it’s clear that Bunch has little time for Donal Trump and, in fact, the GOP in general. On top of this, he stresses the point that cheating and dodgy dealing have been rife in terms of allowing cash rich families to inveigle routes into the most high profile colleges for their offspring. Amongst those cited in this respect are Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. And what is stressed throughout is that a college degree isn’t simply a ‘nice to have’ in the current knowledge based economy, it now offers what a high school diploma did 80 years ago. In other words, the route to these high paying careers is only now open to those with a college degree.
In terms of a way forward, a number of steps are proposed which would, the author says, open up the opportunity of a college education to a much wider population. He also suggests that the introduction of a ‘gap year’ for students at around the age of 18 - i.e. after high school and before college - might recreate the environment achieved post the G.I. Bill by bringing students into higher education with a broader view of life. This gap year might take the form of compulsory non-military public service. There are also suggestions concerning the set-up (or rather expansion) of institutions for training those who are intent on a specific trade and have no interest in a broader education.
Finally, there is a fairly comprehensive debate on the issue of who should pay for these proposed ‘improvements’ and whether higher education should be free to students or merely subsidised. Various options are explored but interestingly the English method is not amongst them. Here, the cost for students is capped and the phasing of any repayment of the government loan funding study and other associated costs is put on hold until a salary roughly equivalent to the national average is achieved, post university. Thereafter the amount of any repayment is governed by the salary level and if the loan is not fully repaid within 30 years it is written off. The reality is that many student will never fully repay these loans, so the excess cost falls to the general tax payer.
I found this book to be highly informative, opening my eyes to issues and possible solutions that I was previously blind to. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in a key issue facing all highly developed countries at this time.
My thanks to publishers William Morrow for supplying an e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
December 17, 2022
This was a difficult book for me to get through - not because it was poorly written or inaccurate but because it examines the issue of higher education in such detail and complexity that it was hard while reading to imagine that this is a problem that can be easily solved. Bunch comes at the commonly cited flaws of higher education from economic, political and social angles- sometimes flowing in and out of each other, sometimes issues that need separate attention - and makes a good case that the current state of affairs is due to both deliberate manipulation and unintended consequences. There are many villains, ranging from those who wish to turn colleges into profit-making institutions to those who prefer a society where students only learn what they need to learn in order to serve the needs of employers. There are also a few heroes, but they don’t show up until the end, and he doesn’t even touch the need for colleges themselves to reform curriculum, staffing and many other issues now that they have bent themselves into pretzels trying to accommodate the whims of various legislators over the years..
Many in my family have been academics, including me, so this information hits close to home. In fact, Chapter 7 is almost exclusively devoted to Scott Walker’s tenure as governor of Wisconsin, where he busted public education unions, weakened tenure, and even tried to rewrite the mission of the University of Wisconsin. This is an era I lived, painfully, when I was teaching at a UW system school. My colleagues and I were literally on the front lines, protesting, writing letters, and working social media in support of academia. The changes Walker made may affect Wisconsin’s education for generations.
Because of my personal stake in the matter, I believe what Bunch has written is true and necessary. He calls for a Truman-style commission on higher education to come to some agreement on what we want from higher education in the future. He advocates for principles including universality, seeing education as a public good rather than an individual benefit, and a liberal arts education which will help us see problems with a wider lens. I can only hope that this book will make it into the hands of those who can make that happen.
Thank you to Harper Collins and NetGalley for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
Many in my family have been academics, including me, so this information hits close to home. In fact, Chapter 7 is almost exclusively devoted to Scott Walker’s tenure as governor of Wisconsin, where he busted public education unions, weakened tenure, and even tried to rewrite the mission of the University of Wisconsin. This is an era I lived, painfully, when I was teaching at a UW system school. My colleagues and I were literally on the front lines, protesting, writing letters, and working social media in support of academia. The changes Walker made may affect Wisconsin’s education for generations.
Because of my personal stake in the matter, I believe what Bunch has written is true and necessary. He calls for a Truman-style commission on higher education to come to some agreement on what we want from higher education in the future. He advocates for principles including universality, seeing education as a public good rather than an individual benefit, and a liberal arts education which will help us see problems with a wider lens. I can only hope that this book will make it into the hands of those who can make that happen.
Thank you to Harper Collins and NetGalley for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
September 10, 2022
I agree with most of the analysis here - College for everyone was an idea that came out of the G.I. Bill after WWII. Back then state colleges and universities cost very little. A college education of any kind broadens people culturally, helps to develop communication, learning and organizational skills and builds a better informed and more participatory electorate. Expanding the college educated population was good for the economy and good for democracy. College doesn't have to be for everyone, and we should rebuild an economy with better, more rewarding jobs than Walmart and Starbucks for people who don't go to college, but college should be a realistic and available choice for anyone who wants it. But then, after we made college broadly available, we had the problem of students and college graduates embracing political and social ideas that were anathema to much of the rest of the country, followed by a backlash against state support for university level education, so it became wildly expensive even to go to state schools, and elite universities became out of reach to anyone but the wealthy. Much of the extra cost was covered by student loan programs that created crushing debt. And all of this just made the problems worse. Now we pretend to offer college to all, but not on economic terms that make sense, and we pretend that elite institutions are open to anyone who demonstrates merit, but it's a rigged game that only the rich can play. It's a giant problem. We need to go back to making state colleges and universities free or almost free. I'm fine with allowing expensive elite private schools to continue to exist, but more of them have to be need blind, and they should all be required to give at least a fourth of their slots to low income people if they want a nickel of government support. There also should be more constructive dialog between left and right on college campuses -- more conversation and less attempts to stop conversation with people that you disagree with. Universities should model the kind of reasonable conversations between people across the political spectrum that we need to foster to reduce the current climate of divisiveness.
October 21, 2022
Summary: How the culture wars, costs, and inaccessibility of college have contributed to our political divides and what may be done.
I graduated from college in 1976. Because of personal savings, scholarships, and work, I finished college without debt. Our family did not have much in the way of financial resources at that time and did not contribute financially except for providing a roof over my head. Low, state-subsidized tuitions helped make that possible. Reading this book, I realized that this could not have happened in 2022. If I went to college, I likely would have ended with five or six figured debt. I even might not have gone to college.
Will Bunch argues that there are two Americas–one that manages to afford a college education, and one that does not and either finishes or drops out with massive debts, or doesn’t even try. He proposes that our political divides map onto those two Americas. He opens the book by using Knox County, Ohio as an object lesson of this division. Knox County is the home of the elite, liberal arts college, Kenyon College in Gambier, as well as Mount Vernon, six miles to the west, the county seat and a town struggling to get by after its largest factories were shuttered. Kenyon costs in excess of $76,000 a year and attracts a national student body, many from households that can afford these costs. In 2020, the median household income in Mount Vernon was $46,656. In terms of politics, Gambier is an island of blue surrounded by an ocean of red, and Bunch, who spent time embedded in the area as a journalist, maps how those differences played out.
He then zooms out to a time when public education got as close to being universally accessible, following World War 2 and the G.I. Bill, the building boom that accompanied the Baby Boom, and the low or no tuitions (in the case of California) for in-state institutions at public institutions. He traces the increasing disaffection toward public support for colleges to the political radicalism of the Vietnam era and the rise of the culture wars and conservative talk radio in the 1980’s and 1990’s, particularly in the Clinton era. During this time, state support for higher education began to decrease and costs rose. And so began the efforts of colleges to recruit from out of state or even internationally those who would pay premium prices. By the 2020’s, student debt had climbed to $1.7 trillion and scandals like the Varsity Blues scandal exposed the pay to play admissions policies with vast inequities, particularly at the most elite schools.
Bunch then zooms in again, describing four groups, illustrated by four individuals that he argues comprise the two Americas. First are the Left Perplexed, boomers and Gen-Xers who are baffled by the rise of both Trumpism and youth drawn to socialism. Second are the Left Broke, the children of the Left Perplexed, saddled with high debts and drawn to socialist solutions and concerns for racial justice. Third are the Left Behind, the Boomers and Xers who went to work out of high school in factory jobs, many of which went away or were off-shored, people often drawn to Donald Trump as one who affirms their value, their work ethic, and their concerns. Finally, there are the Left Out, the young growing up in the former factory towns who don’t have access to the college track, who work in warehouse and service industries while struggling with alcohol or opioid addiction and higher rates of suicide.
He then chronicles both the increased resentments of foreclosed opportunities in movements like Occupy Wall Street and the rejection of the knowledge associated with college from science to social analysis, particularly among the Left Behind, who often felt themselves belittled and marginalized by the progressive elites associated with higher education.
Bunch then turns to Truman-era solutions as the beginnings of a way out, arguing for the public good of subsidized post-secondary education, whether college or skilled trades. He also looks at the possible benefits of a National Service program for 18 year-olds, bringing people from a variety of backgrounds together for the good of the country as well as mentoring that prepares them for further educational options. In addition to advancing the common good, such a program would help close the divides and forging new bonds of commonality.
I found Bunch’s survey of the higher education and cultural landscape both persuasive in the broad strokes and flawed in the nuances. I wonder if the portrayal of an college vs. high school educated divide, while working as a broad generalization, especially among white Americans, neither explains the support of Trump politics among the educated, nor the more progressive policies supported by some communities with less access to higher education.
What is more compelling is the account of rising college costs, the burdens of college debt, and the urgency for a new policy that recognizes the public good of education beyond high school. To fail to act on this perpetuates not only economic inequities but also political divides. The best way to avoid divides is to include those who might be alienated. It is actually in the common interest of all of us to provide education beyond high school at the public expense as opposed to that education being available only to those who can pay. But that will require a shift in understanding of “us versus them” to “we” and from competing interests to the common good. The question this leaves me with is where the leadership will come from to forge that new understanding.
I graduated from college in 1976. Because of personal savings, scholarships, and work, I finished college without debt. Our family did not have much in the way of financial resources at that time and did not contribute financially except for providing a roof over my head. Low, state-subsidized tuitions helped make that possible. Reading this book, I realized that this could not have happened in 2022. If I went to college, I likely would have ended with five or six figured debt. I even might not have gone to college.
Will Bunch argues that there are two Americas–one that manages to afford a college education, and one that does not and either finishes or drops out with massive debts, or doesn’t even try. He proposes that our political divides map onto those two Americas. He opens the book by using Knox County, Ohio as an object lesson of this division. Knox County is the home of the elite, liberal arts college, Kenyon College in Gambier, as well as Mount Vernon, six miles to the west, the county seat and a town struggling to get by after its largest factories were shuttered. Kenyon costs in excess of $76,000 a year and attracts a national student body, many from households that can afford these costs. In 2020, the median household income in Mount Vernon was $46,656. In terms of politics, Gambier is an island of blue surrounded by an ocean of red, and Bunch, who spent time embedded in the area as a journalist, maps how those differences played out.
He then zooms out to a time when public education got as close to being universally accessible, following World War 2 and the G.I. Bill, the building boom that accompanied the Baby Boom, and the low or no tuitions (in the case of California) for in-state institutions at public institutions. He traces the increasing disaffection toward public support for colleges to the political radicalism of the Vietnam era and the rise of the culture wars and conservative talk radio in the 1980’s and 1990’s, particularly in the Clinton era. During this time, state support for higher education began to decrease and costs rose. And so began the efforts of colleges to recruit from out of state or even internationally those who would pay premium prices. By the 2020’s, student debt had climbed to $1.7 trillion and scandals like the Varsity Blues scandal exposed the pay to play admissions policies with vast inequities, particularly at the most elite schools.
Bunch then zooms in again, describing four groups, illustrated by four individuals that he argues comprise the two Americas. First are the Left Perplexed, boomers and Gen-Xers who are baffled by the rise of both Trumpism and youth drawn to socialism. Second are the Left Broke, the children of the Left Perplexed, saddled with high debts and drawn to socialist solutions and concerns for racial justice. Third are the Left Behind, the Boomers and Xers who went to work out of high school in factory jobs, many of which went away or were off-shored, people often drawn to Donald Trump as one who affirms their value, their work ethic, and their concerns. Finally, there are the Left Out, the young growing up in the former factory towns who don’t have access to the college track, who work in warehouse and service industries while struggling with alcohol or opioid addiction and higher rates of suicide.
He then chronicles both the increased resentments of foreclosed opportunities in movements like Occupy Wall Street and the rejection of the knowledge associated with college from science to social analysis, particularly among the Left Behind, who often felt themselves belittled and marginalized by the progressive elites associated with higher education.
Bunch then turns to Truman-era solutions as the beginnings of a way out, arguing for the public good of subsidized post-secondary education, whether college or skilled trades. He also looks at the possible benefits of a National Service program for 18 year-olds, bringing people from a variety of backgrounds together for the good of the country as well as mentoring that prepares them for further educational options. In addition to advancing the common good, such a program would help close the divides and forging new bonds of commonality.
I found Bunch’s survey of the higher education and cultural landscape both persuasive in the broad strokes and flawed in the nuances. I wonder if the portrayal of an college vs. high school educated divide, while working as a broad generalization, especially among white Americans, neither explains the support of Trump politics among the educated, nor the more progressive policies supported by some communities with less access to higher education.
What is more compelling is the account of rising college costs, the burdens of college debt, and the urgency for a new policy that recognizes the public good of education beyond high school. To fail to act on this perpetuates not only economic inequities but also political divides. The best way to avoid divides is to include those who might be alienated. It is actually in the common interest of all of us to provide education beyond high school at the public expense as opposed to that education being available only to those who can pay. But that will require a shift in understanding of “us versus them” to “we” and from competing interests to the common good. The question this leaves me with is where the leadership will come from to forge that new understanding.
July 28, 2022
I never really understood the division in our country that political analysts said was between college graduates and non-graduates. It seemed to be real, yet made no sense to me. I know people on both sides of that divide and they did not seem all that different to me.
But there are many issues. Several are discussed. The cost of college is a big one and much of the book is about that.
Before World War 2, a college education was pretty much limited to the upper classes who could afford it. After World War 2 higher education became much more common. The GI Bill paid for the education of many returning soldiers. Government investment continued though the turbulent sixties and tuition was still affordable for many of the middle class.
I graduated from Rutgers in 1972 and believe my tuition was $400 per year.
Fast forward to today or any recent year. Tuition may be closer to 30 thousand per year and living expenses many thousands more. To make thing worse, there are often loans (not grants) to cover those hefty expenses.
So if you are from a family of modest means, your choices are skipping college and bypassing many job opportunities or completing college and having more job opportunities but also having massive debt. I over simplify a bit but that choice can be a source of resentment and anger.
So how did we get here? College was once for the few, then became a good for many, and is now a source of resentment and political division.
Will Bunch’s well-researched and well written book examines that question in depth. And discusses some possible solutions. His journalistic skills serve him well in presenting what could be a rather dry recitation of facts as a fascinating story.
The book is scheduled for an August 2 publication. I thank Netgalley for the chance to read it before publication.
But there are many issues. Several are discussed. The cost of college is a big one and much of the book is about that.
Before World War 2, a college education was pretty much limited to the upper classes who could afford it. After World War 2 higher education became much more common. The GI Bill paid for the education of many returning soldiers. Government investment continued though the turbulent sixties and tuition was still affordable for many of the middle class.
I graduated from Rutgers in 1972 and believe my tuition was $400 per year.
Fast forward to today or any recent year. Tuition may be closer to 30 thousand per year and living expenses many thousands more. To make thing worse, there are often loans (not grants) to cover those hefty expenses.
So if you are from a family of modest means, your choices are skipping college and bypassing many job opportunities or completing college and having more job opportunities but also having massive debt. I over simplify a bit but that choice can be a source of resentment and anger.
So how did we get here? College was once for the few, then became a good for many, and is now a source of resentment and political division.
Will Bunch’s well-researched and well written book examines that question in depth. And discusses some possible solutions. His journalistic skills serve him well in presenting what could be a rather dry recitation of facts as a fascinating story.
The book is scheduled for an August 2 publication. I thank Netgalley for the chance to read it before publication.
Currently reading
July 30, 2022I thought it was just amazing.
I write about social movements, a cousin to what Bunch is doing here, and this book is the rarest achievement. He tells a story of a critical social development with broad and deep reverberations in the culture and the polity, the failure of modern American education. AND he makes it into a story so brilliant, so well-written, so filled with memorable characters that this nonfiction work reads like a novel. The American Tragedy, say.
I read a lot of nonfiction, and this is one of two nonfiction books of the last year I would truly call essential.
Also he has a great gift of gab!
I write about social movements, a cousin to what Bunch is doing here, and this book is the rarest achievement. He tells a story of a critical social development with broad and deep reverberations in the culture and the polity, the failure of modern American education. AND he makes it into a story so brilliant, so well-written, so filled with memorable characters that this nonfiction work reads like a novel. The American Tragedy, say.
I read a lot of nonfiction, and this is one of two nonfiction books of the last year I would truly call essential.
Also he has a great gift of gab!
July 18, 2022
"After the Ivory Tower Falls" is the history of higher education in the United States and how it became a polarizing, overwhelmingly expensive facet of our society. This book taught me how the dream of free or reduced cost higher education used to be a reality until politicians purposefully withheld funds and started charging fees since the liberal, intellectual cultures on campus were a threat to rampant capitalism. Even though a college degree no longer promises a career whose wages pay an amount that can keep up with rising costs, it is one of the most defining features of the political party one chooses. The rising cost of college has left an entire segment of the American population feeling left behind, left out, and drawn to anti-intellectual public figures who stoke the flames with conservative rhetoric. Rush Limbaugh is one of the most well-known figures who rose to fame as the cost of college started to spiral out of control, and his rose is representative of the fissure in American society between who has a college degree and who does not. This was an eye-opening, well-written read by one of Philadelphia's most famous journalists. I highly recommend this book!
October 13, 2022
This is a poorly written book. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it as Mr. Bunch drifts from memoir to reportage, slanted cherry-picking, opining, coming to a 'Hey, what we need is national service' moment. He jumps to unjustified conclusions based on poor or non-existent data and relies on opinion and what I perceive as personal bias. He has no footnoting, and data are lacking for much of his ideating. His bibliography seems to consist of, 'I read a couple of books and talked to some people." He does throw out an occasional observation worthy of discussion. He has little to say about public PreK-12 education that would seem to be a contributing factor. I hope he enjoys this use of my $29. I didn't.
January 2, 2023
I had a hard time deciding between 1 and 2 stars for this book. What I learned from my experience in college was how to present arguments in a manner that would at least pretend to show a lack of bias and objectivity. The book appears to be a longer op-ed with cherry-picked interviews to bolster the author's predetermined viewpoint. There is a fundamental lack of research presented in the absence of footnotes, the endnotes that merely mention "interviews", and data without referencing where to find those actual studies.
Perhaps the author might want to revisit this book in the aftermath of Twitter releasing information about the federal government propagandizing the "science" regarding COVID-19, looking down his nose at anyone who might disagree.
Perhaps the author might want to revisit this book in the aftermath of Twitter releasing information about the federal government propagandizing the "science" regarding COVID-19, looking down his nose at anyone who might disagree.
April 8, 2023
This was a tough read. Working in higher education and seeing the student debt situations the author talks about time and time again is disheartening. It was helpful to read a book that traces the history and politics of higher education all the way up to 2021 and from varying political perspectives. It offers decent suggestions for change but they all feel like impossible feats.
Shelved as 'no'
October 16, 2022In the 1970s, the State of Illinois paid $12 of University-of-Illinois expenses for every dollar of tuition and fees. As of 2022, it's thirty cents.
December 27, 2022
Total US student debt was only $90 billion in 1999 and $550 billion in 2011 but now is up to 1.7 trillion dollars; that’s more than all of US credit card debt. College was the American Dream; now college crushes the American Dream. COVID was a “bloodbath for higher education” a big revenue loss, reduced everything. 37% percent of Americans today have BA degrees versus only 5% during WWII. One of the reasons for the GI Bill was to not suddenly oversaturate the post-war US job market. FDR’s opponents felt the GI Bill was a success because “they’d whittled down FDR’s ambition for an expanded welfare state to one lonely program for veterans.” “Nixon, Ford, and Bush 41 all received GI Bill benefits.” The GI Bill was heavily stacked against women and Blacks.
“Between 1958 and 1964, federal dollars for university research quadrupled ($200 million to $800 million).” Would business control college or would it instead become the place for “moral awakening”? Campuses as a place of protest led to a backlash under the “law & order” banner (see Watts July 1965 Uprising with 34 dead). “The consensus around taxpayer support for higher education and a liberal curriculum” began to collapse. Reagan asks, “What in heaven’s name does academic freedom have to do with rioting, with anarchy?” He starts the culture wars and ends the higher education push, instead pushes “to end free tuition, the bedrock principle of the postwar college revolution.” Reagan said, “taxpayers shouldn’t have to subsidize intellectual curiosity”, and that “the main purpose of college should be workforce development.”
Kent State changes college life forever. Without warning two rows of Guardsmen there shoot 67 bullets in 13 seconds directly at students. It was an educational moment. Repeated at Jackson State, two students die. Was the American Heartland angered by unprovoked trained professionals slaughtering mere students, doing what Jesus would never do? No. “A Gallup poll taken immediately after the May 4th shootings found that 58% of Americans blamed the Kent State students for their own deaths and only 11% blamed the National Guard.” At a memorial event in Kent, townspeople chanted “Kent State Four! Should have studied more.” This reminds me to never visit the town of Kent. Post-Kent State, it became harder for low-income students to attend college.
The Powell Memorandum’s author Powell was alarmed by campus protest which for him said, America is “a wholly selfish, materialistic, racist, and repressive society.” I agree but I’d add, by design. Powell’s memo was “about saving US capitalism from campus infidels.” In response business diplomas increased 92% between 1972 to 1985 (when music also went corporate). In 1969, 82% of incoming freshmen stressed wanting to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life”. That figure dove to just 43% by 1985. College diplomas became “a question of personal responsibility.” US elites kept on ramping down the idea of higher education as a public good. Today we see the logical outcome, tapping voter outrage against “liberal” intellectuals so that “resentment would become the driving political force of the twenty-first century.” Still many colleges “remained islands of progressivism” with their “young students still hormonally driven to question authority.”
1979 was the first year that more women than men attended college, that number would grow so that “by 2020-21, nearly 60% of current college graduates were women.” Women “hold a greater proportion of America’s $1.7 trillion college debt burden”, nearly 2/3 of it. Then factor in that women graduates earn an average of 81% of what a man makes. Employers paid more for workers with a diploma (40% more in 1979 to 200+% by the mid-1990’s).
In 1987 the FCC kills off the Fairness Doctrine. AM radio stations desperately needed some way to compete against sonically superior FM Stereo and the game became clear – draw in the big corporate advertisers and cash by selling to the listener from the right using anger and “we share your fear” twaddle while empowering corporations over people. In the 60’s there were only two all-talk radio stations, “by 1995 there would be 1,130 – and almost all of these would be all conservative, all the time.” Imagine the thrill of addressing uneducated white middle class men working while listening to you paid for hours a day to say how you feel their anger and they aren’t alone.
When Clinton and Company severed blue-collar workers from the Democratic Party, that was a crazy boost for Conservative Talk Radio. “Democrats won’t even pretend to like you blue-collar folk? Come over to us! At least we will PRETEND to like you.” Funny how the workers who were the backbone of the New Deal were suddenly basking in the feigned attention of wealthy capitalists funding conservative media. Clinton governed center-right “much of the time.” After the 2008 crisis, aid to colleges plunged by 1/3, tuitions rose and don’t forget room and board, and mandatory fees. One third of students now suffer from food insecurity. Add to that the anxiety of fearing the incurred wall of debt when they graduate.
Harvard created the “high-tuition/high aid model”. Famous colleges average $3.5 billion endowments, while regular colleges average $113 million endowments. To compete for new students, some colleges have gyms decorated with “rock-climbing walls.” It’s called “an amenities arms race.” Some colleges give only crappy job placement after graduation. An average white family has “a net worth 20 times larger than a typical black family.” 2006 brought a lot more foreign students when entry requirements changed. Colleges are also supported by students on the party track who need a degree, not excellence. Undergraduates are spending less time studying – forty hours weekly in 1961 to twenty-seven hours by 2003. Voters who lack college degrees can show resentment of elite candidates at the voting booth. “Donald Trump makes me feel good about myself.” “Extractive capitalism”. The Bernie Sanders plan brings back college to being more of a public good.
Today, eighteen US states spend more money annually on their prisons than they do on higher education. Pause to wave the flag. Now that we’ve dismantled the American Dream, our higher education has moved from a public responsibility to a private one. One would expect public anger directed against those billionaires outsourcing US jobs to China, instead the anger is against professors, actors, and journalists - a nice party trick. School attendance in the US wasn’t mandatory until 1852. Republicans today see campuses as places for liberal indoctrination and critical race theory instead of as a ladder to lift your child up in society. This new view of Republicans happened even though the GI Bill “proved that young people could thrive on a college campus.” Presently, 4.6 million of our young Americans (18 to 24) don’t attend school or work a full-time job. And two million of our kids under the age of 18 are arrested annually in the US.
“The threat that higher education poses to white supremacy has always been hiding in plain sight.” 59% of Republicans said college played a negative role. “Increasingly, to be a college grad is to be a Democrat. Post-George Floyd rallies (15 million to 26 million participating) “dwarfed the civil rights protests of the 60’s.” 82% of those Post-Floyd crowds were at least college educated. In 2019, In 2016, 54% of working-class Americans said college education is “a risky gamble”. To many, college today looks like a “rigged fake meritocracy.” Cancellation of college debt looks very different to those who didn’t go to college and those grads who worked hard to pay off their debts. 50% of Gen X and Millennials say they would prefer living under socialism. This was good book which I read to better understand the recent huge rise in college debt.
“Between 1958 and 1964, federal dollars for university research quadrupled ($200 million to $800 million).” Would business control college or would it instead become the place for “moral awakening”? Campuses as a place of protest led to a backlash under the “law & order” banner (see Watts July 1965 Uprising with 34 dead). “The consensus around taxpayer support for higher education and a liberal curriculum” began to collapse. Reagan asks, “What in heaven’s name does academic freedom have to do with rioting, with anarchy?” He starts the culture wars and ends the higher education push, instead pushes “to end free tuition, the bedrock principle of the postwar college revolution.” Reagan said, “taxpayers shouldn’t have to subsidize intellectual curiosity”, and that “the main purpose of college should be workforce development.”
Kent State changes college life forever. Without warning two rows of Guardsmen there shoot 67 bullets in 13 seconds directly at students. It was an educational moment. Repeated at Jackson State, two students die. Was the American Heartland angered by unprovoked trained professionals slaughtering mere students, doing what Jesus would never do? No. “A Gallup poll taken immediately after the May 4th shootings found that 58% of Americans blamed the Kent State students for their own deaths and only 11% blamed the National Guard.” At a memorial event in Kent, townspeople chanted “Kent State Four! Should have studied more.” This reminds me to never visit the town of Kent. Post-Kent State, it became harder for low-income students to attend college.
The Powell Memorandum’s author Powell was alarmed by campus protest which for him said, America is “a wholly selfish, materialistic, racist, and repressive society.” I agree but I’d add, by design. Powell’s memo was “about saving US capitalism from campus infidels.” In response business diplomas increased 92% between 1972 to 1985 (when music also went corporate). In 1969, 82% of incoming freshmen stressed wanting to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life”. That figure dove to just 43% by 1985. College diplomas became “a question of personal responsibility.” US elites kept on ramping down the idea of higher education as a public good. Today we see the logical outcome, tapping voter outrage against “liberal” intellectuals so that “resentment would become the driving political force of the twenty-first century.” Still many colleges “remained islands of progressivism” with their “young students still hormonally driven to question authority.”
1979 was the first year that more women than men attended college, that number would grow so that “by 2020-21, nearly 60% of current college graduates were women.” Women “hold a greater proportion of America’s $1.7 trillion college debt burden”, nearly 2/3 of it. Then factor in that women graduates earn an average of 81% of what a man makes. Employers paid more for workers with a diploma (40% more in 1979 to 200+% by the mid-1990’s).
In 1987 the FCC kills off the Fairness Doctrine. AM radio stations desperately needed some way to compete against sonically superior FM Stereo and the game became clear – draw in the big corporate advertisers and cash by selling to the listener from the right using anger and “we share your fear” twaddle while empowering corporations over people. In the 60’s there were only two all-talk radio stations, “by 1995 there would be 1,130 – and almost all of these would be all conservative, all the time.” Imagine the thrill of addressing uneducated white middle class men working while listening to you paid for hours a day to say how you feel their anger and they aren’t alone.
When Clinton and Company severed blue-collar workers from the Democratic Party, that was a crazy boost for Conservative Talk Radio. “Democrats won’t even pretend to like you blue-collar folk? Come over to us! At least we will PRETEND to like you.” Funny how the workers who were the backbone of the New Deal were suddenly basking in the feigned attention of wealthy capitalists funding conservative media. Clinton governed center-right “much of the time.” After the 2008 crisis, aid to colleges plunged by 1/3, tuitions rose and don’t forget room and board, and mandatory fees. One third of students now suffer from food insecurity. Add to that the anxiety of fearing the incurred wall of debt when they graduate.
Harvard created the “high-tuition/high aid model”. Famous colleges average $3.5 billion endowments, while regular colleges average $113 million endowments. To compete for new students, some colleges have gyms decorated with “rock-climbing walls.” It’s called “an amenities arms race.” Some colleges give only crappy job placement after graduation. An average white family has “a net worth 20 times larger than a typical black family.” 2006 brought a lot more foreign students when entry requirements changed. Colleges are also supported by students on the party track who need a degree, not excellence. Undergraduates are spending less time studying – forty hours weekly in 1961 to twenty-seven hours by 2003. Voters who lack college degrees can show resentment of elite candidates at the voting booth. “Donald Trump makes me feel good about myself.” “Extractive capitalism”. The Bernie Sanders plan brings back college to being more of a public good.
Today, eighteen US states spend more money annually on their prisons than they do on higher education. Pause to wave the flag. Now that we’ve dismantled the American Dream, our higher education has moved from a public responsibility to a private one. One would expect public anger directed against those billionaires outsourcing US jobs to China, instead the anger is against professors, actors, and journalists - a nice party trick. School attendance in the US wasn’t mandatory until 1852. Republicans today see campuses as places for liberal indoctrination and critical race theory instead of as a ladder to lift your child up in society. This new view of Republicans happened even though the GI Bill “proved that young people could thrive on a college campus.” Presently, 4.6 million of our young Americans (18 to 24) don’t attend school or work a full-time job. And two million of our kids under the age of 18 are arrested annually in the US.
“The threat that higher education poses to white supremacy has always been hiding in plain sight.” 59% of Republicans said college played a negative role. “Increasingly, to be a college grad is to be a Democrat. Post-George Floyd rallies (15 million to 26 million participating) “dwarfed the civil rights protests of the 60’s.” 82% of those Post-Floyd crowds were at least college educated. In 2019, In 2016, 54% of working-class Americans said college education is “a risky gamble”. To many, college today looks like a “rigged fake meritocracy.” Cancellation of college debt looks very different to those who didn’t go to college and those grads who worked hard to pay off their debts. 50% of Gen X and Millennials say they would prefer living under socialism. This was good book which I read to better understand the recent huge rise in college debt.
March 17, 2023
One of the few books I've read about what's going on in higher ed today (other than Sara Goldrick-Rab's work) that actually seems to exist in an evidence-based reality, as opposed to some techno-utopian fantasy - at least for the parts about history. The suggestions for progress at the end -- a universal gap year of national service, more equitable funding structures -- are all absolute fantasy given the current power of the GQP fascists already in power in state legislatures and Congress, whose only power lies in continuing to stoke division between various segments of the working class (i.e., college-educated and non-college-educated).
Re: the pundits' surprise about Trump's victory, "No one wanted to contemplate the collateral damage from a rigged system where college now locked in America's gross inequality - meaning a gilded adulthood for a select few and back-breaking debt for millions more, while everybody else locked out of this 'knowledge economy' were told they must be a sucker or a loser" (7).
Uses Kenyon College - a wealthy blue island in the middle of a de-industrialized wasteland, as his case study.
Completely clear about how strange Kenyon is "one of every 5 students . . . . hails from the top 1 percent of the wealthiest families, and where 60 percent of the students are from the top 20 percent of income?" (13)
Overall, he argues that there was a move toward college a democratizing force (before WWII, just 5% of Americans went to college; afterwards, it was much closer to 40% - which provided the engineers, teachers, social workers, lawyers, and other technocrats who powered the economy. But that deal soured after the campus unrest of the 60s, when "our leaders, amid a moral panic that kids today were maybe learning just a little too much about democratic values, convinced their voters that college isn't really a public good, and that universal higher education would no longer be a national goal. Instead, they created a privatized regime with a diploma as a golden ticket for just over a third of America's young people, and they called this arguably rigged system 'a meritocracy' - thus telling the other 2/3 [who couldn't afford or didn't want to go to college] that obviously they lacked merit" (16). He could push this point by noticing that it was a *decision* to allow wages for all to stagnate since 1972, and to decide that retail workers and health care workers should earn low, precarious wages with few benefits, while keeping the college degree as the gatekeeper to middle class wages and benefits.
Interviews Joan Slonczewski, a biology professor, and Jeanne Griggs, who runs the writing center, argue that Trump voters do so b/c they are "brainwashed" by right-wing radio. "They challenged me on any suggestion that the American way of college has been a negative influence -- or that administrators are paid too much. Griggs told me that 'people vote the way they do b/c they haven't been able to get the education they need to do critical thinking.'" Oh, my, this is everything I hate about higher ed. Maybe they vote the way the do b/c they can see that the Democrats long ago abandoned the working class in favor of neoliberalism (hello, Biden breaking the railroad strike).
[Parenthetically, the editing is godawful. I hate to be an editing snob, b/c does this really matter compared to the content? But it seems just one more sign of the decline of publishing. Here's one sentence: "The school was founded in the 1820s by the first Episcopal bishop on what was then the Ohio frontier, Philander Chase." Philander Chase was the Ohio frontier?? Obviously the sentence should be "The school was founded in the 1820s by Philander Chase, the first Episcopal bishop of the territory, on what was then the Ohio frontier." (29). Here's another doozy: ""the launch of the influential Kenyon Review in 1937, not long before the 1940 graduation of the Poet Laureate Robert Lowell." Actually, says fact checker Jonna -- in 1947-1948, Robert Lowell served as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position later known as the US Poet Laureate. So there are two inaccuracies of time in the sentence, which should read "not long before the 1940 graduation of Robert Lowell, who would later serve in a position that would even later come to be known as the US Poet Laureate." These are details, but sloppy. Which makes me less trusting of the more substantive claims Bunch makes.]
Bunch's basic argument is that "a half century of bad decisions and generational change had sliced America into fourths, like a lazy pizza cutter" [again, c'mon, Bunch, you shouldn't be relying on an editor for this stuff - did you skip 8th grade Composition? The sentence should be, ". . . generational change had, like a lazy pizza cutter, sliced America into fourths."]
Left Broke - college education, but weighed down by worries about money and an unequal society
Left Out: "using drugs or video games to cope with the tedium of fast-food McJobs or warehouse work"
Left Behind: older generation clinging to "rituals as the middle-class culture they were born into crumbled before their eyes"
Left Perplexed - professors and admins at Kenyon who'd gone to school when "tuition was low and American optimism was high, struggled to understand why today's students weren't interested in the same issues, or why the Trumpers in the rest of Knox County drowned in their own ignorance" (38).
"the only thing worse than the struggle of paying for a diploma were the struggles facing those who'd never have one" (39).
Although I knew about the GI Bill's impact, I didn't know about its scale: "New Jersey's Rutgers University went from 7,000 pre-World War II to 16,000 within a short time after" (49). People like Harvard president Conant "had to admit . . . that veterans" were great students, serious, perceptive, and steady (50). Created 450,000 engineers, 91,000 scientists, along with 238,000 teachers to handle the boom babies. (50)
Example of one Kenyon alum whose work with the autoworkers near Kenyon in the 40s led him to "the egalitarian worldview of socialism," which led him to become the leader of Sweden. "This casual 1940s solidarity between Ohio's working class and those kids who were often the first in their family to attend college seemed no longer possible in the 2020s, when the university-bound and those left behind in a declining middle class were trapped in deep silos" (41).
No one focused too much on the college provisions of GI Bill, since less than half the troops who served in WWII had graduated from high school. They thought at most a million, fewer than one in ten, would go to college. They focused more on housing aid and unemployment benefits. The college portion was generous, but "they'd whittled down FDR's 1944 vision for an expanded welfare state to one lonely program for veterans" (47).
Of course, the GI Bill was skewed to white men, since serving had been, and "the late-1940s surge of male vets actually crowded out civilian college applicants who were women" (51). Mississippi's Rankin made sure that regional VAs had power over administration, so in the South they "steered Black applicants toward vocational training over college." And HBCU's didn't have access to boom in tax revenues and less access to wealthy donors at white colleges, though HBCU enrollment still tripled in the 40s. (51-52).
There were cultural pieces - despite fears of nuclear war, "most Americans in the 1950s venerated both new technology and scientists and physicians such as Dr. Jonas Salk . . . arguably the most admired man in the nation" (58).
1956-1970, college enrollment in America tripled, yet spending on higher ed rose sixfold. (58).
As always, the Truman Commission's recommendation to move toward truly universal higher ed through a "14th grade" and a more expansive government role in paying for it "was heavily weighed down by segregation" (61).
Nice exposition of California's work to expand higher ed, which resulted in high college-going rates there, while at the same time Ivy League presidents were promoting a "rigorous" education for the few. "Meritocracy" coined in 1958, though those who coined the term (Hannah Arendt or Michael Dunlop Young) "understood the negative context of a meritocracy as "a system prone to elite manipulation, which serious social consequences for the left behind" (67).
Describes the impact of the Port Huron statement, which "in pursuit of progressive goals, it rejected the collective action of worker-based early-twentieth-century leftist movements for a kind of personal freedom, made possible -- ironically - by the liberation of union-aided postwar affluence, and boosted by the free thought of liberal education. It would have been impossible to predict from a 1962 perspective how the desires for personal freedom might someday metastasize - steered by the generations coming up right behind them - into things like open-carry gun ownership or refusing to wear a mask during a pandemic" (76).
Details the ways in which universities were tied to the military-industrial complex, MSU sending 1000 people to remake the government in South Vietnam and worked closely with the CIA. "This remarkable contradiction -- a US war machine underwriting the cost for thousands of young Americans to attend college virtually for free, to major in liberal subjects such as philosophy and then question the military, and authority in general - was, inevitably, imploding" (84).
Reagan's first act was to impose tuition on UC system, said "taxpayers shouldn't subsidize intellectual curiosity" (88).
Some of the students arriving on campuses in the 60s had already learned to question authority from their dads, "who'd in many cases walked the picket lines in chaotic and sometimes violent labor unrest that spread across America in the 1930s and '40s," Akron tire strike of 1935. They remembered that "the New Deal had saved my family," recalling government coal deliveries and an uncle's CCC participation (89). At Kent State, R governor James Rhodes blamed Communist influence for the protests and said, "chillingly, 'We are going to eradicate the problem.' . . . Rhodes had already activated the state's National Guard to deal with a Teamsters strike, but now he diverted these armed troops to Kent State" (91).
James McGill Buchanan, who would win the Nobel prize in Economics in 1986 and advise the Koch brothers, was focused on the "college problem" in the 1970s. They wrote Academia in Anarchy (clearly with no understanding of what anarchy is), arguing that higher ed is not a "public good" but a "unique industry." Low or free tuition "provided no incentive to keep kids from becoming revolutionaries." This view would establish a framework in which "money to pay tuition would be borrowed against future earnings -- committing graduates to the service of capitalism" (94).
I hadn't realized that in 1971, more US grads earned BAs in social sciences than business. But business diplomas went up 92 percent from 1972 to 1985, while English dropped by 54 percent, history 63%, and sociology 61%. In 1969, 82% of students said it was important to develop a "meaningful philosophy of life" while 43% said so in 1985 (97).
1980-1985 - federal spending on higher ed fell 25% -- reductions to student aid, especially Pell of about $1B
1980 Pell covered 75% tuition, now about 30% (99)
Gives a nod to credential inflation (100)
Millions who wouldn't or couldn't borrow whatever it took "began to internalize that America in the college age was now a 'meritocracy' and that their failures to keep up weren't b/c the deck was stacked against them, but b/c of arrogant eggheads who didn't know how to screw in a lightbulb telling them they lacked 'merit.' And the smart elites who promoted this myth of a meritocracy apparently weren't bright enough to see that the resentment would become the driving political force of the twenty-first century" (101). [ Weird assumption here that the "smart elites" are not members of the right wing who benefit from that resentment and in fact explicitly stoke it].
Argues the left provided ammunition for the right, by "turning inward, shunning the grat universalistic causes that had galvanized college students in the early and mid-1960s, and embracing narrow spats over language or the arcane internal politics of academia." Todd Gitlin, "a communications professor and author who'd served as president of the national SDS in the period right after Tom Hayden had published the Port Huron statement , argued in The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars, that "late twentieth-century leftists 'were marching on the English Department while the Right took the White House" (122). He argued that structures like departments of racial, ethnic, and gender studies "made it easy to embrace identity politics, while protesting the broader political shifts in post-Reagan America felt overwhelming, so that 'university life could come to feel like a consolation prize." (123). Gives an example of passionate protest at Berkeley against hiring a French sociology professor to teach race and ethnic studies (he was white), while "there'd been a steep spike in California university tuition that would fall most heavily on Black and Brown students yet 'there was virtually no public protest from students at Berkeley or at any other California campus'" (123).
Argues that focus on identity politics gave an opportunity, along with expanded laws allowing right-wing radio/far right media outlets, for billionaires to fulfill a dream that had once been unthinkable "converting the working class that had been the backbone of FDR's New Deal into Republicans" (124).
Argues that this mess is the result of 3 wrong turns:
1. conservative backlash (fueled by anti-intellectualism, white panic over rising Black and Brown enrolment, and hatred of government) that decided college was nota public good "and instead turned ambitious young people into indentured servants of debt"
2. Meritocracy, screaming out for rigging
3. Diploma as a passport in a hypercapitalist society "Never mind that 'credential' mean t one thing (social status, self-worth) to the super wealthy who hoarded elite college slots and something else to the daughter of a laid-off factory worker (employability, at least a shot at a future). College education started to feel like some crazy Beeple artwork NFT - bid upward to irrational prices, seemingly destined to collapse at any minute" (132).
"Few question the insanity of this uniquely American system. Imagine celebrating your kid's high school graduation - and telling your party guests it was worth the $30k you borrowed to pay for it. That would be crazy, right? And yet we all know young people who now owe $80k, $100k, or even $150k for the privilege of attending college, even though today a university degree means what a high school diploma meant 80 years ago" (133).
Thank God - reiterates that focusing on Varsity Blues is part of the Malcolm Gladwell syndrome -- his takes in a podcast "weren't totally wrong, but he seemed to miss the big picture of what American college means for the vast middle class" - like an episode about Bowdoin's gourmet cafeteria versus Vassar's unappealing slop "because it had redirected dollars into scholarships for lower-income applicants. Gladwell seemed oblivious to the reality that for hundreds of thousands of food-insecure US college students, Vassar's mystery meat might look like a Kobe steak" (134).
In PA, 2008-2018, state government aid plunged 33.8% per student
A student now paid for nearly 75% of education through tuition and fees, whereas in the 1980s state taxpayers had picked up 75%. (136).
Matriculation at a four-year school is presented as a solution to the lower middle class, when "instead, for millions saddled with staggering tuition bills and loomin gdebt, it can feel more like a continuation of them" (139).
Even though Obama had wanted to do something about college costs, "when Obama left office, America's college debt had roughly doubled, from $600B to $1.2T, as average tution at both private and public universities rose in the ballpark of roughly 25% (140)
Examples of the rigged game of selectivity sweepstakes (143).
"When you get beyond the Malcolm Gladwell Syndrome of elite-college fixation and look at the #RealCollege picture, how the idea of higher ed as a public good got warped into a privatized dog-eat-dog inequality machine jokingly called a 'meritocracy,' the mismatch between young people's degrees and the actual job market, the soaring debt for those who gambled o college, and the rising despair among young people left out - you start to get a sense of how America's college problem doesn't just affect people applying to college" (156).
2015 paper on deaths of despair by Case and Eaton. Until the mid-70s, rates of happiness among those with and without diplomas were about the same. Now there's deindustrialization and the social factors that go with that. 153,000 Americans a year are dying from overdose, suicide, and alcohol addiction - sharply increase among working-age "white men and whomen without college degrees, especially in rural areas and blue-collar Rust Belt " == 3 fully loaded Boeing 737 MAX jets falling out of the sky every day for a year. Didn't rise among Black and Brown workers, "from familial or church ties to differing expectations or coping mechanisms." "It's the long-term drip of losing opportunities and losing meaning and structure in life." And now it's surging for younger people without college diplomas.
Those who don't go to college struggle to find "purpose and meaning" -- Bunch argues that being 18 and transitioning out of high school is a very fraught time, where we should invest meaning and resources. (189)
1999 college debt was $90B
2011 $550 B
Unemployment rate of those young grades -- 9.9 percent (18% for those without college degrees).
"few people seem to know that college costs actually rose by a greater percentage than medical expenses every year, beginning in the Reagan era" (196).
Among R's, support for "the very idea of college" dropped off a cliff in 2015 -- 54$ "believed colleges had a positive impact on the country's direction
2017 - 58% college plays a negative role
2015 Madison - cost of attending had doubled since 1985
percentage of out of state students willing to pay tuition spiked
Re: the pundits' surprise about Trump's victory, "No one wanted to contemplate the collateral damage from a rigged system where college now locked in America's gross inequality - meaning a gilded adulthood for a select few and back-breaking debt for millions more, while everybody else locked out of this 'knowledge economy' were told they must be a sucker or a loser" (7).
Uses Kenyon College - a wealthy blue island in the middle of a de-industrialized wasteland, as his case study.
Completely clear about how strange Kenyon is "one of every 5 students . . . . hails from the top 1 percent of the wealthiest families, and where 60 percent of the students are from the top 20 percent of income?" (13)
Overall, he argues that there was a move toward college a democratizing force (before WWII, just 5% of Americans went to college; afterwards, it was much closer to 40% - which provided the engineers, teachers, social workers, lawyers, and other technocrats who powered the economy. But that deal soured after the campus unrest of the 60s, when "our leaders, amid a moral panic that kids today were maybe learning just a little too much about democratic values, convinced their voters that college isn't really a public good, and that universal higher education would no longer be a national goal. Instead, they created a privatized regime with a diploma as a golden ticket for just over a third of America's young people, and they called this arguably rigged system 'a meritocracy' - thus telling the other 2/3 [who couldn't afford or didn't want to go to college] that obviously they lacked merit" (16). He could push this point by noticing that it was a *decision* to allow wages for all to stagnate since 1972, and to decide that retail workers and health care workers should earn low, precarious wages with few benefits, while keeping the college degree as the gatekeeper to middle class wages and benefits.
Interviews Joan Slonczewski, a biology professor, and Jeanne Griggs, who runs the writing center, argue that Trump voters do so b/c they are "brainwashed" by right-wing radio. "They challenged me on any suggestion that the American way of college has been a negative influence -- or that administrators are paid too much. Griggs told me that 'people vote the way they do b/c they haven't been able to get the education they need to do critical thinking.'" Oh, my, this is everything I hate about higher ed. Maybe they vote the way the do b/c they can see that the Democrats long ago abandoned the working class in favor of neoliberalism (hello, Biden breaking the railroad strike).
[Parenthetically, the editing is godawful. I hate to be an editing snob, b/c does this really matter compared to the content? But it seems just one more sign of the decline of publishing. Here's one sentence: "The school was founded in the 1820s by the first Episcopal bishop on what was then the Ohio frontier, Philander Chase." Philander Chase was the Ohio frontier?? Obviously the sentence should be "The school was founded in the 1820s by Philander Chase, the first Episcopal bishop of the territory, on what was then the Ohio frontier." (29). Here's another doozy: ""the launch of the influential Kenyon Review in 1937, not long before the 1940 graduation of the Poet Laureate Robert Lowell." Actually, says fact checker Jonna -- in 1947-1948, Robert Lowell served as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position later known as the US Poet Laureate. So there are two inaccuracies of time in the sentence, which should read "not long before the 1940 graduation of Robert Lowell, who would later serve in a position that would even later come to be known as the US Poet Laureate." These are details, but sloppy. Which makes me less trusting of the more substantive claims Bunch makes.]
Bunch's basic argument is that "a half century of bad decisions and generational change had sliced America into fourths, like a lazy pizza cutter" [again, c'mon, Bunch, you shouldn't be relying on an editor for this stuff - did you skip 8th grade Composition? The sentence should be, ". . . generational change had, like a lazy pizza cutter, sliced America into fourths."]
Left Broke - college education, but weighed down by worries about money and an unequal society
Left Out: "using drugs or video games to cope with the tedium of fast-food McJobs or warehouse work"
Left Behind: older generation clinging to "rituals as the middle-class culture they were born into crumbled before their eyes"
Left Perplexed - professors and admins at Kenyon who'd gone to school when "tuition was low and American optimism was high, struggled to understand why today's students weren't interested in the same issues, or why the Trumpers in the rest of Knox County drowned in their own ignorance" (38).
"the only thing worse than the struggle of paying for a diploma were the struggles facing those who'd never have one" (39).
Although I knew about the GI Bill's impact, I didn't know about its scale: "New Jersey's Rutgers University went from 7,000 pre-World War II to 16,000 within a short time after" (49). People like Harvard president Conant "had to admit . . . that veterans" were great students, serious, perceptive, and steady (50). Created 450,000 engineers, 91,000 scientists, along with 238,000 teachers to handle the boom babies. (50)
Example of one Kenyon alum whose work with the autoworkers near Kenyon in the 40s led him to "the egalitarian worldview of socialism," which led him to become the leader of Sweden. "This casual 1940s solidarity between Ohio's working class and those kids who were often the first in their family to attend college seemed no longer possible in the 2020s, when the university-bound and those left behind in a declining middle class were trapped in deep silos" (41).
No one focused too much on the college provisions of GI Bill, since less than half the troops who served in WWII had graduated from high school. They thought at most a million, fewer than one in ten, would go to college. They focused more on housing aid and unemployment benefits. The college portion was generous, but "they'd whittled down FDR's 1944 vision for an expanded welfare state to one lonely program for veterans" (47).
Of course, the GI Bill was skewed to white men, since serving had been, and "the late-1940s surge of male vets actually crowded out civilian college applicants who were women" (51). Mississippi's Rankin made sure that regional VAs had power over administration, so in the South they "steered Black applicants toward vocational training over college." And HBCU's didn't have access to boom in tax revenues and less access to wealthy donors at white colleges, though HBCU enrollment still tripled in the 40s. (51-52).
There were cultural pieces - despite fears of nuclear war, "most Americans in the 1950s venerated both new technology and scientists and physicians such as Dr. Jonas Salk . . . arguably the most admired man in the nation" (58).
1956-1970, college enrollment in America tripled, yet spending on higher ed rose sixfold. (58).
As always, the Truman Commission's recommendation to move toward truly universal higher ed through a "14th grade" and a more expansive government role in paying for it "was heavily weighed down by segregation" (61).
Nice exposition of California's work to expand higher ed, which resulted in high college-going rates there, while at the same time Ivy League presidents were promoting a "rigorous" education for the few. "Meritocracy" coined in 1958, though those who coined the term (Hannah Arendt or Michael Dunlop Young) "understood the negative context of a meritocracy as "a system prone to elite manipulation, which serious social consequences for the left behind" (67).
Describes the impact of the Port Huron statement, which "in pursuit of progressive goals, it rejected the collective action of worker-based early-twentieth-century leftist movements for a kind of personal freedom, made possible -- ironically - by the liberation of union-aided postwar affluence, and boosted by the free thought of liberal education. It would have been impossible to predict from a 1962 perspective how the desires for personal freedom might someday metastasize - steered by the generations coming up right behind them - into things like open-carry gun ownership or refusing to wear a mask during a pandemic" (76).
Details the ways in which universities were tied to the military-industrial complex, MSU sending 1000 people to remake the government in South Vietnam and worked closely with the CIA. "This remarkable contradiction -- a US war machine underwriting the cost for thousands of young Americans to attend college virtually for free, to major in liberal subjects such as philosophy and then question the military, and authority in general - was, inevitably, imploding" (84).
Reagan's first act was to impose tuition on UC system, said "taxpayers shouldn't subsidize intellectual curiosity" (88).
Some of the students arriving on campuses in the 60s had already learned to question authority from their dads, "who'd in many cases walked the picket lines in chaotic and sometimes violent labor unrest that spread across America in the 1930s and '40s," Akron tire strike of 1935. They remembered that "the New Deal had saved my family," recalling government coal deliveries and an uncle's CCC participation (89). At Kent State, R governor James Rhodes blamed Communist influence for the protests and said, "chillingly, 'We are going to eradicate the problem.' . . . Rhodes had already activated the state's National Guard to deal with a Teamsters strike, but now he diverted these armed troops to Kent State" (91).
James McGill Buchanan, who would win the Nobel prize in Economics in 1986 and advise the Koch brothers, was focused on the "college problem" in the 1970s. They wrote Academia in Anarchy (clearly with no understanding of what anarchy is), arguing that higher ed is not a "public good" but a "unique industry." Low or free tuition "provided no incentive to keep kids from becoming revolutionaries." This view would establish a framework in which "money to pay tuition would be borrowed against future earnings -- committing graduates to the service of capitalism" (94).
I hadn't realized that in 1971, more US grads earned BAs in social sciences than business. But business diplomas went up 92 percent from 1972 to 1985, while English dropped by 54 percent, history 63%, and sociology 61%. In 1969, 82% of students said it was important to develop a "meaningful philosophy of life" while 43% said so in 1985 (97).
1980-1985 - federal spending on higher ed fell 25% -- reductions to student aid, especially Pell of about $1B
1980 Pell covered 75% tuition, now about 30% (99)
Gives a nod to credential inflation (100)
Millions who wouldn't or couldn't borrow whatever it took "began to internalize that America in the college age was now a 'meritocracy' and that their failures to keep up weren't b/c the deck was stacked against them, but b/c of arrogant eggheads who didn't know how to screw in a lightbulb telling them they lacked 'merit.' And the smart elites who promoted this myth of a meritocracy apparently weren't bright enough to see that the resentment would become the driving political force of the twenty-first century" (101). [ Weird assumption here that the "smart elites" are not members of the right wing who benefit from that resentment and in fact explicitly stoke it].
Argues the left provided ammunition for the right, by "turning inward, shunning the grat universalistic causes that had galvanized college students in the early and mid-1960s, and embracing narrow spats over language or the arcane internal politics of academia." Todd Gitlin, "a communications professor and author who'd served as president of the national SDS in the period right after Tom Hayden had published the Port Huron statement , argued in The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars, that "late twentieth-century leftists 'were marching on the English Department while the Right took the White House" (122). He argued that structures like departments of racial, ethnic, and gender studies "made it easy to embrace identity politics, while protesting the broader political shifts in post-Reagan America felt overwhelming, so that 'university life could come to feel like a consolation prize." (123). Gives an example of passionate protest at Berkeley against hiring a French sociology professor to teach race and ethnic studies (he was white), while "there'd been a steep spike in California university tuition that would fall most heavily on Black and Brown students yet 'there was virtually no public protest from students at Berkeley or at any other California campus'" (123).
Argues that focus on identity politics gave an opportunity, along with expanded laws allowing right-wing radio/far right media outlets, for billionaires to fulfill a dream that had once been unthinkable "converting the working class that had been the backbone of FDR's New Deal into Republicans" (124).
Argues that this mess is the result of 3 wrong turns:
1. conservative backlash (fueled by anti-intellectualism, white panic over rising Black and Brown enrolment, and hatred of government) that decided college was nota public good "and instead turned ambitious young people into indentured servants of debt"
2. Meritocracy, screaming out for rigging
3. Diploma as a passport in a hypercapitalist society "Never mind that 'credential' mean t one thing (social status, self-worth) to the super wealthy who hoarded elite college slots and something else to the daughter of a laid-off factory worker (employability, at least a shot at a future). College education started to feel like some crazy Beeple artwork NFT - bid upward to irrational prices, seemingly destined to collapse at any minute" (132).
"Few question the insanity of this uniquely American system. Imagine celebrating your kid's high school graduation - and telling your party guests it was worth the $30k you borrowed to pay for it. That would be crazy, right? And yet we all know young people who now owe $80k, $100k, or even $150k for the privilege of attending college, even though today a university degree means what a high school diploma meant 80 years ago" (133).
Thank God - reiterates that focusing on Varsity Blues is part of the Malcolm Gladwell syndrome -- his takes in a podcast "weren't totally wrong, but he seemed to miss the big picture of what American college means for the vast middle class" - like an episode about Bowdoin's gourmet cafeteria versus Vassar's unappealing slop "because it had redirected dollars into scholarships for lower-income applicants. Gladwell seemed oblivious to the reality that for hundreds of thousands of food-insecure US college students, Vassar's mystery meat might look like a Kobe steak" (134).
In PA, 2008-2018, state government aid plunged 33.8% per student
A student now paid for nearly 75% of education through tuition and fees, whereas in the 1980s state taxpayers had picked up 75%. (136).
Matriculation at a four-year school is presented as a solution to the lower middle class, when "instead, for millions saddled with staggering tuition bills and loomin gdebt, it can feel more like a continuation of them" (139).
Even though Obama had wanted to do something about college costs, "when Obama left office, America's college debt had roughly doubled, from $600B to $1.2T, as average tution at both private and public universities rose in the ballpark of roughly 25% (140)
Examples of the rigged game of selectivity sweepstakes (143).
"When you get beyond the Malcolm Gladwell Syndrome of elite-college fixation and look at the #RealCollege picture, how the idea of higher ed as a public good got warped into a privatized dog-eat-dog inequality machine jokingly called a 'meritocracy,' the mismatch between young people's degrees and the actual job market, the soaring debt for those who gambled o college, and the rising despair among young people left out - you start to get a sense of how America's college problem doesn't just affect people applying to college" (156).
2015 paper on deaths of despair by Case and Eaton. Until the mid-70s, rates of happiness among those with and without diplomas were about the same. Now there's deindustrialization and the social factors that go with that. 153,000 Americans a year are dying from overdose, suicide, and alcohol addiction - sharply increase among working-age "white men and whomen without college degrees, especially in rural areas and blue-collar Rust Belt " == 3 fully loaded Boeing 737 MAX jets falling out of the sky every day for a year. Didn't rise among Black and Brown workers, "from familial or church ties to differing expectations or coping mechanisms." "It's the long-term drip of losing opportunities and losing meaning and structure in life." And now it's surging for younger people without college diplomas.
Those who don't go to college struggle to find "purpose and meaning" -- Bunch argues that being 18 and transitioning out of high school is a very fraught time, where we should invest meaning and resources. (189)
1999 college debt was $90B
2011 $550 B
Unemployment rate of those young grades -- 9.9 percent (18% for those without college degrees).
"few people seem to know that college costs actually rose by a greater percentage than medical expenses every year, beginning in the Reagan era" (196).
Among R's, support for "the very idea of college" dropped off a cliff in 2015 -- 54$ "believed colleges had a positive impact on the country's direction
2017 - 58% college plays a negative role
2015 Madison - cost of attending had doubled since 1985
percentage of out of state students willing to pay tuition spiked
September 3, 2022
A really good book, written with a lot of pop and highly compelling thesis. Bunch diligently illustrates the evolution of the American college system from prior to the Second World War through to now. And along the way he brilliantly demonstrates how college slowly began to find itself at the very heart of the American culture wars and our political divide.
I think a great many issues in America today would look a lot better had college remained as was in the heady times of the GI Bill: public, free, no frills, dedicated to lower-case L liberal education. And if beside this we had somehow developed a flourishing network of similarly free trade school and community colleges, I think there is a good chance many aspects of contemporary American life would be a lot better.
Bunch brilliantly lays blame for the current mess of college (extremely high cost, politically polarized, overly luxurious and underly educational, and prohibitive to many different types of people in many different situations) at the feet of both Republicans and Democrats. Much of the shift from GI Bill era view of college to contemplate one is credit to Ronald Reagan’s hated for learning for learnings sake and his constant attacks on public universities. But so much of that work has been sustained—or right wing stereotypes of why elite colleges are bad amplified—by Democrats focus on elite schooling and supposedly merit based systems.
I fear Bunch’s point in the conclusion that college itself is now too controversial for the parties to unite behind a fix is true. And I find his brief discussion of universal mandatory public service to be a compelling solution. But I need to read a book on that by itself.
All in all I found myself constantly surprised by just how many stunning points Bunch makes about how college and America’s political divide interact. I think many of the issues I see day to day in the workplace stem from college’s strange cultural evolution as well. A super thought compelling read.
I think a great many issues in America today would look a lot better had college remained as was in the heady times of the GI Bill: public, free, no frills, dedicated to lower-case L liberal education. And if beside this we had somehow developed a flourishing network of similarly free trade school and community colleges, I think there is a good chance many aspects of contemporary American life would be a lot better.
Bunch brilliantly lays blame for the current mess of college (extremely high cost, politically polarized, overly luxurious and underly educational, and prohibitive to many different types of people in many different situations) at the feet of both Republicans and Democrats. Much of the shift from GI Bill era view of college to contemplate one is credit to Ronald Reagan’s hated for learning for learnings sake and his constant attacks on public universities. But so much of that work has been sustained—or right wing stereotypes of why elite colleges are bad amplified—by Democrats focus on elite schooling and supposedly merit based systems.
I fear Bunch’s point in the conclusion that college itself is now too controversial for the parties to unite behind a fix is true. And I find his brief discussion of universal mandatory public service to be a compelling solution. But I need to read a book on that by itself.
All in all I found myself constantly surprised by just how many stunning points Bunch makes about how college and America’s political divide interact. I think many of the issues I see day to day in the workplace stem from college’s strange cultural evolution as well. A super thought compelling read.
May 28, 2022
After the Ivory Tower Falls by Will Bunch is a detailed and nuanced look at how college has gone from a symbol of the American dream to a divisive battleground in the current partisan environment.
In tracing how a college education went from being only for a select few to being an avenue for (theoretically) all to improve their lot in life and then on to becoming a political pawn and punching bag Bunch offers insight into what we could have done and what we still could do.
It seems to me that one of the biggest obstacles to actual debate on making higher education accessible, affordable, and effective is how we define higher education. So many of us think only of 4-year universities and maybe a nod toward community colleges. First of all, community colleges deserve a lot more than a nod. In addition, the inclusion of skills training, apprenticeships, and many other forms of education and training need to be included in a wide-ranging plan to include as many people as possible and as many avenues toward a fulfilling life as possible.
We can't go back in time, whether to make the decisions about higher education that should have been made in Truman's time or to a world where manufacturing is again a dominant and well-paying field. Many of those jobs are gone, not to someplace else but simply gone. The consensus and motivation that we had early in this time frame is also gone so what we should have done is mostly moot, though we can learn (one hopes) from it. We have to look at where we are now, who we are now, and work toward something that will do the best for the most. Bunch offers suggestions and ideas toward this end and the future of our young people is the future of our country, and that should not be a partisan issue.
One quote from close to the front struck me. In discussing Clark Kerr and the type of meritocracy envisioned at the time, Bunch states "[a]wash in prosperity, no one worried about a future in which the fantasy of merit-based success became entrenched, but the equality of opportunity needed for a real system of merit would disappear." For me, that sums up a lot of what still angers and frustrates me about where we are. We went from college being for the elite, to college being a steppingstone for millions of everyday people, and now back to college being for the elite (as far as postgraduate success) while being a burden on everyone else (whether from crippling debt in a poor job market or being shut out completely from even attending and having the chance).
My comments are what struck me and are my takeaways. The book itself offers so much information that I think any reader with an interest in how we can repair society will find points that speak to them and thus have different takeaways. Ideally, all of us with our different perspectives can then start some kind of dialogue about making meaningful change.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
In tracing how a college education went from being only for a select few to being an avenue for (theoretically) all to improve their lot in life and then on to becoming a political pawn and punching bag Bunch offers insight into what we could have done and what we still could do.
It seems to me that one of the biggest obstacles to actual debate on making higher education accessible, affordable, and effective is how we define higher education. So many of us think only of 4-year universities and maybe a nod toward community colleges. First of all, community colleges deserve a lot more than a nod. In addition, the inclusion of skills training, apprenticeships, and many other forms of education and training need to be included in a wide-ranging plan to include as many people as possible and as many avenues toward a fulfilling life as possible.
We can't go back in time, whether to make the decisions about higher education that should have been made in Truman's time or to a world where manufacturing is again a dominant and well-paying field. Many of those jobs are gone, not to someplace else but simply gone. The consensus and motivation that we had early in this time frame is also gone so what we should have done is mostly moot, though we can learn (one hopes) from it. We have to look at where we are now, who we are now, and work toward something that will do the best for the most. Bunch offers suggestions and ideas toward this end and the future of our young people is the future of our country, and that should not be a partisan issue.
One quote from close to the front struck me. In discussing Clark Kerr and the type of meritocracy envisioned at the time, Bunch states "[a]wash in prosperity, no one worried about a future in which the fantasy of merit-based success became entrenched, but the equality of opportunity needed for a real system of merit would disappear." For me, that sums up a lot of what still angers and frustrates me about where we are. We went from college being for the elite, to college being a steppingstone for millions of everyday people, and now back to college being for the elite (as far as postgraduate success) while being a burden on everyone else (whether from crippling debt in a poor job market or being shut out completely from even attending and having the chance).
My comments are what struck me and are my takeaways. The book itself offers so much information that I think any reader with an interest in how we can repair society will find points that speak to them and thus have different takeaways. Ideally, all of us with our different perspectives can then start some kind of dialogue about making meaningful change.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
September 20, 2023
1.5
This book was exhausting to read. I’m so glad I’m done.
1. The structure was tedious. It was convoluted, confusing, covered both way too much and not enough. Each chapter focused on a different topic (be it an era of history, a proposal, or something else intangible), and within that chapter had multiple subtopics. There were a LOT of anecdotes and stories about individuals — I had to keep reminding myself that (a) Bunch is a journalist so this is his style, and (b) none of the people he talks about matter (in the specifics) to the overall point and I don’t have to remember their names. I did not enjoy the structure at all, found it difficult to follow and unclear.
2. The title of the book is not the actual argument. The title suggests that college broke American politics. That’s not his argument. His argument is that politics led to a broken college system in America, which in turn polarized people, and politicians exploited the results of the broken college system to turn people against each other. I think I agree with his argument, but I don’t know why I needed to read an entire book to get there.
3. He is EXTREMELY condescending of the very people he’s trying to empathize with — non-college-going republican voters. He comes across as one of the elite, condescending liberals he describes in the book. It’s not an attractive quality and made me squirm at times. However, he seems pretty unaware, even when writing about himself.
4. I wanted to know more about many of the things he touches on, but a general overview of the entire history of American higher education was not a good format for this book. I’d enjoy reading a newsletter by him, elaborating on each section of this book. As a series of blog posts this could have been great. Unfortunately it was a book.
I did learn some things and enjoyed parts of it. The heavy use of reporter-style writing — explaining a complex structure and issue through one person’s individual story — and got old quickly and made me dislike the reading experience. I didn’t find the book super cohesive and found it extremely hard to get through. I had to force myself to pick it back up each time, and often set it back down after a few pages. I so badly wanted to like this book, but I can’t widely recommend it. If you want a long and dense (not academic, but think of reading a loooong Atlantic article) overview of the history of higher ed in America, it might be worth a try, see if you like it more than I did.
This book was exhausting to read. I’m so glad I’m done.
1. The structure was tedious. It was convoluted, confusing, covered both way too much and not enough. Each chapter focused on a different topic (be it an era of history, a proposal, or something else intangible), and within that chapter had multiple subtopics. There were a LOT of anecdotes and stories about individuals — I had to keep reminding myself that (a) Bunch is a journalist so this is his style, and (b) none of the people he talks about matter (in the specifics) to the overall point and I don’t have to remember their names. I did not enjoy the structure at all, found it difficult to follow and unclear.
2. The title of the book is not the actual argument. The title suggests that college broke American politics. That’s not his argument. His argument is that politics led to a broken college system in America, which in turn polarized people, and politicians exploited the results of the broken college system to turn people against each other. I think I agree with his argument, but I don’t know why I needed to read an entire book to get there.
3. He is EXTREMELY condescending of the very people he’s trying to empathize with — non-college-going republican voters. He comes across as one of the elite, condescending liberals he describes in the book. It’s not an attractive quality and made me squirm at times. However, he seems pretty unaware, even when writing about himself.
4. I wanted to know more about many of the things he touches on, but a general overview of the entire history of American higher education was not a good format for this book. I’d enjoy reading a newsletter by him, elaborating on each section of this book. As a series of blog posts this could have been great. Unfortunately it was a book.
I did learn some things and enjoyed parts of it. The heavy use of reporter-style writing — explaining a complex structure and issue through one person’s individual story — and got old quickly and made me dislike the reading experience. I didn’t find the book super cohesive and found it extremely hard to get through. I had to force myself to pick it back up each time, and often set it back down after a few pages. I so badly wanted to like this book, but I can’t widely recommend it. If you want a long and dense (not academic, but think of reading a loooong Atlantic article) overview of the history of higher ed in America, it might be worth a try, see if you like it more than I did.
August 27, 2022
(I received a free copy through a Goodreads Giveaway).
As both a graduate of, and a professor at, a private 4-year college, I learned a lot from this book. It's a highly readable and engaging account of higher education in the US since World War II, especially how the economics of paying for college have shifted along with political attitudes toward education. Bunch makes a persuasive argument that the primary divide in the nation right now is between those who went to college and those who didn't. He's better at analyzing the problem than at proposing solutions (but aren't we all?). I was finishing the book just as Biden's debt forgiveness was announced, and I don't know how well the book will wear as events unfold, but that's always the hazard with any book engaging current events. Bunch spends a chapter pushing national service, which may be a good idea in itself, but is not going to make college more affordable.
As both a graduate of, and a professor at, a private 4-year college, I learned a lot from this book. It's a highly readable and engaging account of higher education in the US since World War II, especially how the economics of paying for college have shifted along with political attitudes toward education. Bunch makes a persuasive argument that the primary divide in the nation right now is between those who went to college and those who didn't. He's better at analyzing the problem than at proposing solutions (but aren't we all?). I was finishing the book just as Biden's debt forgiveness was announced, and I don't know how well the book will wear as events unfold, but that's always the hazard with any book engaging current events. Bunch spends a chapter pushing national service, which may be a good idea in itself, but is not going to make college more affordable.
November 6, 2022
This review is based on an advance reader copy.
This book was extremely disappointing. I was expecting a well-researched look at what went wrong with college, why it got so expensive, why student debt is so high, and of course how debt cancellation got to be such a big political issue. What I got was a very long, boring, rambling and slanted op-ed that was nine chapters of why we need to cancel all debt and make college free. Apparently this will also fix politics because we need to get Republican voters to go to college so that they will then know better than to vote Republican. The last chapter did bring up an interesting potential solution of introducing a mandatory year of service between high school and college, but overall this book was not worth the time it took me to read it. There was very little new information. Statistics were quoted and assertions made throughout that were often not backed up by references at all, or were not referenced in a way that allows a reader to find the source material such as referring to "a Pew Research Center survey" with no other identifying information.
Chapter 1 was a horrible way to start this book, but it really set the stage for the rest of it. Bunch bemoans how the two political groups can't see eye to eye and have a real conversation while showing why: most of the chapter focuses on liberals at Kenyon College and the only conservative he talked to was some crazy ultra right-wing nut/Trump diehard. He mentions the host family of an international Kenyon student who seem to be much more moderate but doesn't bother trying to follow up that lead because he clearly already had laid out the narrative he wanted to portray and they didn't fit it. What was most chilling about the mention of the host family is that the student said her host father "helped me to humanize Trump voters." Since when did we start thinking of people on the other side of the aisle as non-human? Yikes. I have plenty of friends I disagree with on issues politically and yet we are able to remain friends and politely debate the issues as adults. When you recognize that we are all intelligent humans and treat people as such, you can have very interesting, enlightening conversations, change minds, and maybe even learn something yourself in the process. The problem with our politics today is that neither side will have a civil conversation with the other and each side portrays the other as monstrous. Bunch did the exact same thing here. Branch out Bunch!
In fact, throughout the whole book, all the people he talked to are cherry-picked. He visited one trade school but sees it as more of a unicorn - only around because of a visionary philanthropist 100 years ago. I admit to not knowing many 18 year olds (I'm too old to know them personally but not old enough to have friends with kids who are 18), but a couple cousins-in-law from the rust belt have their futures planned out and those futures are trade school. One is going to be an auto mechanic. The other is already getting paid to go to trade school and work part time as an electrician apprentice. In a few years, he will be making what I do with my Master's degree in engineering from a private college, except he didn't have the six-figure educational outlay I did. Soon after that, he will be working for himself and making even more. The trade school Bunch spotlighted may be special, but it is not a fluke. The push for everyone to go to a four year college is well-intentioned but ill-informed. The way my high school guidance counselors talked, you were a loser if you didn't go to a four-year school. I didn't know anything about trade schools and I honestly wish I had. There is a great deal more satisfaction to building or fixing something than there is in writing reports no one will ever read.
Bunch's very narrow worldview is clear in this book. He is a humanities major and bemoans the decline of people majoring in the humanities, and yet all the people he talks to who are struggling to pay loans back are humanities majors. Hmmmm. As someone from the other side of campus (i.e. the engineering quad) my college friends have had a very different experience with finding jobs and paying back loans. Branching out and actually talking to some non-humanities majors would be very good for Bunch's personal education, but it would definitely hurt the narrative in this book.
As a minor nit, Bunch sometimes gets on his political soap box and sticks so many asides into the text that it is hard to follow what his primary point is.
Since this book seems to have mostly very good reviews and I know I am likely to be attacked for my contrary opinion, here is a bit about my college experience. I was lucky that my very not rich parents started saving for college before I was born, so they were able to pay for most of my education. I did everything I could to save money in college: moved off campus, didn't go out with friends except to free stuff, had a part-time job, and lived off of ramen and free pizza from recruiting events. After four years, I had just under $30k in debt, which is apparently above average for when I graduated (according to my first google result, which was US News and World Report). Being an engineer, I got a decent job after college, mostly stayed on my ramen diet, and was able to pay my loan off in about 3 years. All of my engineering friends have similar stories except for a couple rich ones that never had loans in the first place. I'm not saying that if I can do it everyone else can do it too and should suck it up. I'm saying that if Bunch really wanted to pretend this book was anything besides a slanted op-ed piece, he really should have looked at a wider slice of college kids and America in general. It would have made this book more interesting and perhaps gotten to the real root of these problems.
This book was extremely disappointing. I was expecting a well-researched look at what went wrong with college, why it got so expensive, why student debt is so high, and of course how debt cancellation got to be such a big political issue. What I got was a very long, boring, rambling and slanted op-ed that was nine chapters of why we need to cancel all debt and make college free. Apparently this will also fix politics because we need to get Republican voters to go to college so that they will then know better than to vote Republican. The last chapter did bring up an interesting potential solution of introducing a mandatory year of service between high school and college, but overall this book was not worth the time it took me to read it. There was very little new information. Statistics were quoted and assertions made throughout that were often not backed up by references at all, or were not referenced in a way that allows a reader to find the source material such as referring to "a Pew Research Center survey" with no other identifying information.
Chapter 1 was a horrible way to start this book, but it really set the stage for the rest of it. Bunch bemoans how the two political groups can't see eye to eye and have a real conversation while showing why: most of the chapter focuses on liberals at Kenyon College and the only conservative he talked to was some crazy ultra right-wing nut/Trump diehard. He mentions the host family of an international Kenyon student who seem to be much more moderate but doesn't bother trying to follow up that lead because he clearly already had laid out the narrative he wanted to portray and they didn't fit it. What was most chilling about the mention of the host family is that the student said her host father "helped me to humanize Trump voters." Since when did we start thinking of people on the other side of the aisle as non-human? Yikes. I have plenty of friends I disagree with on issues politically and yet we are able to remain friends and politely debate the issues as adults. When you recognize that we are all intelligent humans and treat people as such, you can have very interesting, enlightening conversations, change minds, and maybe even learn something yourself in the process. The problem with our politics today is that neither side will have a civil conversation with the other and each side portrays the other as monstrous. Bunch did the exact same thing here. Branch out Bunch!
In fact, throughout the whole book, all the people he talked to are cherry-picked. He visited one trade school but sees it as more of a unicorn - only around because of a visionary philanthropist 100 years ago. I admit to not knowing many 18 year olds (I'm too old to know them personally but not old enough to have friends with kids who are 18), but a couple cousins-in-law from the rust belt have their futures planned out and those futures are trade school. One is going to be an auto mechanic. The other is already getting paid to go to trade school and work part time as an electrician apprentice. In a few years, he will be making what I do with my Master's degree in engineering from a private college, except he didn't have the six-figure educational outlay I did. Soon after that, he will be working for himself and making even more. The trade school Bunch spotlighted may be special, but it is not a fluke. The push for everyone to go to a four year college is well-intentioned but ill-informed. The way my high school guidance counselors talked, you were a loser if you didn't go to a four-year school. I didn't know anything about trade schools and I honestly wish I had. There is a great deal more satisfaction to building or fixing something than there is in writing reports no one will ever read.
Bunch's very narrow worldview is clear in this book. He is a humanities major and bemoans the decline of people majoring in the humanities, and yet all the people he talks to who are struggling to pay loans back are humanities majors. Hmmmm. As someone from the other side of campus (i.e. the engineering quad) my college friends have had a very different experience with finding jobs and paying back loans. Branching out and actually talking to some non-humanities majors would be very good for Bunch's personal education, but it would definitely hurt the narrative in this book.
As a minor nit, Bunch sometimes gets on his political soap box and sticks so many asides into the text that it is hard to follow what his primary point is.
Since this book seems to have mostly very good reviews and I know I am likely to be attacked for my contrary opinion, here is a bit about my college experience. I was lucky that my very not rich parents started saving for college before I was born, so they were able to pay for most of my education. I did everything I could to save money in college: moved off campus, didn't go out with friends except to free stuff, had a part-time job, and lived off of ramen and free pizza from recruiting events. After four years, I had just under $30k in debt, which is apparently above average for when I graduated (according to my first google result, which was US News and World Report). Being an engineer, I got a decent job after college, mostly stayed on my ramen diet, and was able to pay my loan off in about 3 years. All of my engineering friends have similar stories except for a couple rich ones that never had loans in the first place. I'm not saying that if I can do it everyone else can do it too and should suck it up. I'm saying that if Bunch really wanted to pretend this book was anything besides a slanted op-ed piece, he really should have looked at a wider slice of college kids and America in general. It would have made this book more interesting and perhaps gotten to the real root of these problems.
October 13, 2022
It always comes back to race.
OK, this book isn't entirely about race, but it's totally deflating to realize how much race is a factor in the cultural divide over college, and in the failure of the push for broad access to higher education.
The story essentially starts around the time of the GI Bill, when there was real momentum to expand federal funding for higher education. The Great Depression had fueled both anti-wealth sentiments and the collapse of inherited wealth. So the postwar boom created faith in a true meritocracy.
So let's give returning soldiers (and lots of other young people) access to the universities that had been really only open to wealthy elites, right? Nope! These great ideals hit roadblocks because southern universities would have to accept more blacks, and northern universities would have to accept more Jews.
Then three factors collide to get us to a place where some percentage of the country takes on crippling debt to go to college while the rest of the country attacks the whole idea of college. Bunch clearly and explicitly details three factors that converged in a perfect storm to get us here:
• The Goldwater -> Reagan -> Gingrich -> Trump Republican revolution that wanted to slash public spending (Reagan got rid of free tuition at Cali universities as governor), squash liberal (in both senses of the word) arts education and highlight cultural grievances.
• Globalization, greed and gigabytes (my strained alliterative mashup): The changes in business and industry that drastically reduced opportunities for an American without a college degree to have a comfortable middle-class life.
• The costs of higher education skyrocketed with fancier campuses, bigger staffs and the injection of financiers (especially on the funding assistance end, leading to skyrocketing student loans).
And it's not all just conjecture and liberal musings. Will Bunch has the stats and quotes to back it up.
The book includes years of research, interviews and thought, and it shows. But it's not an academic book about academics. It's really easy to read.
I wish there were more details about the rising costs of college. I feel like he mostly skirted around the questions of why college is getting so expensive, while intricately (and valuably) detailing the history of the cultural divide over college.
Also, his "how to fix it" section was underwhelming. But that may just be my personal issue. I have been preaching the gospel of a massive service corps for many years, but hopefully that idea is more novel and inspiring to many other readers.
OK, this book isn't entirely about race, but it's totally deflating to realize how much race is a factor in the cultural divide over college, and in the failure of the push for broad access to higher education.
The story essentially starts around the time of the GI Bill, when there was real momentum to expand federal funding for higher education. The Great Depression had fueled both anti-wealth sentiments and the collapse of inherited wealth. So the postwar boom created faith in a true meritocracy.
So let's give returning soldiers (and lots of other young people) access to the universities that had been really only open to wealthy elites, right? Nope! These great ideals hit roadblocks because southern universities would have to accept more blacks, and northern universities would have to accept more Jews.
Then three factors collide to get us to a place where some percentage of the country takes on crippling debt to go to college while the rest of the country attacks the whole idea of college. Bunch clearly and explicitly details three factors that converged in a perfect storm to get us here:
• The Goldwater -> Reagan -> Gingrich -> Trump Republican revolution that wanted to slash public spending (Reagan got rid of free tuition at Cali universities as governor), squash liberal (in both senses of the word) arts education and highlight cultural grievances.
• Globalization, greed and gigabytes (my strained alliterative mashup): The changes in business and industry that drastically reduced opportunities for an American without a college degree to have a comfortable middle-class life.
• The costs of higher education skyrocketed with fancier campuses, bigger staffs and the injection of financiers (especially on the funding assistance end, leading to skyrocketing student loans).
And it's not all just conjecture and liberal musings. Will Bunch has the stats and quotes to back it up.
The book includes years of research, interviews and thought, and it shows. But it's not an academic book about academics. It's really easy to read.
I wish there were more details about the rising costs of college. I feel like he mostly skirted around the questions of why college is getting so expensive, while intricately (and valuably) detailing the history of the cultural divide over college.
Also, his "how to fix it" section was underwhelming. But that may just be my personal issue. I have been preaching the gospel of a massive service corps for many years, but hopefully that idea is more novel and inspiring to many other readers.
October 15, 2022
This book doubles as birth control in showing the hopelessness of higher education for current and future generations. Will Bunch makes a strong argument for pointing at changes in the affordability and purposes of higher education as being the driving cause of our broken society. I think it's tough to untangle the many related problems, like racism, housing, inequality, and reactionary backlash politics, but Bunch certainly makes a cogent case for higher education being a driver of these instead of being correlated.
I read this after reading Barbara Ehrenreich's masterpiece "Fear of Falling", which was written just before the 90's and it's interesting how this book almost seems in conversation with her earlier work where she start noticing how much harder it was to stay in the middle class and how paramount an expensive education was for class status. This book, 30 years later, shows how the early trends have now cemented in a situation where the higher education is the cause of, and solution to, many of life's problems.
I think the author had some great ideas about how to fix these problems, but the political situation, which he points out is a result of the polarization caused by this education system, means that I don't think we'll be enacting fixes anytime soon. I hope I'm wrong!
I read this after reading Barbara Ehrenreich's masterpiece "Fear of Falling", which was written just before the 90's and it's interesting how this book almost seems in conversation with her earlier work where she start noticing how much harder it was to stay in the middle class and how paramount an expensive education was for class status. This book, 30 years later, shows how the early trends have now cemented in a situation where the higher education is the cause of, and solution to, many of life's problems.
I think the author had some great ideas about how to fix these problems, but the political situation, which he points out is a result of the polarization caused by this education system, means that I don't think we'll be enacting fixes anytime soon. I hope I'm wrong!
September 29, 2022
Will Bunch, a national columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer (whose columns I've enjoyed for many years), has certainly done his research for this look at the problems facing our institutions of higher education, with a particular emphasis on public (i.e., state sponsored schools) and how we got to this point. Bunch reviews the last 70 years of college financing, from acceptance of college as a "public good" by which all Americans benefit, resulting in the G.I. Bill, which for the first time opened colleges to the non-wealthy, through then-Governor of California Ronald Reagan's realization that colleges were a breeding ground for dissent and subsequently leading a national movement to cut college funding, a trend that continues to this day and has resulted in college debt of mammoth proportions as the burden of covering the cost of college falls to the students, via increased tuition. Bunch brings us personal stories of those riddled by college debt, and ways out of this debacle - although he readily concedes that the current bitterly divided political climate is not encouraging. A collateral issue Bunch looks at is the very purpose of college - is it a training ground for the workplace, or a place of what we used to call a liberal education, consisting of knowledge for its own sake. Bunch is a smart, engaging writer, and he makes a convincing argument that our real national divide is not one of economics, but education.
October 24, 2022
As a retired high ed administrator, I was interested in reading this take on my former industry. Bunch ascribes much of our current polarization to the position higher ed has attained since the G.I.Bill was passed. I found his perspective interesting and the book is well-written. The rapid rise in the cost of a college education has clearly separated the "haves" from the "have nots" and the burden of enormous debt taken on to attain a degree has engendered deep class animosity. While I found the author stretching on some of his points, the book does help one understand the role of higher education in today's world.
October 4, 2022
Must Read!!!
Whom would I recommend this book to, Amazon asks. Everyone, is my answer, absolutely everyone, young people considering college, young people in college, parents, grandparents. It isn’t just about higher education, though, it is about the unraveling of American society and how we can stop it and begin the process of repair. Everyone needs to read his book, absolutely everyone, even people in other countries could benefit from it as a cautionary tale. Bravo, Bunch. Bravo!
Whom would I recommend this book to, Amazon asks. Everyone, is my answer, absolutely everyone, young people considering college, young people in college, parents, grandparents. It isn’t just about higher education, though, it is about the unraveling of American society and how we can stop it and begin the process of repair. Everyone needs to read his book, absolutely everyone, even people in other countries could benefit from it as a cautionary tale. Bravo, Bunch. Bravo!
October 3, 2023
This book had me thinking (and talking) a lot about college. It broke down a lot of how the American higher education system came to be the way it is now - driven by prestige, debt, and the hope of a better future. The author describes the history behind the costs and generational shifts in pursuing a college education, from the GI Bill, the college protests in the 60s, the luxury amenities in colleges today, and the high tuition/high aid model - the history was all really well done and connected to current initiatives that challenge how college is done.
At times, this book is definitely dense with history. Other times, it's reliving 2016 election politics, and you forget that you're reading a book about higher education. But honestly, I'll be thinking about this book for a while.
At times, this book is definitely dense with history. Other times, it's reliving 2016 election politics, and you forget that you're reading a book about higher education. But honestly, I'll be thinking about this book for a while.
February 10, 2024
Wowwww. A very good read. This has been a long one for me to get through (reads like a textbook so gotta get my academic Steph glasses on). I blame my bad attention span for that though, there was just a ton of content in this book. BUT very informative and interesting information. If you’re sus about higher education and want to have a well rounded opinion about the economic, cultural, and political influence of academia, this is the book you want to be reading. Why universities are physically located in the areas they are, the GI bill and its effects on college education attendance and classism…really good stuff.
August 20, 2022
My father was one of those men who benefited greatly from the GI Bill and my youngest sister is one of those people who was still paying off student loans well into her fifties. There is a lot to unpack between those two facts and Bunch does an admirable job unpacking it. College used to be the ticket to the middle class, now it's . . . not. Good book.
January 11, 2024
As with too many Liberal/Progressive writers he fails to make much effort at understanding, let alone steelmanning, the views of his conservative or libertarian opposition. And while there are several interesting ideas and a ton of compelling anecdotes and data, it’s overshadowed by his own partisan views.
October 19, 2023
“Ultimately, changing America for good will start with changing our mindset, the one that arbitrarily—and foolishly, we can now see—picked the age of eighteen for flipping the switch that turns education and growth from a public responsibility into a private one."
Interesting, maddening in it's complexity and short-sighted solutions and well researched and reported.
Interesting, maddening in it's complexity and short-sighted solutions and well researched and reported.
November 10, 2022
This is a powerful and sad book. The author begins by discussing the GI bill and how colleges were surprised at how well the returning GI's took to their studies. Of course, Black servicemen were left out. The idea that a college education should be available to everyone continued to build until Reagan and other Republican governors put an end to that and began to starve public universities. We are now at the point where out-of-state students who can afford the tuition and love to party are taking up more spots, leaving the cash strapped in-state students practically starving as they try to make their way through college. Meanwhile, colleges try to outdo one another in becoming country clubs and have hired more administrators than faculty. Its quite a mess. I liked some of Bunch's suggestions for how to fix this -- such as much more technical education and a year of community service for everyone.
December 9, 2023
A well-written retrospective of the many bad decisions the U.S. made post-WWII regarding higher education, leading us to the current dumpster fire of humongous student loan debt and widespread loss of faith in tertiary education as a common and national good. Bunch is a journalist, so his storytelling is based not on data and social scientific methods, as I’d prefer, but on interviewing folks and taking their recollections as representative of larger patterns. That works from a narrative perspective but leaves me curious about some deeper dynamics that Bunch hints at but doesn’t build out (for example, the fascinating idea—only hinted at briefly—that today’s gun-toting anti-vaxxer is the intellectual offspring of the 1960s-era student rioter, in turn nurtured by the post-GI-bill higher ed boom). Bunch only spends about two pages on studying how other countries do higher ed, a move not terribly surprising but quite indicative of how hopelessly insular American conversations about this issue are. Maybe a greater comparative focus would have suggested further ways out of the quagmire.
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