Public higher education in the postwar era was a key economic and social driver in American life, making college available to millions of working men and women. Since the 1980s, however, government austerity policies and politics have severely reduced public investment in higher education, exacerbating inequality among poor and working-class students of color, as well as part-time faculty. In Austerity Blues, Michael Fabricant and Stephen Brier examine these devastating fiscal retrenchments nationally, focusing closely on New York and California, both of which were leaders in the...
Public higher education in the postwar era was a key economic and social driver in American life, making college available to millions of working m...
The authors persuasively argue that the present cascade of reforms to public education is a consequence of a larger intention to shrink government. The startling result is that more of public education s assets and resources are moving to the private sector and to the prison industrial complex. Drawing on various forms of evidence structural, economic, narrative, and youth-generated participatory research the authors reveal new structures and circuits of dispossession and privilege that amount to a clear failure of present policy. Policymaking is at war with the interests of the vast majority...
The authors persuasively argue that the present cascade of reforms to public education is a consequence of a larger intention to shrink government. Th...