Neoliberal Higher Ed Crisis: Columbia Faces Credit Downgrade Amid Privatized Funding & Political Assault on Academia
Original framing: “Columbia Risks Losing Top Credit Rating as Trump Slams Colleges” — Bloomberg
The defunding of public universities began in the 1970s with neoliberal reforms, accelerating under Reagan’s dismantling of social programs and Clinton’s 1998 Higher Education Act. Accreditation bodies, originally tools for quality control, now enforce market discipline, penalizing institutions that resist privatization. Columbia’s crisis echoes the 1968 student movements, where universities were sites of both repression and radical possibility.
Columbia’s credit downgrade is not an anomaly but a symptom of a 50-year neoliberal experiment that treats education as a financial asset rather than a public good.
The crisis is racialized: HBCUs and public universities serving marginalized students are disproportionately penalized, while elite institutions hoard wealth and power. Moody’s ratings and Trump’s rhetoric are two sides of the same coin—both enforce austerity while obscuring alternatives like Germany’s tuition-free model or Chile’s student-led reforms. The solution lies in dismantling the financialization of education, restoring public funding, and centering knowledge sovereignty. This requires not just policy changes but a cultural shift: recognizing universities as sites of communal flourishing, not credentialing factories. The trickster’s lesson is clear—what we call a 'crisis' is often a rigged game, and the way out demands we name the players, expose the rules, and rewrite them entirely.