In her book, Suzanne Mettler sharply analyses how increasingly plutocratic political-economic dynamics have undermined the array of mechanisms that once enhanced inclusive access to higher education and facilitated both upward mobility and public purposes, “fostering the knowledge, creativity, dynamism, leadership, and skills that would spur economic growth, technological innovation and social advances” (p. 191). Beginning in the mid-1970s, the post–World War II egalitarian system—established by landmark legislation (particularly the GI Bill and the Higher Education Act of 1965) and fostered by strong state-level support for colleges and universities—was horrifically reconfigured in order to drive the enormous expansion of the for-profit education industry. Pell Grants and state support were cut, student loans increased, and a gargantuan, grossly ineffective, and largely unregulated education industry reaped incomparable rates of profit almost entirely from public funds. The result is that higher education now amplifies, rather than diminishes, class stratification in the United States.

Mettler provides a devastating account of the ways in which lower- and middle-class people have been lured into for-profit educational institutions in the hopes of achieving the American Dream, only to discover an impoverished educational environment that leads to high rates of failure, poor employment prospects, extraordinary debts, and soaring default rates. This situation has been created through antidemocratic dynamics of “rent-seeking reciprocity” that converge to form a malignant caste system: The for-profit industry invests in politicians and political machines that generate educational policies through which they reap windfall profits (a small portion of which they reinvest in the same way), while “politicians … reach out to the powerful groups,” creating policies that channel resources to them, with the expectation that the industries reciprocate with campaign contributions” (pp. 75–76).

Mettler’s analysis of dynamics that “sabotage the American Dream” is fine grained and insightful. She places these in a broader political economic context of game-changing plutocratic tendencies polarized to the right, and situates all of this in relation to the culture wars that developed in the mid-1970s when the right wing began to organize a backlash against transformations pertaining to women, families, gays, and abortion (strangely omitting any discussion of race). With the election of Ronald Reagan, the convergence of the economic and cultural Right became a significant factor in the politics of higher education, as growing numbers in the “GOP voiced distrust of traditional institutions of higher education,” claiming they were costly, “offered little value, and indoctrinated students with liberal ideas” (p. 102). The Republican majority in congress in the mid-1990’s came to identify the for-profit sector’s approach to education as one it could endorse: straightforward job training, absent courses of study that seemed “superfluous,” and anti-American (p. 102).

In response to this overall catastrophe, Mettler says, we must create policies that provide effective support for students and eliminate those that create the problems. We must terminate the flow of public funds to for-profit institutions with bad track records, and focus on revitalizing “partnerships between the federal and state governments and private non-profit institutions to ensure all parties do their part” (p. 193). Such changes will not be possible “unless we can find ways to make elected officials more responsive to ordinary Americans and diffuse the forces of polarization and plutocracy” (p. 198), by means of a variety of reforms pertaining to filibuster rules, campaign contributions, and revolving doors. This, in turn, hinges on “amplifying the voice of ordinary Americans in politics” by easing voting restrictions and generating, for “a new era, civic organizational forms” (p. 199), about which the author says almost nothing.

One might read the thinness Mettler’s account of grassroots democracy in her conclusion as unproblematic, given that Degrees of Inequality is primarily devoted to analyzing how public purposes have been sabotaged by dynamics between representative and corporate institutions. Yet I suggest that the democracy deficit here is symptomatic of a broader one that runs throughout the text.

Democratic engagement for public purposes—both in terms of social movements that were integral conditions of possibility for the egalitarian reforms she admires, and in terms of the qualitative dimensions of educational practices that have played a vital role in engendering a polity more disposed to political action and public work—is reduced to a trace in Mettler’s account. It makes extremely brief cameos as she evokes an inclusive politics that would provide an alternative to the caste system of higher education that she criticizes, and as she glimpses the democratic effects of inclusive education in the past. Yet democracy is situated in the margins of an analysis that most often emphasizes how, if only representatives can forge inclusive policies, higher education will once again advance public rather than private purposes. Missing is any serious analysis of how inclusive and democratic higher education may be intertwined with broader cultures of democratic practice—associated with civic energies, relationships, subject formation, knowledge, imagination, aspiration, receptivity, and power—in ways that reciprocally condition each other’s possibility and characteristics. In this way, Mettler’s analysis suffers from an overly technocratic and economistic frame that has unwitting affinities with—and thus impedes our capacities to supplant—the plutocratic powers she rightly criticizes.

Consider the question of social movements. Mettler offers no textured analysis of the impact of democratic organizing and social movements on representative politics in support of public and more inclusive higher education, nor how they have opened new areas and modes of scholarship and pedagogy. Her account of bipartisan support for egalitarian educational policy prior to the “sabotage” is a tale of strategically sharp representatives actively committed to doing the right thing. The radical organizing of the 1930s and 1940s does not appear in her account. Similarly, her discussion of the politics of the Higher Education Act of 1965 makes no mention of the grassroots democratic activism of the 1960s (alluded to only later when she notes the absence of such “countervailing forces” in the 1990s). Relatedly, the author turns a blind eye to emergent democratic activism focused directly on the issues she raises. The Occupy Wall Street movement’s focus on “debt and the value of higher education” is noted in a single paragraph (p. 19), and no attention is given to Debt Strike and other ongoing organizing initiatives that have developed out of Occupy.

Similarly, Mettler offers no discussion of the immanent relationships between different modes of higher education and democracy. She briefly notes that “GI Bill beneficiaries took part in twice as many civic organizations and one-third more political activities,” and that black beneficiaries “became a leadership cadre for the civil rights movement” and afterward participated in formal politics at high levels (p. 7). Yet she does not discuss how the mission, pedagogy, and cultural characteristics of historically black colleges and universities (in which black G.I.s disproportionately enrolled) have long been pivotally oriented by, and intertwined with, struggles to advance public and private freedoms. She ignores how different types of higher education may discrepantly impact democratic cultures and engagement (Coles and Scarnati, Reference Coles, Scarnati and Boyte2015). The comparatively rich tradition of critical and generative liberal arts has very different implications for democracy than does the widespread corporate-consumerist tendency toward narrow job training. Relatedly, Mettler is inattentive to vital networks to advance both democratic pedagogy (e.g., the American Commonwealth Project) and publically engaged liberal arts scholarship (e.g., Imagining America) in higher education.

Although we are indebted to Mettler for illuminating how plutocratic processes have undermined public purposes of higher education, the democracy deficits in her work conceal the very conditions necessary to advance such political aspirations in the face of these malignant forces (Coles, Reference Coles2014). Creatively and powerfully increasing degrees of democracy is integral to thwarting degrees of inequality—integral to understanding how the demos has done so in the past, how we are being undone in the present, and how we might muster imagination and power again.