1. A Nation That Knows the Cost of Everything
Money has always held a powerful place in the American imagination. From the Puritans’ “visible signs of grace” to Silicon Valley’s venture-capital gospel proclaiming the eternal abundance of “more, everything, forever.” Yet something has shifted in recent decades: the culture of money has not only become dominant but total in our society. It has seeped into the heart of our civic institutions, redefining success, merit and even truth itself in purely economic terms.
No institution reveals this transformation more clearly than the American university. Once conceived as a public good—a place where minds were formed for citizenship, not merely for employment—higher education now functions increasingly as a marketplace, where students are customers, faculty are service providers, and knowledge itself is a commodity.
The reality of money’s domination hit me hard, especially as a recipient of a University of Chicago PhD, when I learned of the ongoing current struggles by students and faculty at the university to defend the institution’s traditional educational values. To my dismay, an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the university’s board of directors had “threatened to place the Division of the Arts & Humanities on the chopping block (having first clubbed the humanities and arts together last spring) through consolidation of departments and pausing graduate admissions.”
The same article revealed that financial concerns were undermining even the university’s long-standing commitment to pure research—the very foundation of its world-class reputation and distinctive identity since its founding.
My dismay turned to anger when I discovered that not a single member of the university’s board of directors is an expert in education, let alone a faculty member.
Valid concerns over financial viability—the legal fiduciary responsibility of the board of directors—are being used as weapons to destroy traditions essential to liberal education as well as to the University of Chicago.
2. The Transformation of the University as a Public Project into Private Enterprise
The transformation began quietly, through the slow strangulation of public funding. Since the 1980s, states have slashed appropriations to public universities. As a result, tuition has soared, and student debt has exploded to over $1.84 trillion.
In 1975, tuition at a four-year public college averaged about $600 per year; today it is closer to $11,000. Adjusted for inflation, that is a six-fold increase.
As the Center for American Progress notes, this public disinvestment is “the single largest driver of the student-loan crisis.” Students now pay for what used to be considered a public good, and they pay with borrowed money. They begin adult life in debt — not as citizens in a democracy, but as debtors in a financial system.
Education is no longer a right or a collective investment, but a private gamble. The American university becomes one more market in which individuals wager on their own future earning power.
3. The Corporate University
Inside the gates, the American university itself has been remade in the image of the corporation. Presidents are now called “CEOs,” and governing boards are stacked with business executives who bring with them the values of efficiency, competition, and profit.
But what actually happened? Administrative bloat set in: the number of full-time faculty has remained roughly flat while the number of administrators and “student-service professionals” has ballooned. In 1976, about 70 percent of college instructors were tenured or tenure-track; today that number has fallen below 30 percent. Most teaching is done by adjuncts and graduate assistants who are paid a fraction of a living wage. Small wonder these workers in the academy are organizing into traditional unions to secure some type of job security and worker rights.
As sociologist Ronald W. Cox argues, this reduction of liberal education to market metrics is no accident but a systematic transformation: American universities and colleges are restructuring their labor force on corporate principles, substituting precarious part-time workers for permanent faculty in order to cut costs and maintain managerial control. The result is a kind of academic gig economy.
The faculty’s traditional role—to shape the curriculum, govern the institution, and uphold academic freedom—has been eroded. Decision-making now flows downward from administrators who speak the language of money metrics. Shared governance, once the hallmark of the American university, is increasingly a formality.
But something vital is lost when education is reduced to job training. As Henry Giroux and others have warned, the purpose of higher education is not primarily to supply labor for the economy but to sustain the moral and intellectual life of a democracy. When universities define success only in market terms, they cease to educate citizens to participate in civil society but instead manufacture consumers and producers as their primary contribution to society and civilization.
The liberal arts, the humanities, and liberal studies remind us that education’s highest purpose is understanding, not utility. Yet under the money culture, what cannot be monetized is marginalized.
Even research, once a domain of curiosity and discovery, bends to the pressures of profit. Corporate partnerships dictate the direction of inquiry; grant funding is tied to commercial outcomes. The very idea of disinterested knowledge—the foundation of the modern university—is at risk.
4. Financialization and the Education Market
Economists Daniel Morris and Harry Targ describe this as the financialization of higher education—a process in which higher education, students, and even knowledge itself become financial instruments. Students take on debt to buy degrees; universities take on debt to attract students. It is a self-feeding cycle of risk and return.
In this type of market driven competition, elite universities, such as Harvard, accumulate immense wealth and status, while community colleges and regional publics struggle to survive. The inequality that defines the broader economy now defines higher education itself.
Public universities start to close their satellite campuses, cater to foreign students who pay premium tuition, and tailor their curricula to the marketplace.
The traditional mission of public universities—to provide the rural and working poor, the middle classes, immigrants, and other diverse and marginalized populations with access to the economic and civic tools necessary for success and good citizenship—has been lost amid the feeding frenzy of the pursuit of money.
Catering to the marketplace is like fighting yesterday’s wars—you’re always a step behind in strategy, training, and expertise. The market shifts quickly, while education moves deliberately, because true education is about learning to read, to conduct research, and to think critically about what you discover.
5. The Human Cost
Behind these abstractions are real people. The adjunct teaching four classes at two campuses just to afford rent. The graduate student who will never find a tenure-track job. The first-generation student who borrows $80,000 for a degree and then discovers that the promised career ladder is missing rungs.
When we treat education as a market, we convert the student into a consumer and the professor into a supplier. Both lose. The student is burdened with debt and anxiety; the professor loses autonomy and stability. What disappears is the shared sense of purpose—the idea that both belong to a community devoted to truth, learning, and the common good.
The deeper tragedy of the money culture is not just economic but moral. The American university was once imagined as a place apart, where the pressures of the market gave way to the discipline of thought. It stood for ideals — truth, freedom, community—that could not be priced.
_________
2025 © nicholas.patricca@gmail.com
Nicholas Patricca is professor emeritus at Loyola University Chicago