Charlie Eaton | The Rise (and Fall?) of Student Debt

 In his book Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in U.S. Higher Education, Charlie Eaton exposes the intimate relationship between big finance and higher education inequality in America. Elite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America while public universities have offered a major stepping-stone to new economic opportunities. However, as Charlie Eaton reveals in Bankers in the Ivory Tower, finance has played a central role in the widening inequality in recent decades, both in American higher education and in American society at large.

With federal and state funding falling short, the U.S. higher education system has become increasingly dependent on financial markets and the financiers that mediate them. Beginning in the 1980s, the government, colleges, students, and their families took on multiple new roles as financial investors, borrowers, and brokers. The turn to finance, however, has yielded wildly unequal results. At the top, ties to Wall Street help the most elite private schools achieve the greatest endowment growth through hedge fund investments and the support of wealthy donors. At the bottom, takeovers by private equity transform for-profit colleges into predatory organizations that leave disadvantaged students with massive loan debt and few educational benefits. And in the middle, public universities are squeezed between incentives to increase tuition and pressures to maintain access and affordability. Eaton chronicles these transformations, making clear for the first time just how tight the links are between powerful financiers and America’s unequal system of higher education.

About the Speaker

Dr. Charlie Eaton is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Merced. His research investigates the role of politics and organizations in the interplay between economic elites and disadvantaged social groups. His current research  on the relationships between financialization and growing inequalities in U.S. higher education has been covered by The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, Newsweek, CNBC, Forbes, The Nation, Institutional Investor, Market Watch, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed.

Complimentary copies of Eaton's book will be given to first registrants. 

About the Series

Claire and John Radway Research Workshop

The Education and the Humanities workshop is sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and made possible by support from Claire and John Radway, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.