Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- List of Contributors -- Foreword -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Part I Critical Perspectives on Financing Higher Education in the United States -- 1 Financing Higher Education in the United States: A Historical Overview of Loans in Federal Financial Aid Policy -- 2 Bankruptcy Means-Testing, Austerity Measures, and Student Loan Debt -- 3 African American Student Loan Debt: Deferring the Dream of Higher Education -- 4 Monetary Critique and Student Debt -- Part II The Debt That Won't Go Away: Stories of Non-Dischargeable Student Debt -- 5 The Rise of the Adjuncts: Neoliberalism Invades the Professoriate -- 6 "BFAMFAPhD": An Adjunct Professor's Personal Experience With Student Debt Long After Leaving Graduate School -- 7 Debt(s) We Can't Walk Out On: National Adjunct Walkout Day, Complicity, and the Neoliberal Threat to Social Movements in the Academy -- 8 Misplaced Faith in the American Dream: Buried in Debt in the Catacombs of the Ivory Tower -- 9 An Adjunct Professor's Communication Barriers With Neoliberal Student Debt Collectors -- 10 "Golden Years" in the Red: Student Loan Debt as Economic Slavery -- 11 Should I Go Back to College? -- Part III Alternatives to American Neoliberal Financing of Higher Education -- 12 Free Tuition: Prospects for Extending Free Schooling Into the Postsecondary Years -- 13 "Work Colleges" as an Alternative to Student Loan Debt -- 14 It Takes More Than a Village, It Takes a Nation -- 15 Monetary Transformation and Public Education -- 16 Reflections on the Future: Setting the Agenda for a Post-Neoliberal U.S. Higher Education -- Name Index -- Subject Index

Capturing the voices of Americans living with student debt in the United States, this collection critiques the neoliberal interest-driven, debt-based system of U.S. higher education and offers alternatives to neoliberal capitalism and the corporatized university. Grounded in an understanding of the historical and political economic context, this book offers auto-ethnographic experiences of living in debt, and analyzes alternatives to the current system. Chapter authors address real questions such as, Do collegians overestimate the economic value of going to college? and How does the monetary system that student loans are part of operate? Pinpointing how developments in the political economy are accountable for students’ university experiences, this book provides an authoritative contribution to research in the fields of educational foundations and higher education policy and finance.

Capturing the voices of Americans living with student debt in the United States, this collection critiques the neoliberal interest-driven, debt-based system of U.S. higher education and offers alternatives to neoliberal capitalism and the corporatized university. Grounded in an understanding of the historical and political economic context, this book offers auto-ethnographic experiences of living in debt, and analyzes alternatives to the current system. Chapter authors address real questions such as, Do collegians overestimate the economic value of going to college? and How does the monetary system that student loans are part of operate? Pinpointing how developments in the political economy are accountable for students’ university experiences, this book provides an authoritative contribution to research in the fields of educational foundations and higher education policy and finance.

The book the American Prospect calls “an essential resource for future reformers on how not to govern,” by America’s leading defender of the public interest and a bestselling historian “An essential read for those who want to fight the assault on public goods and the commons.” —Naomi Klein A sweeping exposé of the ways in which private interests strip public goods of their power and diminish democracy, the hardcover edition of The Privatization of Everything elicited a wide spectrum of praise: Kirkus Reviews hailed it as “a strong, economics-based argument for restoring the boundaries between public goods and private gains,” Literary Hub featured the book on a Best Nonfiction list, calling it “a far-reaching, comprehensible, and necessary book,” and Publishers Weekly dubbed it a “persuasive takedown of the idea that the private sector knows best.” From Diane Ravitch (“an important new book about the dangers of privatization”) to Heather McGhee (“a well-researched call to action”), the rave reviews mirror the expansive nature of the book itself, covering the impact of privatization on every aspect of our lives, from water and trash collection to the justice system and the military. Cohen and Mikaelian also demonstrate how citizens can—and are—wresting back what is ours: A Montana city took back its water infrastructure after finding that they could do it better and cheaper. Colorado towns fought back well-funded campaigns to preserve telecom monopolies and hamstring public broadband. A motivated lawyer fought all the way to the Supreme Court after the state of Georgia erected privatized paywalls around its legal code. “Enlightening and sobering” (Rosanne Cash), The Privatization of Everything connects the dots across a wide range of issues and offers what Cash calls “a progressive voice with a firm eye on justice [that] can carefully parse out complex issues for those of us who take pride in citizenship.”

This book examines how teaching and learning and teacher and student identities are being reframed in higher education by neoliberal policies and practices. It shares how teachers perform teaching and learning duties in relation to prescribed institutional policies and how teachers insert dissonant pedagogies as a critical practice. The book explores narrative pedagogy as a disruptive presence and a space for critique. It interrogates personal/professional experience of educational systems that present educators juggling complexity and meeting competing demands to make learning meaningful for students. Each contribution will act as a counterpoint and provide a synoptic method for comparison. The book re-constructs meaning from the generic narrative of the public face of education, which homogenizes and diminishes collective understandings of teachers and teaching. This book provides a contemporary account of the social realities experienced within the higher education classroom across the globe.

"This book examines alternative perspectives on often flawed and misleading college metrics to help students make important education decisions"--

As a school ethnography, this book explores the controversial schooling practices and strategies embedded in charter school management organizations (CMOs), as well as how these practices influence teaching and learning, school leadership, teachers’ professional identities, and students’ understanding of success. By theorizing the common practices within the organization, Stahl connects current research in neoliberal governance, neoliberal structuring of educational policy, aspiration and social reproduction in schooling. Honing in on the discourse on education reform, Stahl demonstrates that a "unique blend" of neoliberalism and social justice values have permeated the CMO’s institutional culture, promoting the belief that adopting corporate practices will fix America’s schools and ensure equity of opportunity for all. The inclusion of institutional texts (emails, Blackberry messages, posters, and rubrics) balances the personal-subjective and inter-subjective to capture a blend of neoliberalism and social justice reframing.