Review of Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities Open Access

Maybe it is because I just finished the first season of Squid Game—a South Korean Netflix series about people in debt forced to compete in murderous games—that Broke conjured images of American public universities competing for funding in a different kind of cut-throat game, the outcomes of which disadvantage students who arguably gain the most from a four-year degree¹ and who have among the narrowest margins for derailment.

Broke lays bare the outcomes of current funding regimes for students and for universities themselves, with their two campuses (UC Merced and UC Riverside) as case studies. The authors argue that a new structure, the “new university,” is increasingly common. The new university is poorly funded by state and federal dollars, forcing it to seek private funding through corporate relationships, privatization of various aspects of campus life, research or other grant dollars, and of course students who can pay tuition with no financial aid. Each of these not only necessitate competition but also new structures or policies created to facilitate that competition—and to meet the demands of those funding sources. The book’s focus on public universities serving predominantly low-income, first-generation Black and Latinx students (or more broadly, “historically underrepresented racially marginalized students, or URS”) (11) under is significant in two ways. First, sociologists often focus on private selective campuses serving “only a tiny fraction of the college-going student of color population” (14) Second, as the authors show, racism and racial enrollment demographics are not incidental to these dynamics, but rather integral to them; their focus on race is an important complement (or corrective) to existing discussions of defunding and effects of neoliberalism.

Across three sections and eight chapters, they trace both the recent history of these arrangements and a series of relationships between institutions and institutional stakeholders. The first section, The Changing Face of the UC, establishes a background of the current context and sets up the problems focused on in the rest of the book. Chapters discuss the role of college rankings, university–corporate partnerships, and intra-institutional political and funding dynamics. The second section, Responses to Underfunding, deals specifically with the financial circumstances that shape current dynamics, with chapters on austerity as a financial strategy and “tolerable suboptimization”— how little funding various campus units can be provided while still accomplishing an output level that can be understood as meeting needs—as the logical result of that austerity. Finally, the third section, Dealing in Diversity, lays out implications of the above for URS and of the rhetorical tool “diversity” in this context. The authors examine different support structures focused on multiculturalism (an approach pushed under austerity funding frameworks) vs. cultural centers and the ways campuses leverage student body diversity in corporate recruiting relationships. A subsequent chapter lays out policy suggestions based on these analyses.

Throughout, the authors do an exceptional job writing clearly and precisely about the complex layers of the relationships they outline. They toggle between organizational-level issues both macro and meso, and the effects of those issues for not only groups of students, faculty, and staff, but also in the voices of individual students, balancing both institutional level processes and individual actors’ voices, experiences, outcomes, and decisions. They also do not shy away from moral ambiguity, explaining how policies or actors may have conflicting impacts, with positive outcomes alongside negative. Scholars of class inequalities, race, and higher education will find this book especially compelling. Those interested in contemporary historical aspects of university life or administration, diversity rhetoric, organizations, and other areas of sociology and education studies will also find this book useful.

While this book is primarily a story about intra- and inter-organizational dynamics and structural issues, I also want to highlight the profound ethical and philosophical questions raised—namely, whom higher education serves and how. As public funding for public universities evaporates, campuses are forced to seek funding schemes based on private sources, meaning that the goals of those private sources must also be incorporated into the university’s mission. While, as the authors point out, these goals are not always only counter to students’ or others’ best interests, they should not drive the agenda on campuses founded to serve the public. This has particular implications for URS (particularly Black and Latinx students) who become, within this scheme, commodified. This is the case at an intra-campus level in the UC system, with more racially diverse campuses put in service of Whiter campuses to benefit from system-wide racial diversity as their own. This is also the case in external relationships, for which URS are also leveraged to offer diversity to corporate potential employers, and further still as compelling narratives of hardship and mobility in application for grant funding and other forms of support or institutional ties.

In these instances, students are serving the university’s interests rather than the other way around, with the fundamental definition of public higher education as a public good therefore upended. And yet these students are also under-resourced and exploited not only at the system level (as the authors note, campuses enrolling higher numbers of “diverse” students are underfunded relative to Whiter peer campuses) but also at the campus level, as support structures for these students are underfunded or simply not provided, forcing students to do the time- and emotion-intensive work of supporting themselves and one-another—for which campuses then often claim credit.

If there were only one fundamental takeaway from Broke, it is that the underfunding of public universities and a prevailing context of ``postsecondary racial neoliberalism'' (20), have profound and broad-ranging consequences for URS who are most vulnerable to economic deprivation, and the authors do an excellent job of tracing this from the organizational to the individual. However, the moral economics of these analyses are what stuck with me most. The authors write that “everything is for sale in the contemporary research university” (173), a stark state of being. More than that, however, the juxtaposition of marketing students while also forcing them to create structural change is a shameful example of having one’s cake and selling it too.

Ultimately, the authors suggest that this is a problem that will only grow: the new university results from the confluence of growing needs for access to research universities and diminished public funding, both ongoing trends. Broke presents a compelling portrait of the steps public campuses take to “survive, and even thrive” (15), and of the implications for the students, along with other members of new university campuses, who are stuck managing the fallout.

Reviewer: Elizabeth M. Lee, Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia PA USA

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