The Switch: Higher Education as a Public Good Decays (1965–1992)

Chapter 1 traces higher education’s historical roots in the United States, including the federal government’s role in constructing a national system of public colleges and universities in the nineteenth century. After World War II (WWII) the federal government prioritized expanding access to higher education under the guise of meeting the economic, political, and military challenges of the twentieth century. President Johnson’s Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965 marked a highwater point. Here, a bipartisan consensus reclassified access to higher education as a public good alongside other Great Society initiatives in health care (Medicare and Medicaid), early education (Head Start), and basic nutrition (Food Stamps)—our book’s bait or an aspirational conception of higher education access that benefitted minority, first-generation and lower income students. This chapter picks up the story in 1965 and shows how the federal government reneged on its commitment to higher education access as a public good. By the early 1990s, it had repositioned itself into the less aspirational role of private student loan guarantor and facilitator, linking higher education access to the choice of students and families to assume debt from for-profit private lenders—our book’s switch. Multiple factors contributed to this policy shift: unanticipated budgetary strains, institutional factors, shifts in middle-class norms and expectations regarding higher education, expenditure choices of universities and colleges, and the rise of powerful, private loan providers such as Sallie Mae.