One aspect of the American Dream has been and probably still is that education is the great equalizer. A good education is a key to social mobility. With a good education, racial and ethnic minorities in the United States will be able to compete on a level playing field with the white majority. So goes the American Dream narrative. Yet some disturbing facts surprised me as I was putting Suzanne Mettler’s Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream in context.

Though not data reported in her study, her startling findings pushed me to look at the following information. The 2014 NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates lists those institutions that produce the highest number of doctoral recipients who are black and other racial minorities. Of course, my immediate thought before actually looking at the data was that Howard University had to be the Number 1 producer of blacks with doctorates in the United States, right? I was wrong, and distressingly so. The highest producer of blacks with doctorates is Walden University, a for-profit, primarily online, institution. Howard was second. (Of note is that this pattern does not exist among Latinos, American Indians, and Asian Americans, who receive doctorates from overwhelmingly non-profit universities.) Data presented in The Chronicle of Higher Education (July 2015) on those institutions receiving the most graduate-student loan disbursements in 2013–14 shows that Walden University is Number 1 at $756.3 million; thus, its students are in the most debt. Of the 20 universities responsible for the largest share of graduate-student debt, 10 were proprietary or foreign for-profit universities.

According to data in the October 2014 issues of Diverse Issues in Higher Education, the two institutions that produced the highest number of blacks with bachelor’s degrees were the University of Phoenix and Ashford University, both for-profit universities. Florida A & M University and Howard were fourth and sixth on the list, respectively. For master’s degrees, the top four producers for blacks were all for-profits—University of Phoenix, Walden, Ashford, and Capella. I assume that those undergraduates and master’s students have also racked up massive debt acquiring these degrees. But are these degrees worth it? Do they actually make it possible for individuals to enter onto a level playing field, or are they, by virtue of their for-profit status, not worth the massive debt that these students incurred? Mettler helped me understand the baffling numbers in the data that dismayed and are still alarming to me.

The author introduces us to another area of increasing inequality that is not as evident as some of the areas that normally jump to mind, such as income inequality and the inequitable treatment of nonwhites by the criminal justice system. She even moves us beyond the traditional notions of educational inequality that are usually framed in terms of access to high-quality K through 12 educational opportunities or access to public and private universities. This book pushes us to think about inequalities in terms of business interests and how, with their influence on members of Congress, they were able to argue successfully that for-profit educational institutions were the vehicle for providing access to educational degrees for the masses of American society, while at the same time undermining public higher-educational institutions. Not only do these proprietary institutions both charge high tuition for which students borrow money and make high profits, but they also put very little of those profits into the education of those students.

Mettler traces the history of the divisions within political parties, the effects of congressional polarization, the partisan changing of sides, and, finally, bipartisan coalescence in support of proprietary institutions and the ability of these institutions, as well as banks and those lending institutions set up by the federal government (e.g., Sallie Mae), to make astronomical profits from the student loan business. First, the Democrats in the 1980s ignored the huge profits from student loans because of their commitment to Pell Grants and giving low-income individuals access to higher education. Republicans who originally opposed the federal government’s providing loans and getting involved in higher education became supporters of the programs because of the lobbying and influence of the for-profit educational groups. Eventually, Democrats and Republicans became captive of a business interest that contributed heavily and generously to reelection campaigns. The Congressional Black Caucus, which initially deplored for-profit educational and trade institutions because blacks incurred high student debt, while rarely graduating with a degree, also came on board. The narrative now was that these institutions provide opportunities for low-income and minority students to obtain advanced education opportunities.

It was a confluence of the unintended consequences of higher-education policy and congressional polarization and plutocracy that brought this perfect storm together. Mettler describes this total takeover of higher-education policy as “policymaking driven by the fierce mobilization of an industry that benefits from government spending, and the ardent efforts of members of Congress to represent it” (p. 72). This for Mettler was the beginning of the policy plutocracy, with increased lobbying by the for-profit sector for more and more student loans as their grew and students’ debt exploded as a result.

As Congress and various presidential administrations were opening up the avenues for banks and for-profit educational companies to rake in the profits from student loans, with the federal government assuming all of the risk, states were eviscerating their public college and university systems. These institutions enroll the majority of students in postsecondary degree programs. State cuts in appropriations and the abandoning of the view that tuition at state institutions should be kept low have made many of these once-accessible institutions out of reach of many in-state residents. Also changed was how federal funds flow to state colleges and universities: Those with higher tuition rates receive more federal funds than those with lower tuition. So state colleges and universities are in a bind that is difficult to escape.

Mettler’s excellent book is in the vein of Ted Lowi’s 1969 The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States, in which he identifies and maps the influence of interest groups on public policy and the concomitant abdication by Congress of its authority to make and execute public policy. The for-profit educational institutions and the placement of many of its former executives in government positions, especially in the George W. Bush administration, have brought about the situation whereby Congress now protects the interests of these entities, while ignoring the plight of those who have fallen prey to their predatory practices. The realm of inequalities in the United States are, unfortunately, expanding, particularly in areas that were once thought to be the great equalizer—education and the exemplary United States educational system.