Thomas Frank: The Higher-Ed. Dream Factory

Thomas Frank is the bestselling omni-critic who founded The Baffler magazine and edited it for years. He’s a columnist at Salon.com and he wrote the book on the turning of American politics ten years ago, What’s the Matter with Kansas? Shifting focus from politics to higher education, he did it again with “Academy Fight Song,” a Baffler piece published last winter. The question, his and ours: how did higher education, in general, turn from the days of the GI Bill — and the land grant colleges long before that — to being a trap for seventeen-year-old kids who are signing away their lives into eternity with student loans? College has turned into a trap, maybe, for all of us. Will it be the undoing of the great American middle class?