The Racializations of Debt: Rationalizing Tuition in Neoliberal Higher Education
Faculty Mentor Information
Dr. Arthur Scarritt (Mentor), Boise State University
Abstract
The precarious economy, marked by decades of neoliberal policies, poses students as risk-entrepreneurs willing to bet it all for higher education on the promise of upward mobility (Mahmud 2012); an unfounded expectation resulting in adapted vocational instrumental mindsets to cope with having to enter an unstable labor market (Tomlinson 2018). This results in voluntarily being dispossessed into being disposable through displacement and disciplined through debt. Though this career-objective mindset through higher education offers a chance to challenge precarity, the introduction of increasingly high tuition complicates this seemingly simple pathway associated with merit. This coupled with the perceived sense that white privilege is fleeting, exemplified through the cultural shift from whiteness as status to whiteness as norm (Olson 2008). Historically nonwhites have been subjected to precarity as oppression (Dawson 2024) which acts differently to how non elite whites are receiving economic instability demonstrating a need for racial analysis in this class issue. This all informs my question of how does the racialized perspective of students on the financialization of their institution, such as coping with tuition, affect their participation in neoliberal higher education?
The Racializations of Debt: Rationalizing Tuition in Neoliberal Higher Education
The precarious economy, marked by decades of neoliberal policies, poses students as risk-entrepreneurs willing to bet it all for higher education on the promise of upward mobility (Mahmud 2012); an unfounded expectation resulting in adapted vocational instrumental mindsets to cope with having to enter an unstable labor market (Tomlinson 2018). This results in voluntarily being dispossessed into being disposable through displacement and disciplined through debt. Though this career-objective mindset through higher education offers a chance to challenge precarity, the introduction of increasingly high tuition complicates this seemingly simple pathway associated with merit. This coupled with the perceived sense that white privilege is fleeting, exemplified through the cultural shift from whiteness as status to whiteness as norm (Olson 2008). Historically nonwhites have been subjected to precarity as oppression (Dawson 2024) which acts differently to how non elite whites are receiving economic instability demonstrating a need for racial analysis in this class issue. This all informs my question of how does the racialized perspective of students on the financialization of their institution, such as coping with tuition, affect their participation in neoliberal higher education?