Great American uni dream over?

American universities, it turns out, may have less to do with ivory towers and more with real estate. In Equator Podcast's episode, The American university is simply a corporate institution, writers Siddhartha Deb and Pankaj Mishra have a brisk, unsettling conversation about what happened to the great institutions of learning.

Deb, who arrived in the US believing he was entering a world of free thought and open minds, soon found something rather different. Universities, he argues, increasingly resemble corporations: expanding aggressively, piling debt onto students, and putting management and money at the centre of the enterprise. His description of the US university as a 'money-making, MBA- and lawyer-run hedge fund and real estate operation' is deliberately provocative.

For students aspiring to attend these unis, even if it means taking on huge loans, the conversation could be particularly illuminating. Especially worth hearing in the Trump era is about US higher education facing fresh questions about its purpose, priorities and relationship with power.


This isn't a comfortable listen, or a tidy one. But that's precisely its appeal. For anyone still buying into the American University dream, this is a reality check.