Elite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America while public universities have offered a major stepping-stone to new economic opportunities. However, as Charlie Eaton reveals in Bankers in the Ivory Tower, finance has played a central role in the widening inequality in recent decades, both in American higher education and in American society at large. With federal and state funding falling short, the US higher education system has become increasingly dependent on financial markets and the financiers that mediate them. Beginning in the 1980s, the government, colleges, students, and their families took on multiple new roles as financial investors, borrowers, and brokers. The turn to finance, however, has yielded wildly unequal results. At the top, ties to Wall Street help the most elite private schools achieve the greatest endowment growth through hedge fund investments and the support of wealthy donors. At the bottom, takeovers by private equity transform for-profit colleges into predatory organizations that leave disadvantaged students with massive loan debt and few educational benefits. And in the middle, public universities are squeezed between incentives to increase tuition and pressures to maintain access and affordability. Eaton chronicles these transformations, making clear for the first time just how tight the links are between powerful financiers and America’s unequal system of higher education.

"The book is a vivid reminder of how rich, exclusive and small the US Ivy League universities are. . . . But the book shows, too, the importance of universities. They can be a means of entrenching privilege or of spreading
opportunity. A well-designed system for funding universities can be a crucial driver of social mobility. But in the US it is not working well." - Financial World

"This thoroughly researched, scholarly case study systemically examines the present higher education system. Eaton identifies the disparate players involved and examines their interactions . . . Eaton also offers a way to reimagine the current system that would realign it with its traditional values. He has provided a valuable public service in developing and presenting this thoughtful, well-researched analysis. Highly recommended."  - Choice

"A timely book. . . [that] analyzes the decades-long, intricate relationship between higher education leaders and financiers." - Journal of Urban Affairs

"Eaton offers an empirically sound and rigorous analysis of how higher education relates to high finance." - Social Forces

"Charlie Eaton’s Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education is a necessary if not timely analysis for understanding the higher-education crisis in the contemporary United States." - Exertions