INTRODUCTION

ON FEBRUARY 18, 2011, SOMETHING UNUSUAL HAPPENED IN THE HOUSE of Representatives. It was in the midst of the 112th Congress, which earned the distinction of being the most polarized along party lines of any in modern history.¹ Yet on that day, the members of that divided institution gathered and managed to achieve an astonishing degree of bipartisan consensus. On one particular vote, 58 of the 193 Democrats gathered with all but 4 of the 240 Republicans on the same side of an issue.² What’s more, minority leader Nancy Pelosi, House Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and members of the Black Caucus joined together with the entire Tea Party contingent. What brought this unlikely crew together?

The issue in question involved the so-called for-profit colleges, previously known as trade schools, proprietary schools, or career colleges. Enrollment in these institutions had exploded nearly tenfold in less than two decades, from 226,818 in 1993 to over 2 million in 2010.³ During that time period, a new business model emerged and fourteen for-profits grew into vast multistate enterprises that in combination enroll three out of four of the sector’s students. These companies, such as Corinthian Colleges, Kaplan, and the University of Phoenix, market themselves heavily, advertising regularly on public transportation, the Internet, television, and highway billboards. Some consumer groups worried that the schools preyed on vulnerable low income students and left them with staggering student loan debt. Consequently the US Department of Education under the Obama administration proposed restricting their use of student aid funds under the Higher Education Act of 1965, America’s landmark law that provides financial aid to college students.

In some respects, for-profit schools have distinguished themselves as inclusive innovators that dared to deviate from the established routines of traditional universities. They led the way in offering online education—a move that other institutions are racing to catch up with and emulate. They introduced flexible course scheduling to accommodate the needs of nontraditional students, whose lives are often packed with work and family responsibilities. As a result, these schools have attracted many students from less advantaged backgrounds, who might not otherwise have enrolled in college.

But the for-profits also charge substantial tuition—$15,172 per year on average for full-time undergraduates in 2012–2013. Although this amount is lower than private nonprofits’ cost of $29,056, it is nonetheless substantial compared to $8,655 at four-year public universities and $3,131 at community colleges.4 As a result, nearly all of their students—94 percent among those who gain bachelor’s degrees—take out loans in order to attend, and the average debt per borrower—$32,700—dwarfs that accrued by students at other types of colleges and universities.⁵ All this for an educational experience that often pales by comparison, as judged by differences in the investment in student instruction and graduation rates.⁶ If students at the for-profits do graduate, their job prospects often fail to measure up to the high levels of student debt they shoulder.⁷ As a result, they have by far the highest default rates on student loans—within three years, 23 percent have failed to maintain payments, and on net the sector accounts for nearly half of all defaults.⁸ This combination of higher tuition, questionable job prospects, and burdensome debt means that many for-profit schools leave a large number of their students worse off than if they had never attempted to pursue advanced education in the first place.

Ironically, despite being regarded as part of the private sector, the for-profits are financed almost entirely by American taxpayers. They enroll about one in ten college students today, but utilize one in four dollars allocated through Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965, the predominant source of federal student aid.9 A 1998 law permits the for-profits to gain up to 90 percent of their total revenues from this single source. Other government funds do not count against this threshold, so the for-profits also receive 37 percent of all Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits and 50 percent of Department of Defense tuition assistance benefits.¹⁰ In recent years, this combination of public funds has provided the for-profit schools with 86 percent of their total revenue, to the tune of roughly $32 billion annually.¹¹

So, we have substandard educational institutions producing many students who can’t get good jobs, costing taxpayers billions. Question: who is actually benefiting from this arrangement? Answer: the businesspersons who own them and their corporate shareholders. The largest for-profits, though subsidized almost entirely by government, are now publicly traded on Wall Street, and during the 1990s and early 2010s they reaped enormous profits. Even in the midst of the financial downturn in 2008, the top nine companies enjoyed 4 percent growth in their stocks, while the S&P 500 declined by 39 percent.

Which brings us back to the surprising moment of bipartisanship in February 2011. A significant number of Democrats united with Republicans to oppose new regulations being developed by the Department of Education, rules that would make student aid to the for-profits contingent on their performance. A mere seventeen months earlier, when the House had voted on a major overhaul of federal student aid that terminated bank-based lending and strengthened Pell grants, partisan politics prevailed: only six Republicans supported it and only four Democrats opposed it.¹² Since 1995, House votes on higher education policy—an issue area that previously involved a fair degree of bipartisanship—had become starkly polarized along party lines.¹³ Now the GOP and its Tea Party–supported members, generally zealous defenders of austerity, voted with Democrats who professed to cherish their party’s role in creating the Higher Education Act, a law long associated with educational opportunity. Together, this bipartisan group implicitly voiced its support for continuing massive government spending on a sector of colleges and universities that has little to show for itself—aside from its ability to channel profits to business leaders and investors.

This vote could easily be passed off as small and insignificant. It involved only an amendment to a large budget bill, and it was dropped in the Senate version, never coming to a vote. Yet it showcases in microcosm a tragedy that has befallen the United States. To begin with, while the for-profits appear to give struggling Americans a shot at improving their life circumstances, in reality, these schools leave many worse off, to the point of financial ruin. Simultaneously, they lavish abundant profits on owners and corporate shareholders—at taxpayer expense—effectively benefiting the affluent even as they destroy the lives of the less advantaged. Most egregiously, the US government not only condones these circumstances but actively facilitates and sponsors them through nearly full subsidization of such schools—paired with, at present, only minimal regulation of how they conduct themselves. But the nation’s support of the for-profits is not an isolated instance of public policy that has gone off course; instead, it is one of several developments that, in combination, amount to an abdication of one of the nation’s proudest legacies: the promotion of higher education and, through it, the promise of the American dream.

The United States from its beginnings distinguished itself as a pioneer in fostering the development of a large and diverse array of colleges and universities. Then in the mid-twentieth century, landmark public policies ushered in a golden age of educational opportunity. Through federal policies ranging from the GI Bill through Pell grants, and extensive state-level support for public institutions of higher education, the nation expanded access to college to growing numbers of Americans from across the income spectrum. People from humble backgrounds became the first in their families to attain college diplomas, enabling them to enjoy occupational choices and a standard of living their parents could only have dreamed of, and to pass those advantages on to their own children.

Over the past thirty years, however, our system of higher education has gone from facilitating upward mobility to exacerbating social inequality. College-going, once associated with opportunity, now engenders the creation of a something that increasingly resembles a caste system: it takes Americans who grew up in different social strata and it widens the divisions between them and makes them more rigid. The consequences are vast, ranging from differences in employment rates and lifetime earnings to health and civic engagement. Besides the rise of the for-profits, several changes in federal student aid and the demise of state funding for public universities and colleges have also helped produce these circumstances. All told, the tragedy is that while public policies in the past helped mitigate inequality and open the doors to college to more Americans, today they themselves play a crucial role in segmenting our society.

At its core, this transformation represents a political failure, a breaking down of representative government so that it no longer provides effective mechanisms by which Americans can pursue a better life. Higher education policies that worked well in the past are still in place, but they have deteriorated or gone off course. Policymakers need to engage in policy maintenance, upkeep, and renovation if these policies are to function effectively for succeeding generations. But with rare exceptions, they do not carry out these basic tasks. Today the US political system has been besieged by two forces that undermine efforts to keep policy functioning effectively: political polarization, as the parties in Congress have grown more ideological and less willing to work together than at any point in at least a century, and plutocracy, the responsiveness of the political system primarily to the concerns of wealthy and powerful interests. These politics, in combination, have sabotaged the American dream.

The promotion of education at all levels emerged as a distinctive component of American political development from the very start. As a young nation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the United States used land grants to the states to spur the creation of a vast network of colleges and universities. By the eve of the Civil War, the nation boasted 250 institutions of higher education.14 The Morrill Act of 1862, also known as the Land-Grant College Act, signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln, ushered in a new educational model that combined traditional liberal arts education with training in agriculture, the natural sciences, and teaching. Kansas State University became the first institution established under the new law, and other fully public universities followed. By their very mission and through their expansive offerings in practical fields of study, the land-grant colleges reached out to a broader segment of the public than the institutions that preceded them. Congress enacted a second Morrill Act in 1890, leading to yet more new institutions, including seventeen historically black colleges and universities.¹⁵

The next great phase of the nation’s leadership in higher education occurred after World War II, when the US Congress enacted a series of landmark laws that expanded access to colleges and universities, making them affordable to a wide swath of the population. This transformation began when policymakers created the first of several GI Bills, laws that enabled veterans to seek additional education at government expense. Fifty-one percent of the 15 million returning veterans of World War II used the benefits, one-quarter of them to attend college. As a result, college graduation rates among males, which had been slowly creeping upward, shot up from just over 100,000 annually in 1940 to well over 300,000 annually by 1950.¹⁶ Soon after, lawmakers extended student aid to civilian students, first in the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which extended the first student loans. Then in 1965, as part of the constellation of programs that made up the Great Society, President Johnson promoted the comprehensive Higher Education Act, which included student loans, grants, and work-study.¹⁷ Pell grants, created in 1972, marked the crowning touch of federal policy, with funds channeled explicitly to low income students. Unlike the GI Bill, these policies were fully available to women, who quickly began to use them at comparable rates to men, particularly once the passage of Title IX, in 1972, mandated an end to discrimination in college admissions.¹⁸ Meanwhile, states expanded the range of educational options available to their citizens and provided ample support. By 1980, nearly 80 percent of all college students were enrolled in public two- and four-year colleges and universities, where they benefited from low tuition.19

This stream of landmark policy developments, in combination with rising high school graduation rates, yielded powerful effects on American society. In 1940, before it began, only one in twenty Americans held a four-year college degree; by 1977, that number had soared to one in four.²⁰ Advanced education, in turn, stimulated upward social mobility. Male veterans who utilized the GI Bill to go to college in many cases experienced leaps in occupational status compared to their fathers: a longshoreman’s son became an attorney, a cobbler’s son became an engineer, a coal miner’s son became a geologist, and on and on.²¹ It is well-known that those with greater education and income participate more in civic life.²² In the case of the GI Bill, the experience of policy usage itself generated active engagement: comparing nonblack male veterans who used the education and training provisions with those who did not, GI Bill beneficiaries took part in twice as many civic organizations and one-third more political activities during the postwar era. Black veterans who utilized the benefits became a leadership cadre for the civil rights movement, and after marching and protesting to end discrimination in the 1950s and early 1960s, by the next period in time they took part in formal politics at high levels.²³ And the GI Bill had second-generation effects: one beneficiary commented that it “gave our family at ‘boost’ that has allowed us to help our children go to college more than I had expected, i.e., GI Bill benefits have been passed to a second generation!”²⁴ Women who utilized student loans and Pell grants attained more advanced education than those who did not, and subsequently they took part in politics at higher rates, helping close the gender gap in political involvement.²⁵ In these and myriad other ways, aid policies mitigated economic and political inequality.

But something happened beginning in the 1980s, with disastrous effects for the American dream—the belief that those who work hard can improve their circumstances—that is so central to the nation’s values. Those born in the quarter century following World War II possess higher rates of college education than members of their generation elsewhere in the world, but that is no longer the case for younger generations. Eleven other nations—not only in western Europe but also Poland and Korea—have leapfrogged over the United States in the percentage of their young obtaining four-year college degrees.26

More importantly, the stalled progress in the United States occurred primarily among those from low to moderate incomes; indeed, people from those groups are barely more likely to graduate from college than were those of their parents’ generation.²⁷ Making matters worse, this trend has developed during the same decades as economic inequality has widened and a college degree has become more critical than ever in determining Americans’ chances of employment and income.²⁸ And this doesn’t even take into account the kind of degree attained. Today, it matters increasingly not only whether you go to college, but also what type of college you attend. Many needy students are sequestered into separate and inferior institutions, including the for-profits, from which they are likely to emerge without degrees and too often with crushing levels of debt. In short, our system of higher education contributes, increasingly, to rising inequality, as it stratifies Americans by income group rather than providing them with ladders of opportunity.

What can explain why the United States has gotten off track from its historic legacy? My research indicates that problems in higher education policy today are not attributable solely to the usual suspects. Many would put the blame squarely on the shoulders of universities and colleges, pointing to the high tuition they charge. Indeed, tuition has skyrocketed since the 1980s, far outpacing inflation. The average published tuition at private nonprofit four-year institutions amounts to 36 percent of average family income, up from 16 percent in 1973. The tuition at four-year public institutions, though considerably less, has actually increased at a faster rate over the same time period, growing from 4 percent of average family income to 11 percent. Two-year community colleges typically charge a rate that approaches 4 percent of the average family income, up from 2 percent.²⁹ So whether you’re a student at Harvard University, Grand Valley State in Michigan, or Hinds Community College in Mississippi, you’re feeling the strain of steep annual increases in tuition.

Tuition has soared for several reasons. Some colleges—particularly elite privates and flagship publics—serve large numbers of affluent students who are eager to benefit from their brand name and from the latest and best facilities and services they can offer. These students come from families who are willing and able to pay higher rates. Colleges in this tier compete with each other, aiming to outdo one another in pursuit of such students—by installing desirable features such as recreation centers with climbing walls, spa amenities, and luxurious dining and dormitory facilities. Colleges of all types have sought to elevate graduation rates by offering supportive services to students—such as mental health counseling and writing tutors—which increase costs.30 Economists who study tuition increases in depth point out that higher education—like health care but unlike many other industries—relies primarily on a number of human services that cannot be as easily replaced or sped up by technological advances as other sectors of the economy.³¹ Amazon.com can reduce what students pay for textbooks by automating the costs of shipping them, but student learning—even in an age of online education—still requires instructors. Moreover, in order to provide state-of-the-art education, it is necessary to rely on skilled professionals and up-to-date equipment and facilities. Therefore, even apart from the cost drivers noted above, college education tends to grow more expensive over time.

But tuition increases do not occur in a vacuum, with colleges and universities single-handedly determining the price that students pay for their education. The long history of federal and state support for higher education demonstrates powerfully that students have never been charged the full balance of the costs involved: government has always played a supportive role, in effect subsidizing the cost of tuition through a wide array of public policies. Even in the colonial period, public authorities contributed to the development of what became private colleges, beginning with Harvard in 1636. As recently as the 1980s, individual states contributed the lion’s share of funds needed by public universities and colleges, and thereby managed to keep tuition low for state residents. And so rather than using tuition increases alone to explain the crisis in higher education, we need to consider what has become of government’s role in supporting students and institutions.

Lackluster college graduation rates are also often blamed on students themselves, or on inadequacies in the K-12 educational system from which they come. Countless reports suggest that low and moderate income people may be insufficiently prepared for college, and therefore less likely to matriculate or to complete their degrees. They may find it difficult even to navigate the admissions and the financial aid processes, and to discern between credible institutions and those that are more likely to take advantage of the vulnerable. Each of these claims has some merit. Yet there is nothing new in the greater advantages the wealthy have in finding their way to college and succeeding once they get there. Here again, we need to consider what has changed over the past forty years—namely, government’s capacity to enable growing numbers of ordinary Americans to graduate from college.

In recent decades public policies have functioned far less effectively than they did in the mid-twentieth century to ameliorate inequality in college-going. This policy failure is manifest in three areas. First, federal student aid—though more costly than ever—no longer promotes opportunity as effectively as it did in the past. This is in part because policymakers permitted Pell grants to fall behind in value as tuition escalated, leaving students with no option apart from borrowing more in student loans—and growing more indebted. Despite increases in Pell grants since 2007, the benefits still fail to keep pace with rising college costs. The value of the maximum grant award in covering the cost of tuition, fees, room and board at the average four year public university has fallen from nearly 80 percent in the 1970s to only 31 percent in 2012–2013.32 Also, beginning in the late 1990s, lawmakers fashioned costly new tuition tax policies that provide a bonus to many fairly well-off Americans who would attend college regardless of whether or not they received aid. Expansions of these policies in 2009 deliver their largest benefits to households with incomes between $100,000 and $180,000.³³

Second, state governments have diminished their commitment to public higher education, no longer treating it as the priority that it once was. The vast network of state universities and community colleges has long served as the access point for most Americans who pursue higher education by offering quality education at an affordable price. These institutions continue to enroll 73 percent of all college students.34 But between 1990–1991 and 2009–2010, state governments decreased funding for them by an average of 26 percent in real terms—even as operating costs increased.³⁵ Unlike the elite private nonprofit universities that rely on private donations to close the budget gap, public institutions—outside of the flagship universities—lack such capacity.³⁶ They have instead raised tuition: at the average public four-year institution, it skyrocketed by 244 percent in real terms between 1980–1981 and 2010–2011.³⁷ In effect, public higher education has become increasingly privatized as students and their families have been left to shoulder the increased costs.

This means that public universities and colleges no longer offer the same degree of opportunity they provided to low and moderate income Americans as recently as a generation ago. In Minnesota, for example, the cost of tuition—adjusted for inflation—increased threefold. Nils Badrul, a student at St. Cloud University, was amazed to learn that his grandparents paid all expenses for his father, Badrul Bakar, when he was a student there. Bakar explains that back then, attending cost only “a few hundred dollars a quarter. Wow!” By contrast, his son’s expenses are upward of $11,000 per year, and Bakar can do little aside from giving him small amounts every few weeks to help defray expenses. Nils received $5,000 per year in grants and borrows the rest through student loans. “At this time we have no choice because we can’t afford it,” explains Bakar.³⁸ For low to moderate income students, these escalating rates of tuition can make the difference between enrolling or not, and completing a degree or dropping out.³⁹ The shortfall in funding also leads to a widening of the resource gap between the public and private nonprofit sectors, with implications for the professor-student ratio and other key dimensions of the quality of the college experience.

Third, as noted earlier, lawmakers have permitted the for-profit education industry to capture a huge portion of federal student aid funds, despite their poor record in serving students. In fact, for a decade beginning in the late 1990s, lawmakers relaxed restrictions on the sector, making it even easier for it to take advantage of federal largesse. They did this even though these schools generally lack the established forms of self-regulation and quality control that have long been in place at most of the public and private nonprofit universities and colleges. The for-profits lack the intensive review procedures that traditional colleges use to evaluate faculty for tenure and promotion and the rigorous ethical guidelines they abide by for the admissions and financial aid process. And yet even in the absence of such self-governance by the for-profits, advocates of more extensive public regulation for the sector have faced an uphill battle in recent decades. The efforts by the US Department to Education to regulate the sector—to which the House objected in the 2011 vote described above—produced a watered-down set of rules that year, and most of them were discarded by a judge one year later.

These three sets of policy developments, in combination, have transformed the US system of education from one that provides access and opportunity to one that widens economic inequality and fosters social division. Young people’s experiences of college itself and of government support in attending it both vary with their position on the income spectrum. At the upper end are those born into affluent families who would go to college whether or not government assisted them. They typically attend elite private or flagship public universities. These institutions do benefit from government largesse that reduces their operating costs, but through channels that are less than obvious. For instance, they enjoy tax-free status, meaning that they owe nothing to government on capital gains in their endowment. The tax system also incentivizes private donors to give to them by making contributions tax-free. Government-sponsored research grants, complete with allotments for indirect costs, fill out this portfolio. Such subsidies not only support faculty research but also enable such institutions to provide a very high-quality education to students at a cost considerably less than its actual value. Other colleges lack comparable support.40 Upper middle income families benefit directly from tuition tax breaks if they have household income under $180,000 per year. Students in these families are also often well positioned to win merit scholarships awarded by a growing number of states that permit them to attend flagship public universities at sharply reduced tuition.⁴¹ They are also likely to be awarded merit aid at private nonprofit colleges, which use such funds as inducements to attract students who will pay nearly full tuition, rather than to provide more need-based aid to low income students, to supplement what they receive from Pell grants.⁴² Students in solidly middle income families, by contrast, enroll especially in public universities and colleges where they face steeply rising tuition costs—and must borrow more and work more than those in the past to make ends meet. Being employed lengthens the time it takes them to get their degree and imperils their chances of finishing. They are also increasingly likely to be in large classes and to be deprived of the special services that assist students at better-funded universities. Worst of all are the circumstances of low income people—who must borrow heavily and work the most hours in order to attend. They are the most likely either to attend community colleges, where the investment per student—hovering around $12,000 annually—is far lower than that of the institutions noted above, or to be recruited by for-profit schools that invest far less in students and typically leave them heavily indebted.

The question yet to be answered is this: Why has the US political system permitted policies to veer so far off track, abandoning the tradition of expanding the ranks of the college educated? Why has it advanced policy changes that destroy the nation’s legacy in higher education—particularly at a point in time when acquiring a college degree is more important than ever? In mountains of reports, economists and education experts have documented the US lag in college-going as well as the commensurate rise in inequality in college attainment.⁴³ Several notable books delve deeper still.⁴⁴ To name just a few, in The Race Between Education and Technology Claudia Goldin and Richard Katz show how inequality lessened as college degrees and technology grew in tandem in the early twentieth century, but rose again as education fell behind more recently.45 Greg J. Duncan’s collection, Whither Opportunity? and Richard Kahlenberg’s Rewarding Strivers elaborate on the features of educational inequality, its socioeconomic consequences, and how it might be addressed.⁴⁶ However, scholars have yet to explain how and why the United States permitted these developments to occur. Unraveling that story requires us to put the American political system front and center, examining what happened to higher education policy over this time period and the forces that shaped it.

I have discovered that Americans have not become less supportive of college students than they were in the past; public opinion trends reveal at least steady support and by some indicators a growing commitment to promoting college degree attainment. Neither is the problem attributable simply to the textbook features of the American political system—such as the complexities of the separation of powers and federalism, and the power of interest groups—that routinely complicate the enactment of policy reform. Rather, the profound political dysfunction underlying trends in this issue area—as in many others—owes to particular features of contemporary American politics that are every bit as routine and established as those institutional features, but observers have not yet recognized their existence.

Today we dwell in what I call a policyscape, a political landscape densely cluttered with a vast array of policies of all varieties that were established at earlier points in time. These policies, in higher education and in other areas as well, do not function as effectively as they once did. In some measure, that’s because circumstances in the environment have changed, and policymakers have failed to update the policies accordingly—a phenomenon that has been called “drift.”⁴⁷ For example, tuition has grown for some reasons unrelated to government’s role, as noted above, and student aid has failed to keep pace. But these external changes are only part of the problem.

It’s also the case that existing policies themselves generate effects that, over time, can reshape their development—and in some cases, take them off the rails from their intended purposes. This may be caused by any of three dynamics: policy design effects, unintended consequences, or lateral effects. Policy design effects occur as inherent characteristics of policies act to foster their growth and expansion or, conversely, to make them vulnerable to deterioration or contraction. These tendencies, over the years, can transform policies and affect their capacity to achieve their original goals. Pell grants, for example, lack automatic cost-of-living adjustments; this means that their value necessarily diminishes as inflation occurs, unless lawmakers manage to raise rates through the cumbersome and contentious annual budget appropriations process in Congress. Student loans, by contrast, grow easily: lawmakers only need to agree to allow more students to borrow more money. This imbalance between grants and loans, paired with rising tuition, has led to increasing student indebtedness.

Unintended consequences happen when policies yield side effects that their creators did not anticipate, for example, by influencing the activity of individuals or organizations beyond those they aimed to affect. In some instances, such policy consequences may reshape the political system itself through “feedback effects” that can be salutary or perverse. Scholars find some evidence that universities and colleges—for-profit colleges in particular—may respond to the availability of federal aid by simply increasing the tuition they charge.48 Federal student aid policies may also prompt industries to engage in behavior that economists call “rent-seeking,” meaning attempts to influence the political system in order to extract profits from it, for example, by gaining new customers or commanding a higher price for their goods and services than they would otherwise. Student aid policies have created a windfall for for-profit schools, and those companies have, in turn, invested some of their earnings in enhancing their political capacity—through campaign contributions and lobbying—as a means of maintaining and extending the policies that benefit them so lucratively.

Lateral effects happen when policies are changed due to the impact of other, unrelated policies. Higher education spending in the states, for instance, has been effectively displaced as lawmakers have left it to dwindle while permitting spending areas such as K-12 education and health care to consume larger portions of state budget resources. In part this owes to the “mandatory” features of the latter policies, as governments are compelled by law to provide such services to those who are eligible, while aid for colleges and universities is instead “discretionary” and therefore more vulnerable to budget cutting.

What becomes clear is that when left to their own devices, policies can develop over time in ways that undermine their ability to achieve the societal goals they were created to address. But the existence of the policyscape doesn’t mean that we are doomed to forces beyond our control; it is not inevitable that policies will go off track or that if they do, they will remain derailed. Rather, a fundamental task of contemporary governance is that of policy maintenance: lawmakers need to monitor policies, assess what sorts of repairs or renovation may be required, and conduct reforms as needed. As former senator Nancy Kassebaum, a Republican of Kansas, explains, “Public programs—just like any other programs—need to be managed.”49

But the extent to which lawmakers engage in policy maintenance depends on the political context in which they dwell. Maintaining existing policies effectively requires that political leaders recognize and value the basic purposes of public policy—and identify when existing policies need updating. It demands public officials who are creative thinkers and flexible negotiators, willing to work across differences to repair and alter policies so that they continue to function well for future generations. Landmark higher education laws were created in the mid-twentieth century typically at the initiative of Democrats who controlled Congress at that time, but they enjoyed a fair amount of bipartisan support. Two of the most prominent ones were signed into law by Republican presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Following the 1980 election of President Ronald Reagan, a new conservative approach to governance emerged and Republicans gained control of the Senate. For a time higher education policies grew untended, as lawmakers couldn’t agree on how to maintain them. Yet by the late 1980s and early 1990s, reform initiatives began to appear, emanating from both sides of the aisle and gaining bipartisan support.

Since the 1994 elections, however, constructive bipartisanship has all but vanished from the political landscape. Both chambers of Congress have grown more polarized than at any time since at least the early twentieth century, if not the Civil War. Both parties have become more internally homogeneous and unified, and moderates have become scarce.50 This partisan environment has not only hindered chances that public officials will enact bold new landmark laws; it has also proven detrimental to their performance of even the basic tasks necessary to maintain existing ones. Polarization undermines lawmakers’ willingness and ability to update policies and to make necessary adjustments when they veer off course. But that’s only part of the problem.

Making matters worse, when factions within Congress have managed to unite in the past two decades, the interests they have responded to most reliably have been those with the deepest pockets; money lubricates political machinery that is otherwise stuck in gridlock. As demonstrated by the February 2011 House vote on the for-profits (described above), many public officials come together readily across the aisle when the interests of the affluent and powerful are at stake. These bipartisan “exceptions to the rule” endow the political system with features of a plutocracy, as if a wealthy class effectively controls the government. In the case of higher education issues, they ensure that shareholders and top management of businesses that benefit from student aid are represented, but the needs of ordinary Americans fail to gain attention. In sum, this polarized and plutocratic politics is a disastrous combination with the policyscape: it lacks the characteristics necessary for successful negotiation of the complex array of organizations, industries, and other policy effects that have emerged with long established policies.

The pairing of the dense policyscape that exists today with the politics of polarization and plutocracy has amounted to a tragic mismatch for effective governance. The unfortunate results are apparent not only in policies related to college-going, but also in many other seemingly intractable issue areas. If we continue along this path of dysfunctional governance, we will fail to address problems ranging from retirement security to immigration—areas in which we have existing policies, but ones that need updating. As a nation we will continue to slide away from the greater equality and more widespread upward mobility that characterized the mid-twentieth century, and become increasingly beleaguered by problems that could be mitigated through a reasoned public policy response.

Citizenship in the United States has never come with a guaranteed standard of living or political influence. Historically, however, it has offered the possibility of upward mobility. And it has provided means for citizens to improve their understanding of public life and their capacity to participate in it, thereby enhancing democracy. Not many decades ago, higher education was an important key to this dynamic.51

When the US House of Representative discussed federal aid for the for-profits in February 2011, to those listening in the gallery it might have sounded like this American tradition was being revived. The inclusive spirit of earlier higher education policies was echoed, for example, when Edolphus Towns of New York implored his colleagues to vote against federal restrictions on the for-profits: “Supporting this amendment is supporting educational opportunities for minorities. A ‘yes’ vote is a vote for economically disadvantaged students. Many of them are the first in their families to attend college. These students wish to have the opportunity to attend a flexible program that trains them to be the best they can be.”⁵² This view united him and other members of the Black Caucus together with Tea Party Republicans, who praised the schools as exemplars of the free market. The more telling indication of what was actually at stake, however, may have been provided in the midst of the economic downturn in 2008, when the top for-profit companies experienced growth in their stocks while other major companies posted huge losses. A for-profit analyst at the time noted with satisfaction, “We’ve been trouncing the S&P.”⁵³ When elected officials coalesced in the House vote in 2011, they clearly endorsed opportunity for industry elites, but their actions provided little hope for Americans struggling for a better life.