The History Of College Affordability In The United States From Colonial Times To The Cold War

This book examines how tuition and student loans became an accepted part of college costs in the first half of the twentieth century. The author argues that college was largely free to nineteenth-century college students since local and religious communities, donors, and the state agreed to pay the tuition bill with the expectation that the students would serve society upon graduation. College education was essentially considered a public good. This arrangement ended after 1900. The increasing secularization and professionalization of college education as well as changes in the socio-economic composition of the student body—which included more and more students from well-off families—caused educators, college administrators, and donors to argue that students pursued a college degree for their own advancement and therefore should be made to pay for it. Students were expected to pay tuition themselves and to take out student loans in order to fund their education.

Student affairs work—like higher education—is fundamentally about change. Principally, the change work performed by student affairs practitioners is about supporting the growth and development of individual students and student groups. Increasingly, that work has called for practitioners to become more active in working to change higher education so that it lives up to its radically democratic, inclusive ideals. This means adopting new strategies to transform student affairs staff, students, and institutions, and drawing on insights from critical, liberatory theories. This text represents an effort to describe and document these practices of intentionally centering critical theories.The first section of this text examines the ways that critically-minded practitioners lead through equitable, liberatory frameworks, offering important models for reimagining the future of higher education. In the second section, the editors take up thinking and acting to support the development of critical consciousness in students, providing examples of programs, initiatives, and student support offices that center social justice in their work, and foster a critical lens through their interactions with students. In their conclusion, the editors provide a model for critical praxis, offering enduring strategies for practitioners seeking to incorporate critical, socially just praxis into their everyday work, and defining areas for future research and praxis, including identifying strategies for effective assessment of critical praxis, and modalities for “scaling up” the work for maximal impact.

Article abstracts and citations of reviews and dissertations covering the United States and Canada.

"An engrossing and impossibly wide-ranging project . . . In The Free World, every seat is a good one." —Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post "The Free World sparkles. Fully original, beautifully written . . . One hopes Menand has a sequel in mind. The bar is set very high." —David Oshinsky, The New York Times Book Review | Editors' Choice One of The New York Times's 100 best books of 2021 | One of The Washington Post's 50 best nonfiction books of 2021 | A Mother Jones best book of 2021 In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt’s Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s residencies at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg’s friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin’s transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag’s challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood. Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America’s once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened.

The untold history of how America’s student-loan program turned the pursuit of higher education into a pathway to poverty. It didn’t always take thirty years to pay off the cost of a bachelor’s degree. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer untangles the history that brought us here and discovers that the story of skyrocketing college debt is not merely one of good intentions gone wrong. In fact, the federal student loan program was never supposed to make college affordable. The earliest federal proposals for college affordability sought to replace tuition with taxpayer funding of institutions. But Southern whites feared that lower costs would undermine segregation, Catholic colleges objected to state support of secular institutions, professors worried that federal dollars would come with regulations hindering academic freedom, and elite-university presidents recoiled at the idea of mass higher education. Cold War congressional fights eventually made access more important than affordability. Rather than freeing colleges from their dependence on tuition, the government created a loan instrument that made college accessible in the short term but even costlier in the long term by charging an interest penalty only to needy students. In the mid-1960s, as bankers wavered over the prospect of uncollected debt, Congress backstopped the loans, provoking runaway inflation in college tuition and resulting in immense lender profits. Today 45 million Americans owe more than $1.5 trillion in college debt, with the burdens falling disproportionately on borrowers of color, particularly women. Reformers, meanwhile, have been frustrated by colleges and lenders too rich and powerful to contain. Indentured Students makes clear that these are not unforeseen consequences. The federal student loan system is working as designed.