Why Is America Fractured? Blame College, a New Book Argues.

Americans owe $1.7 trillion in student loans, an amount so gargantuan that it has lodged in the public consciousness, like the visibility of the Great Wall of China from space, except the debt monument grows higher and longer every year.

“After the Ivory Tower Falls,” by the Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch, is the story of how the Great Wall of Loans was built and why it divides us, of how higher education went from a beloved guarantor of opportunity to, in Bunch’s telling, a fracturing force of cultural and economic separation. It is ambitious and engrossing, even when the narrative sometimes strains to fit the demands of Bunch’s argument that college has become “a fake meritocracy rigged to make half of America hate it.”

Bunch’s history tracks the missed opportunities to define and finance college as a public good, beginning with the 1944 G.I. Bill’s unexpected success in sending millions of white veterans to college, free of charge. President Harry S. Truman’s Commission on Higher Education followed up in 1947 with a far-reaching vision of enlightened, productive citizens educated by federally financed colleges and universities.

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