The arc of the tale Suzanne Mettler tells will prove familiar to students of contemporary higher education in the United States: Beginning with passage of the Land-Grant College Act of 1862, accelerating with the adoption of several GI bills after World War II, and culminating in creation of the Pell Grant program in 1972, the history of higher education during that hundred years was one of incremental but cumulative extension of its promise to an ever broader swath of Americans. “But,” Mettler cautions, “something happened beginning in the 1980s, with disastrous effects for the American dream—the belief that those who work hard can improve their circumstances—that is so central to the nation’s values” (p. 7). This dream’s betrayal testifies to the consolidation of a “political system” that now responds “primarily to the concerns of wealthy and powerful interests” (p. 5). Recovery of higher education’s pledge depends, accordingly, on the enactment of reforms that will “make elected officials more responsive to ordinary Americans and diffuse the forces of polarization and plutocracy” (p. 198).

The virtue of Mettler’s work consists of its careful account of the role of the federal government, and Congress in particular, in transforming higher education into an institutional complex that now plays a key role in generating and maintaining “a caste system in which students from different socioeconomic backgrounds occupy distinct strata, and their experiences within those tiers end up making them increasingly unequal” (p. 190). The failure of Degrees of Inequality consists of its inadequate comprehension of the “something” whose origins Mettler traces to the 1980s and whose operation mocks any representation of higher education as a meritocratic vehicle accessible to all. That failure explains, in turn, why the reforms she commends in her closing chapter appear so ill-equipped to challenge, let alone undo, the inegalitarian regime she explores in the book’s body.

Mettler insists that the causes of the “crisis” of higher education are “fundamentally political” (p. 190). By this, she means to direct our attention to a “severely dysfunctional” (p. 197) order characterized by stubborn partisan polarization and the gridlock it routinely engenders. Indeed, as illustrated by Congress’s rejection in 2011 of regulations designed to make student aid to nonprofit educational institutions contingent on performance, today, bipartisan accords are possible only when Republicans and Democrats discover a common interest in channeling “vast public funds to private entrepreneurs” (p. 47). Our representative government, in sum, “no longer provides effective mechanisms by which American can pursue a better life” (p 5.).

The proposals advanced by the author in her concluding chapter, entitled “Restoring the Public Purposes of Higher Education,” vacillate between those which reduce to negligible tinkering and those which are wistfully utopian. Among the former, for example, she calls for modification of the Senate’s filibuster rule, as well as same-day voter registration, neither of which appears credible as a way of furnishing effective voice to the structurally silenced. Among the latter, she exhorts the House and Senate to approve bills that “prohibit lawmakers from accepting campaign contributions from lobbyists and their organizations” (p. 199) and to “terminate aid to institutions that serve students poorly” (p. 193), each of which is incredible given her conviction that “Congress, the for-profit college industry, and the US Department of Education” now comprise “the kind of ‘iron triangle’ that political scientists have long noticed in relationships between industries, agencies, and public officials” (p. 108).

How should we account for this disjuncture between Mettler’s Panglossian prescriptions and her portrayal of an oligarchical regime that cannot mobilize on behalf of any ends except those that benefit wealthy corporations and the moneyed elites that control them? The answer, I believe, stems from her unexamined belief that, for analytic purposes, it still makes sense to draw a categorical distinction between state and economy. This presupposition undergirds her contention that the federal government has now been captured by “unscrupulous profiteers” (the title of Chapter 3), and this same premise is the condition of the meaningfulness of her plea for reforms that will extricate it from this web of corruption.

Mettler takes a tentative step toward a more adequate analytic framework when she notes that the processes through which higher education has been transformed into an inequality-generating machine have been replicated in “numerous other policy areas, as well, leaving the United States unable to address many of its most pressing problems, whether pertaining to updating Social Security, immigration reform, tax reform, carbon emissions, and so forth” (p. 198). Her acknowledgment of this pattern, though, does not induce her to ask whether its existence signifies an ever more complete integration, if not fusion, of economic and political power, especially since the Reagan administration, in the service of the macroeconomic growth that is vital to national competitiveness in a globalized marketplace. Nor does she ask whether higher education is now being drawn into the orbit of a neoliberal regime whose fruits include the systematic production and reproduction of socioeconomic inequality.

The principal foci of the book, that is, the emergence of a for-profit educational sector and the explosion of student indebtedness, disclose certain key features of this regime. In for-profit universities, we see a form of academic capitalism that is “public” insofar as it is financed almost entirely by taxpayers via federal student aid but “private” insofar as its profits accrue to corporate owners and shareholders. We might characterize this development as the “privatization” of a once “public” good, as Mettler does, but better to represent it as a metamorphosis that scrambles the public/private distinction and does so in ways that help to transform higher education into a commodity whose costs are increasingly shifted to those least able to afford it.

A fitting illustration of this transformation is provided by Mettler’s own reading of the history of the Student Loan Marketing Association (Sallie Mae). Created in 1972 as a government-sponsored corporation designed to increase investment in student lending, only to shed its federal charter and so “privatize” in 2004, today the federal government continues to guarantee student loans in the event of default and renders student debt unforgivable via ordinary bankruptcy proceedings. As total student debt has grown from about $240 billion in 2003 to nearly $1 trillion in 2013, today higher education’s consumers are ever more deeply enmeshed in a regressive financial system that disregards the distinction between state and economy and, more important, ensures that its dependents remain captives of this order for decades to come. That this dynamic is not confined to for-profit entities is made evident when state governments decrease funding for public universities, tuition is increased in consequence, and still more students assume the burden of massive debt as well as the interest it accrues. Thus does a neoliberal order shift much of the cost of training human capital to so many disconnected and hence disempowered sources of the financial resources required in order to sustain that regime.

If we assume that a central purpose of higher education in the United States is to advance the ideal of meritocracy, as does Mettler, we must conclude that it now represents a collosal failure. If, however, higher education is understood as an institutional complex that serves the interests of financial capital by shifting “the cost of obtaining a college degree … from higher income residents to young people from low to moderate income families” (p. 47), then it is hard to imagine a more ingenious means of accomplishing that end. If this be so, then the federal government’s inability to act on behalf of the 81% of Americans who, in 2012, called for greater public investment in higher education is not a crisis but, rather, an indispensable condition of that end’s accomplishment. Indeed, perhaps the real “tragedy” (p. 5) of higher education is most fully revealed when students, persuaded that the acquisition of a college degree is the ticket to upward mobility, find themselves saddled with burdens that render realization of the American dream ever more elusive.