Episode 14. Lean Semesters: How Higher Education Reproduces Inequality

I wanted to talk to you today about this book, Lean Semesters, How Higher Education Reproduces Inequality by Sikile M. Nzinga.

So a lot of the books that I'm talking about lately have to do with higher education and inequalities.

And that's because I myself am a sociology professor and I'm currently researching the situation of faculty in higher education.

And so I'm reading a lot of books about what's happening in higher education as an academic workplace, how it's changed over time, how it incorporates different demographics, just the neoliberal aspects to higher education that have been developing since the 1980s.

And so this book just examines one particular demographic and the impacts of higher education.

And one of the central ideas here is that higher education has this ideology of being something that can raise your status in society, can get you a better job, can provide some upward mobility.

And so those kinds of ideas come out of this post-war boom and development of higher education.

But since the 1980s, a lot of state budget has been withdrawn from the university system, shifting the burden from the state to the students themselves, and has developed this entire financial student industrial complex.

So in this book, she's talking about how black women are trying to get PhDs, master's degrees, entering into graduate school as a way to try to achieve that upward mobility.

But in reality, it sets them back even further through student debt, through the opportunity costs of the time spent in higher education and so on.

So let's get into the details.