This resonates with my experience at one of the most expensive universities in the U.S. -- University of Richmond. While they use their money (2.19 billion dollar endowment!) to attract great professors and build/market their country club of a campus, it's clear that the student body is nothing but a cash crop to them. I am interested in the ways in which universities manufacture consent on their campuses -- how they give students a perceived sense of agency through trivial clubs and "perks," while bigger decisions are made by the Trustees. Then, there's the whole "Greek system" which is essentially a psy op used by the administration to implement fictitious divides within the student body through the pretense of tradition -- when I was at the University of Richmond, roughly 50% of the students were part of fraternities and sororities -- we are talking about a campus of 3,000 students. There's also a wide variety of clubs to further segment the population, but no Student Union for obvious reasons. The "Student Government" was a joke and was controlled by the administration. Now that I think about it, a lot of the tricks used by universities to control the population are true for society at large -- social control, censorship, complete disregard for feedback. This is what happens when you let neoliberals control education, not to mention that colleges are a great honey pot for military propaganda and recruitment. UR is recognized for its Business School which is essentially an assembly line to Wall St.

What "saved" it for me was finding a group of fellow weirdos and creatives who became my best friends. If it weren't for them, I'd be in great trouble. This is the opportunity which a lot of universities fail to capitalize on -- the generative power of their student body, and why would they, if that would threaten the status quo imposed by the Board of Trustees and whoever else is pulling the strings?

Student debt is perhaps the biggest, and most obvious, scam of our generation. Now that it has even surpassed credit card debt, there's no denying that student debt is just a way to pacify us -- to keep us docile and chained to the system, because when we are thousands of dollars in debt we are not going to rebel much at work. I was lucky to qualify for FAFSA and my debt after graduation was below 20K, but I know a lot of people who will be paying off their debt for a while.

Nice to read your in-depth take on the issue. I think you might enjoy this video: