Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal recently introduced the "College for All Act," which, The Hill reports, "would make community college tuition-free for everyone and four-year public colleges tuition-free and debt-free for students from families making up to $125,000 per year." Whatever the fate of that bill, the continuing crisis of college debt — much of it held by students who never complete their degrees — is a policy priority for the Biden administration. (From 2009 to 2019, student-loan debt more than doubled, from $720 billion to $1.51 trillion. Our Jacquelyn Elias breaks it down here.)
How did we get here? One answer stems from what the sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom calls the "education gospel," the widespread faith that college will improve one's economic prospects. All too often, it hampers them instead. What Cottom calls "Lower Ed" “absorbs all manner of vulnerable groups who believe in it.”
In an ambitious new essay for the Review, Chad Wellmon, an intellectual historian of higher education, begins with Cottom's work and then moves backward, to the early years of the Cold War and the expansion of higher education along the model of what Clark Kerr, the first chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, named the "multiversity." Wellmon's goal is to excavate the ideological origins of the education gospel. What combination of policy decisions and imaginative commitments — of faith in the transformative power of college — produced our current impasse? Faith in college, Wellmon suggests, will require some revision if it is not to do more harm than good.
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April 24, 2021 at 05:32AM
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The Review: The Corruption of the College Dream Machine - The Chronicle of Higher Education
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