The U.S. Supreme Court has decided
to hear two legal challenges brought by six
Republican-led states and two
student loan debtors to President Biden’s $400
billion debt-relief plan, which promises to provide as much
as $20,000 in forgiveness to more than 40
million Americans with federal college
loans. The program has been placed on hold
in light of these cases, causing Biden to
extend the pandemic-era pause on federal
student loan repayments through June 2023.
The United States is an outlier in
terms of its prohibitively large student
debt, which stands at $1.75
trillion and amounts to roughly 7.5 percent
of the country’s gross domestic product, and
exorbitant college costs. Indeed, other
countries, such as France
and
Germany, offer low-cost tuition, and in
countries including Finland,
Brazil,
Norway and Panama, there is no
tuition at all. But education did not always come
at such a high cost in America, where public
education was once treated as a public
good.
During the 1960s, government
funding for these public institutions began
to fall precipitously, resulting in the
austerity regime we are witnessing today.
The reason? Conservatives waged an
ideological war against publicly funded
colleges and universities that had become a
place for social justice activism.
Free and low-cost college became
the norm when President Abraham Lincoln
signed the Morrill
Act of 1862, which provided land
grants for states to establish public
colleges and universities. In the 20th
century, the federal government displayed
its commitment to expanding educational
opportunity with the Servicemen’s
Readjustment Act of 1944, also known as the
GI
Bill, which covered tuition and
expenses for veterans attending college or
trade school. In the postwar era, college
enrollment
soared thanks to the advent of federal
student
grants and loans through the 1958
National Defense Education Act, and the
expansion of federal financial aid and
work-study programs for low-income students
with the 1965 Higher Education Act.
Political support for such policies
began to change during the 1960s as the
civil rights movement expanded to college
campuses. Student activists demanded more
equitable campus environments and increased
admissions for students of color.
Universities developed affirmative
action
policies to diversify and transform their
overwhelmingly White student bodies.
Conservatives responded by cutting funds for
public education and advancing the idea that
not everyone — particularly working-class
and low-income people — should have access
to college.
California Gov. Ronald Reagan fired
the first shot by cutting funding to the
University of California system and then for
the first time making in-state students pay
tuition as well as fees, as part of an
effort to politicize education and make it a
wedge issue. At the time, California public
colleges and universities had become centers
of student antiwar and civil rights
activism. The Free
Speech Movement formed at the University of
California at Berkeley when students
challenged campus policies against political
protest and free speech. That student
movement was later motivated by opposition
to the Vietnam War. In the year following
the assassination of Malcolm X, Merritt
Junior College students Huey
P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party
for Self-Defense in 1966 in Oakland, Calif.
And students of color at San
Francisco State University staged the longest student strike
starting in 1968, leading to the birth of
the ethnic studies movement across the
country.
And so, at a time when higher
education had begun to diversify its student
body and expand opportunity for marginalized
communities, conservatives made the case for
college education as a private
endeavor
for the individual rather than a
public good that benefits society. Reagan’s education adviser, Roger
Freeman, warned, “We are in danger of
producing an educated proletariat. … That’s
dynamite! We have to be selective on who we
allow [to go to college]. If not, we will
have a large number of highly trained and
unemployed people,” he added, claiming such
conditions had created fascism in Germany.
Reagan — who according to an FBI
memo was “dedicated to the destruction of
disruptive elements on California college
campuses” — cut funding to the UC system as
a means to engage in austerity politics and
please the conservative base. Narrowing the
scope of government, Reagan charged tuition
to “get rid of undesirables … those who are
there to carry signs and not to study might
think twice to carry picket signs.” The
measure changed public education, and
like-minded government officials in other
states followed suit. Soon, other public
institutions including the University of
Florida and the City University of New York
would turn their backs on free college.
As president, Reagan expanded these
efforts, joining forces with congressional
Republicans and conservative Democrats to
pass cuts to federal
student
aid. This forced students in need —
regarded as “undeserving” like “welfare
queens” by Reagan’s Secretary of Education
Terrel Bell — to resort to taking out student
loans. The Reagan administration justified
the cuts as part of “a major philosophical
shift” to return “to the traditional
emphasis on parent and student
responsibility for financing college costs.”
Meanwhile, the federal government began to
encourage student loans, and schools
regarded students as consumers.
Critics, including institutions of
higher education themselves, viewed the cuts
as brutal and predicted admissions from low-income
students would drop. Such was the legacy of
Reaganomics, of funding tax cuts to the
wealthy by slashing social programs. The
Republican Party consensus was that students
were an economic
drain on the country and that taxpayers
were not obligated to fund student aid.
We are living with the consequences
today. While state and federal governments
once covered most of the cost of attending
public college, today much more of the
burden falls on students. In addition, in an
effort to climb in the rankings and increase
revenue, many public universities have
employed the practices of their private
counterparts and excluded
low-income
and working-class students by pursuing wealthier students.
Public universities have become less
accessible to low-income students and students
of
color, and the covid pandemic has
further exposed the inequities in higher
education as fewer
needy
students are applying
to
college, in what has been described as an
“alarming”
nationwide
exodus.
And in recent weeks the University
of California system — where Reagan first
waged the culture wars against public
investment in higher education — has become
ground zero in the labor union struggle on
college campuses. In the largest action by
academic workers in U.S. history, 48,000
graduate students employed by the University
of California system and represented by the
United Auto Workers went
on strike for nearly six weeks, demanding
higher wages and child care. While 12,000
striking postdoctoral employees and academic
researchers reached
an
agreement and returned to work earlier this
month, 36,000 workers remained on strike
until last week when they voted to ratify
new
contracts.
Faculty are also pushing back. Todd
Wolfson, a journalism professor and faculty
union vice president at Rutgers
University, has pushed to address the crisis
in higher education, which was made worse by
the pandemic, by rethinking it as a “public
socialized good that can reinvigorate our
democracy and workers on our campuses must
be treated with dignity and respect.”
Free or low-cost college used to be
the norm, but now, as austerity measures
saddle students with debt and create
precarious conditions for many academic
workers, American politicians create policy
that treats higher education as a luxury.
And today, college remains a weapon in the
culture wars, with attacks on affirmative
action, diversity, equity and inclusion,
critical race theory and academic freedom.
America has the opportunity to return to the
days before the Reagan education cuts and
restore college as a public good rather than
a profit center.
Such a measure would benefit
society as a whole and combat racial and
economic inequality, which is precisely why
conservatives oppose these steps in the
first place.
This commentary is also posted on The Washington Post
