Degrees of Inequality

Starred review from January 6, 2014
The long-running debate on higher education in America is masterfully served by Cornell political scientist Mettler’s carefully researched study, which roams between history, polemic, and analysis with aplomb while championing the positive legacy of equal opportunity in education. Mettler (The Submerged State) arrays an impressive arsenal of statistical data to bolster her claim that for-profit educational institutions are not only overpriced, but fail to deliver the promise of higher education to students who leave disproportionately saddled with debt and diminished job prospects. Though the book orbits the central theme of the for-profits and their outsized political influence, she frames this with a history of higher education and its attendant laws, as well as an excellent introduction to political science that explains—in approachable language—the myriad impacts of law and the ways in which the intentions of legislators are often deformed. In one memorable passage, she avoids facile conclusions in examining the role of money in influencing politics, concluding that while money matters, its impact is far more complex than popular cynicism would imagine. These ideas are informed by a sincere belief in the power of education on Mettler’s part, but her analysis does not suffer. She avoids easy sloganeering and instead focuses on plutocracy, partisanship, and how we might end education policy’s “politics of drift.” Agent: Lisa Adams, Garamond Agency.

Starred review from January 15, 2014
Mettler (Government/Cornell Univ.; The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy, 2011, etc.) delivers a broadside to for-profit universities and the politics that enrich them. The author spent eight years researching and writing her withering attack, and her data is devastating. The for-profits have poor graduation rates, poor records of employment for those who do graduate, and vast numbers of people who find themselves greatly in debt (student loans) and, due to their inadequate education and training, unable to find jobs that will enable them to repay their loans. "The reality of these schools," she writes, "has not matched the rhetoric." Mettler's text is also a social and political history of American higher education, and she notes that despite the pervasiveness of anti-elitist rhetoric, polls show that Americans still believe in the importance of higher education. There is a vast difference between the lifetime incomes of those who did and those who did not graduate from college. The author also traces the history of public funding for higher education--all the way back to pre-colonial America--with special emphasis on major projects like the GI Bill and Pell Grants. She notes that increasing tuition is linked closely to the recent cutbacks in state and federal taxes that support higher education, and she uses Colorado as an example. Among her most damning discoveries: The majority of the for-profits receive more than 80 percent of their revenue from the federal government, and their administrators earn far more than their counterparts in brick-and-mortar universities. She notes that for-profits focus on recruitment, not on education. The GOP receives most of her fire, but the Democrats do not escape unscathed. Basically, she writes, the rich go to "real" schools, the poor to the for-profits, exacerbating inequality. A thorough and deeply troubling analysis of a quiet but ominous threat to democracy.

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March 1, 2014
Cornell University professor Mettler (The Submerged State, 2011) takes on the problems facing U.S. college students, particularly those attending the for-profit, so-called trade schools or career colleges. Attendance in such institutes of higher education, which exploded nearly tenfold in less than two decades to more than two million in 2010, has left its primary students, those from less-advantaged backgrounds, swimming in debt and unable to find work. Pell Grants have failed to expand with college costs, and political partisanship has resulted in the government waffling over student-loan debts while bowing to corporate interests. Mettler notes that the moneyed but basically unregulated for-profit schools are financed by American taxpayers through such mediums as the post-9/11 GI Bill and Department of Defense tuition-assistance benefits. As a result, the American dream slips further from the grasp of many, while the U.S. slips in worldwide standing to where 11 other nations currently have passed the U.S. in college-graduation rates. Reform is past due, and Mettler's well-researched book needs to fall into the hands of those who will read, heed, and rally for change.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)