When we look at the subsequent history of higher education funding in the United States, it is astounding how closely neoliberal reforms of the sector have followed the prescriptions set out by Friedman and Becker. Since Reagan's reforms of higher education in 1980, federal policy has tended to diminish the spending power of Pell grants and to push instead for the expansion of federal and private student loans. At the same time, state governments have been chipping away at their investments in public universities so that institutions that were free for state residents before the 1980s have now become effectively private. The effect of this policy drift, as few would be unaware, has been rapidly inflating tuition costs and an enormous expansion in student debt. As movements such as Strike Debt have explained so well, inequality now tends to manifest in the form of differing degrees of debt servitude rather than outright exclusion.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 257