In this book, Suzanne Mettler offers a definitive account of a federal and state higher-education policy that promoted greater social equality from the end of World War II through the late 1970s, but then shifted in ways that exacerbated inequality from the 1970s onward. From 1945 to the late 1970s, college graduation rates rose from 4% of the adult population to 25%, with the Education Act of 1958 extending federal higher education funding for women and the 1965 Higher Education Act radically expanding funding for students of color. But from the mid-1970s until the mid-1990s graduation rates stagnated, inching up in the past two decades to 32%, in part due to the collapse of the Great Recession labor market encouraging young people to extend their education. During this time, the United States fell from the leading country in regards to college graduation rates to the eleventh, with not only most of Western Europe exceeding the United States but also South Korea and Poland.
Mettler ascribes the stagnation in college graduation rates from the mid-1980s to 2010 to three policy developments: the drop in the real value of Pell Grants, which go to students from modest- and low-income families; the decline in state funding for higher education and the concomitant rise in the real cost of tuition at state universities; and bipartisan support from the 1990s onwards for shifting federal aid from grants to federally guaranteed loans and to tuition tax credits, which disproportionately benefited the children of relatively affluent families. In addition, the growth in merit aid, aimed at raising universities’ average SAT scores, went disproportionately to more affluent students.
The author attributes these changes in public policy to growing political polarization and the increasingly plutocratic nature of American politics. The declining number of moderate Republican elected officials from the Reagan era onward meant that Democrats had few allies at the federal and state level who favored robust public expenditure on higher education. In addition, the growing plutocratic influence of former Democratic and Republican Congress members as lobbyists for the finance industry and for-profit education accelerated these trends. Today, despite their abysmally low graduation rates, for-profit universities (the Strayers and University of Phoenixes) garner nearly 25% of higher-education grants and loans—often to veterans—and their current and former students constitute 50% of those in default on student loans.
In addition to the causal role of increased polarization and growing plutocracy, Mettler contends, “public policy drift” accentuated the trend toward higher education as an engine of inequality. She defines policy drift as the failure of policy to adapt to social changes that hinder achieving the original intent of the policy. Policy drift can take the form of “policy design effects, unintended consequences, and lateral effects.” Mettler cites as a major “policy design effect” the initial legislation’s failure to index Pell Grants to inflation; in the face of growing political polarization this predestined a decline in the real value of such grants. The growing role of the finance industry in congressional lobbying made it easier for student loans to increase; outright grants, funded by a contentious budget process, inexorably decreased in value. An “unintended consequence” of the rise in federal grants and guaranteed loans from 1965 onward was that private universities could raise tuition faster than the rate of inflation. And the “lateral effects” of federally mandated spending on Medicaid and state formulas driving up K–12 educational funding, combined with growing state expenditure on mass incarceration, squeezed out state funding for higher education. In fact, state funding for higher education drops from 8% of state budget expenditure in the mid-1980s to only 4% today, a major, often unrecognized, cause of the increased cost of state universities (which enables private universities to drive up their tuition as well).
All of these forces are undoubtedly at work, but largely absent from Mettler’s account is perhaps the primary cause of these secondary effects: the decline, from the mid-1970s onward, of New Deal and Great Society liberalism as the dominant ideology and policy frame of American politics and the rise of a corporate-backed, fiscally conservative, bipartisan “neoliberal” consensus that embraced fiscal moderation and favored private provision over public provision. By the 1980s, many Democratic governors had embraced this viewpoint, including a founder of the neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council, then-Governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton (who would announce “the end of big government” in his 1992 presidential inaugural address). Even allegedly liberal governors, such as Jerry Brown of California and Mario Cuomo of New York, embraced regressive tax reform, fiscal moderation, and significant cuts in state funding for public higher education. Their Republican successors would accelerate these policies.
These neoliberal cuts in federal and state funding for higher education led to the decline in access to higher education and also to the 30-year inexorable growth in exploited and contingent academic labor. In the mid-1970s, the maximum Pell Grant covered 80% of tuition and room and board at the average four-year state university. Today, it covers only 31% of such costs. Tuition at state universities rose 244% (nearly twice the rate of inflation) from 1980 to 2010, in part because of a more than 30% drop in state funding of higher education. This rise in tuition and drop in the real value of grants exacerbated the differential between students from affluent versus modest economic backgrounds in regards to both enrollment rates and graduation rates. Today, while 71% of individuals from the top quarter of family incomes will earn a college degree by age 24, only 10% from the bottom quartile will do so, and only 15% from the second-lowest quartile. This is not primarily because of differential secondary school preparation for college, though that matters, but because moderate- and low-income students are much more likely to discontinue their college education than are more affluent students, due to financial difficulties and the challenges of balancing work with school.
As Jacob Hacker’s work demonstrates, part of the neoliberal project has been to shift the burden of insuring against risk from social institutions to the individual. This shift not only weakened both state and corporate support for strong, defined benefit pensions but also held that individuals were responsible for “investing in themselves,” particularly through personal financing of higher education. Mettler’s work does not mention that the first concerted attack on publicly funded higher education came amid the New York City fiscal crisis of 1975, when the New York City Financial Control Board demanded not only significant cuts in public pensions but also the abolition of free tuition in the massive City University of New York public higher-education system. This occurred on the watch of both a Democratic mayor and governor. Mettler does recognize how the massive growth in state expenditure on incarceration squeezed out dollars for higher education. But she does not describe how the neoliberal state’s abandonment of serious job training and public investment projects means that this “surplus labor” in our inner cities is now quarantined within the neoliberal penal state.
Nor does Mettler devote much attention to how cuts in state funding for higher education transformed the academic labor market. She does mention how the increasing use of part-time faculty, predominantly at state and community colleges, adversely affects student outcomes (given that part-time faculty have little time to advise and mentor students). But she fails to investigate further the radical “casualization” of the academic labor market over the past 30 years. Despite the political causes of the deteriorating condition of academic labor, many tenured faculty at major research universities naturalize the declining academic job market as a permanent “fact of life.” That is, they do not believe that a politically caused phenomenon could be reversed by a shift in political power and state taxation and budgetary policies. In fact, the academic job market is not “stagnant” at all; rather, its growth is robust, but accompanied by a precipitous decline in the percentage of “good jobs.” These trends are similar to the growth of “temporary” and “independent contractor” jobs in the neoliberal labor market overall.
The demand for academic labor remains considerable, as a higher percentage of high school students go on to attend institutions of higher education than ever before. Seventy percent of high school graduates will enroll at some form of educational institution, but less than half of them, or 35%, will receive four-year degrees. The number of students in four-year institutions has risen from 10 million in 1970 to more than 21 million today. Meanwhile, the size of the overall higher-education faculty is nearly 70% larger than it was in 1976. At close to 1.5 million individuals, there are more university faculty today than ever before; but only 30% of them have tenured jobs or positions eligible for tenure, versus 70% in the early 1970s (although even the total number of tenured and tenure-track jobs has grown 23% since 1976).
The basic statistics reveal the stark contours of the casualization of the neoliberal academic labor market. According to a chart in the April 18, 2014, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, in 1976 there were 353,681 full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty at institutions of higher learning, including community colleges. In 2011, there were 436,293, a gain of 23%. In 1976, 160,086 graduate students served as teaching assistants or instructors of record. By 2011, that number had grown to 358,743, for a gain of 123%. (This increased reliance on graduate students as teachers is one reason why Ph.D. programs, even in the humanities, have not shrunk in size.) In 1976, there were 80,883 full-time non-tenure-track faculty; in 2011, 233,368, for a gain of 259%. Part-time faculty (adjuncts) grew at even a higher rate, from 199,139 in 1976 to 786,071 in 2011, an increase of 286%! These trends have accelerated over the past four years since the gathering of this data in 2011.
Precipitous cuts in state funding for higher education, particularly at state colleges and community colleges, has led to a radical stratification of the academic labor market. Adjunct faculty teach close to 50% of seats at community colleges, 27% at state four-year institutions, but only 17% at major research universities and 11% at private liberal-arts colleges. The larger the institution’s private endowment and the greater its increasingly corporate-funded research dollars, the more full-time faculty they can afford. Given the class composition of students at these more selective institutions, more affluent students have much greater interaction with full-time faculty.
Given this transformation of the academic labor market, nontenured full-time instructors have increasingly turned to unionization to improve their working conditions. While the U.S. Supreme Court Yeshiva decision of 1980 precluded faculty at most private institutions from unionizing (as the Court ruled that tenured faculty have management responsibilities), 24% of tenured and tenure-track faculty are unionized, mostly at state institutions (covered by state labor law), almost exclusively in non-right-to-work states (though faculty at top-ranked public research universities have, until recently, chose not to unionize). While a comparable percentage of full-time, nontenurable faculty are unionized (particularly in the large California and New York State public university systems), less than 15% of adjuncts and graduate students have collective-bargaining rights. Graduate students are unionized at some major state research universities; when Republicans control the National Labor Relations Board, the board rules that graduate-student teaching at private institutions, covered by national rather than state labor law, is a form of “apprenticeship,” rather than formal paid work.
The past three years, however, have witnessed over 40 successful union drives to organize adjuncts and teaching assistants, with the American Federation of Teachers winning several drives at public institutions (including one to represent 1,400 adjuncts at Temple University) and the Service Employees International Union “Faculty Forward” campaign winning adjunct contracts at private institutions, such as Northeastern, Tufts, American University, and Seattle University. Lecturers at the University of Chicago just voted to unionize; full-time nontenured faculty at even wealthy, privately endowed universities earn much less than half the salary and benefits of tenured faculty, while having much higher teaching loads.
While university administrators claim that most adjuncts teach in professional or preprofessional programs and do so for their own “enrichment,” over 50% of adjuncts earn the majority of their income from teaching and desire to teach full time. Over 30% of adjuncts hold Ph.Ds., and most of them teach in the humanities and social sciences. Unionization has won some modest economic gains for adjuncts in terms of salary, prorated health benefits, and a seniority system in regards to guaranteeing courses for the upcoming semester. But these contracts have not radically transformed the conditions of adjunct and nontenured faculty. Unionization can provide workers with greater power and voice, but even the most powerful of unions can only garner the maximum of what the overall labor market conditions of their economic sector permit. Expanding the economic pie available for faculty salary and benefits will, in part, necessitate the curtailment of academic managerial bloat caused by the neoliberal university’s recruitment of student “customers” based on nonacademic amenities and displacement of the faculty’s role in academic governance with professional administrators. But the hyper-exploitation of academic labor can only be seriously curtailed if a social movement for affordable and high-quality public education forces legislatures to restore funding of public higher education to the real levels of the early 1980s. If tenured faculty fail to use whatever political leverage and prestige they may still have to build such movements, the job prospects for their Ph.D. students will continue to deteriorate.
A closer examination of the bipartisan neoliberal consensus in the United States might also have enabled Mettler to offer a deeper understanding of the reason that most European countries (outside of the neoliberal United Kingdom) have sustained universal, free, higher education. While there has been trimming of the Western European welfare state, these nations, on average, still channel 45% or more of their GDP through state expenditure (55% in France), whereas the United States is only at 34%, with a quarter of it going to defense and incarceration. Mettler has shown in her other work that additional state expenditure goes to an “invisible state” of tax expenditures that disproportionately benefit the affluent. But could we fund universal, public, higher education and also federally financed child care in this country? If we had the political will to change our regressive tax policies, yes. Reversing the redistribution of income upward to the top 2% due to the Reagan and George W. Bush tax cuts would alone add $200 billion per year to the federal coffers. But one of the few definitive findings of political science is that once marginal tax rates have been cut, they prove very hard to restore. And because of the regressive nature of the U.S. tax system, working families often mistrust talk of tax increases for the affluent and corporations—out of fear that working people might be the real victims of changes in tax policy.
One final element situates Mettler’s enriching contribution within the broader context of neoliberal hegemony: The neoliberal “education reform” movement assumes that improvements in the provision of education to the less advantaged can solve labor market problems, inner-city poverty, the legacy of racial and class segregation of neighborhoods, and a myriad of other social ills—even though these social realities powerfully reproduce inequalities in educational outcomes. Even if we increased public investment in higher education (as we should), would there be enough good, secure jobs for college graduates in this new age of precarious labor? And what of the 50% or more of the labor force unlikely to attain four-year college degrees, no matter how accessible we make college? Should they and their children be consigned to live permanently on the edge of economic insecurity—or worse?
With economic rewards now going disproportionately to the rentier class of CEOs, financiers, and hedge-fund managers, the earnings of younger college-educated adults have been largely flat since 2000. Only 5% of current jobs demand high-level STEM (science, technology, engineering, or math) skills; most middle-strata jobs for college graduates are in the underpaid state, educational, or hospital and caregiving sectors, or in low-level management jobs in retail and financial services supervising underpaid noncollege graduates. Thus, the “value added” of the college degree is now mostly due to the steady, secular drop in the earnings power of non-college-educated adults, who even among 25–34-year-olds still constitute 60% of the labor force. Their life prospects, and those of their children, are nowhere addressed in the neoliberal model of “purchase an education and the good jobs will come.”
Mettler should be commended for helping us understand how political and policy trends over the past 40 years have made a college degree less accessible to children born to families whose earnings are in the bottom three-quarters of the income hierarchy. The value of her work is not decreased because it did not offer a critique of the bipartisan, neoliberal policy discourse that has underpinned the rise of inequality in the United States and around the globe—and which has now given rise to inchoate, but significant, left (and right) populist movements against the politics of austerity (even in the United States—see the Bernie Sanders campaign, Occupy Wall Street, Fight for 15, Black Lives Matter, but also the nativism behind the Donald Trump candidacy). But increasing access to higher education will only truly enhance social equality if democratic social movements also win the restoration of basic labor rights and an increase in funding of the public provision of basic human needs (such as universal health care and publicly funded child care). We cannot educate our way out of social inequality.
