Just this week, on the front page of my hometown paper was the less-than-shocking news that, in our new economically wounded world, if your parents can pay the staggering tuition demanded by our top private colleges in full, you have a major leg up in the race to the college of your choice. New York Times reporter Kate Zernike quotes Robert A. Sevier, an "enrollment consultant to colleges," saying, "If you are a student of means or ability, or both, there has never been a better year." And as fans of my beloved Brooklyn Dodgers used to say in my childhood, "Wait till next year!"
In the meantime, college and university endowments are plummeting, non-tenured professors and teaching assistants are being dropped, and classes cut back on campuses nationwide. Going to college was, of course, something only a thin slice of the American elite once did. If it turns out that we are indeed in a twenty-first century version of the Great Depression, who knows what a college campus will look like, or who will be walking its paths to class, a decade from now?
As the latest entry in TomDispatch's ongoing series on the fallout in the U.S. from the global economic meltdown, Andy Kroll, who last wrote on the ways in which new Secretary of Education Arne Duncan militarized Chicago's school system, explores higher education in the financial doldrums. Still a college student himself, in a state that's been clobbered by bad times and the collapse of the American auto industry, Kroll considers an American world in which the door to college could be slammed shut on so many. Tom...
