Category: 2U

  • Can College Presidents Tell Us the Truth?

    Can College Presidents Tell Us the Truth?

    “Truth? You can’t handle the truth!” Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men captures the tension at the heart of American higher education: can college presidents confront veritas—the deep, sometimes uncomfortable truths about their institutions—or will they hide behind prestige, endowments, and comforting illusions?

    At the foundation of academia lies veritas, Latin for truth or truthfulness, derived from verus, “true” or “trustworthy.” Veritas is not optional decoration on a university crest; it is a moral and intellectual obligation. Yet 2025 reveals a system where veritas is too often sidelined: institutions obscure financial mismanagement, exploit adjunct faculty, overburden students with debt, and misrepresent outcomes to the public.

    The Higher Education Inquirer (HEI) embodies veritas in action. In “Ahead of the Learned Herd: Why the Higher Education Inquirer Grows During the Endless College Meltdown,” HEI demonstrates that truth-telling can thrive outside corporate funding or advertising. By reporting enrollment collapses, adjunct exploitation, and predatory for-profit practices, HEI holds institutions accountable to veritas, exposing what many university leaders hope will remain invisible.

    Leadership failures are a direct affront to veritas. “Scam Artist or Just Failed CEO?” scrutinizes former 2U CEO Christopher “Chip” Paucek, revealing misleading enrollment tactics and financial mismanagement that serve elite universities more than consumers. These corporate-style decisions in a higher education setting betray the very principle of veritas, prioritizing appearance and profit over educational integrity and human outcomes.

    Student journalism amplifies veritas further. Through Campus Beat, student reporters uncover tuition hikes, censorship, and labor abuses, demonstrating that veritas does not belong only to administrators—it belongs to those who seek to document reality, often at personal and professional risk.

    Economic and political realities also test veritas. In “Trumpenomics: The Emperor Has No Clothes,” HEI exposes how hollow economic reforms enrich a few while leaving the majority behind. Academia mirrors this pattern: when prestige is elevated over substance, veritas is discarded in favor of illusion, leaving students and faculty to bear the consequences.

    Structural crisis continues. In “College Meltdown Fall 2025,” HEI documents federal oversight erosion, AI-saturated classrooms with rampant academic misconduct, rising student debt, and mass layoffs. To honor veritas, leaders would confront these crises transparently, but too often they choose comforting narratives instead.

    Debt remains one of the clearest tests of institutional veritas. HEI’s “The Student Loan Mess: Next Chapters” shows how trillions in student loans have become instruments of social control. The Sweet v. McMahon borrower defense cases illustrate bureaucratic inertia and opacity, directly challenging the principles of veritas as thousands of debtors await relief that is slow, incomplete, and inconsistently applied.

    Predatory enrollment practices further undermine veritas. Lead generators, documented by HEI, exploit student information to drive enrollment into high-cost, low-value programs, prioritizing revenue over truth, clarity, and student welfare. “College Prospects, College Targets” exposes how prospective students are commodified, turning veritas into a casualty of marketing algorithms.

    Through all of this, HEI itself stands as a living testament to veritas. Surpassing one million views in July 2025, it proves that the public demands accountability, clarity, and honesty in higher education. Veritas resonates—when pursued rigorously, it illuminates failures, inspires reform, and empowers communities.

    The question remains: can college presidents handle veritas—the unflinching truth about student debt, labor exploitation, mismanagement, and declining institutional legitimacy? If they cannot, they forfeit moral and public authority. Veritas is not optional; it is the standard by which institutions must be measured, defended, and lived.

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  • The Right-Wing Roots of EdTech

    The Right-Wing Roots of EdTech

    The modern EdTech industry is often portrayed as a neutral, innovative force, but its origins are deeply political. Its growth has been fueled by a fusion of neoliberal economics, right-wing techno-utopianism, patriarchy, and classism, reinforced by racialized inequality. One of the key intellectual architects of this vision was George Gilder, a conservative supply-side evangelist whose work glorified technology and markets as liberating forces. His influence helped pave the way for the “Gilder Effect”: a reshaping of education into a market where technology, finance, and ideology collide, often at the expense of marginalized students and workers.

    The for-profit college boom provides the clearest demonstration of how the Gilder Effect operates. John Sperling’s University of Phoenix, later run by executives like Todd Nelson, was engineered as a credential factory, funded by federal student aid and Wall Street. Its model was then exported across the sector, including Risepoint (formerly Academic Partnerships), a company that sold universities on revenue-sharing deals for online programs. These ventures disproportionately targeted working-class women, single mothers, military veterans, and Black and Latino students. The model was not accidental—it was designed to exploit populations with the least generational wealth and the most limited alternatives. Here, patriarchy, classism, and racism intersected: students from marginalized backgrounds were marketed promises of upward mobility but instead left with debt, unstable credentials, and limited job prospects.

    Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn of Harvard Business School popularized the concept of “disruption,” providing a respectable academic justification for dismantling public higher education. Their theory of disruptive innovation framed traditional universities as outdated and made way for venture-capital-backed intermediaries. Yet this rhetoric concealed a brutal truth: disruption worked not by empowering the disadvantaged but by extracting value from them, often reinforcing existing inequalities of race, gender, and class.

    The rise and collapse of 2U shows how this ideology plays out. Founded in 2008, 2U promised to bring elite universities online, selling the dream of access to graduate degrees for working professionals. Its “flywheel effect” growth strategy relied on massive enrollment expansion and unsustainable spending. Despite raising billions, the company never turned a profit. Its high-profile acquisition of edX from Harvard and MIT only deepened its financial instability. When 2U filed for bankruptcy, it was not simply a corporate failure—it was a symptom of an entire system built on hype and dispossession.

    2U also became notorious for its workplace practices. In 2015, it faced a pregnancy discrimination lawsuit after firing an enrollment director who disclosed her pregnancy. Women workers, especially mothers, were treated as expendable, a reflection of patriarchal corporate norms. Meanwhile, many front-line employees—disproportionately women and people of color—faced surveillance, low wages, and impossible sales quotas. Here the intersections of race, gender, and class were not incidental but central to the business model. The company extracted labor from marginalized workers while selling an educational dream to marginalized students, creating a cycle of exploitation at both ends of the pipeline.

    Financialization extended these dynamics. Lenders like Sallie Mae and Navient, and servicers like Maximus, turned students into streams of revenue, with Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities (SLABS) trading debt obligations on Wall Street. Universities, including Purdue Global and University of Arizona Global, rebranded failing for-profits as “public” ventures, but their revenue-driven practices remained intact. These arrangements consistently offloaded risk onto working-class students, especially women and students of color, while enriching executives and investors.

    The Gilder Effect, then, is not just about technology or efficiency. It is about reshaping higher education into a site of extraction, where the burdens of debt and labor fall hardest on those already disadvantaged by patriarchy, classism, and racism. Intersectionality reveals what the industry’s boosters obscure: EdTech has not democratized education but has deepened inequality. The failure of 2U and the persistence of predatory for-profit models are not accidents—they are the logical outcome of an ideological project rooted in conservative economics and systemic oppression.

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