A01=Charlie Eaton
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american society
Author_Charlie Eaton
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borrowers
brokers
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=JNB
Category=JNKG
Category=JNM
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
disadvantaged students
educational policy
elite colleges
endowment growth
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
finance
financial oligarchy
funding
hedge fund investments
incentives
inequality
investors
justice
Language_English
massive loan debt
PA=Available
predatory organizations
Price_€20 to €50
private schools
PS=Active
public universities
sociology
softlaunch
tuition
united states
us higher education
wall street
wealthy donors
Product details
- ISBN 9780226720425
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 25 Feb 2022
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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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 US 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.
Charlie Eaton is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Merced.
