After the Ivory Tower Falls Quotes

“Georgie rejected his dad’s Operating Engineers after two months, insisting he wanted a career as a full-time firefighter and paramedic.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“Joe Biden was the 46th president, helped by a shift of white suburbanites and college-educated women, also the very spine of the Tuesdays with Toomey movement.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“often perplexing their parents, who hewed to more traditional liberalism.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“Consumed with protecting their gains in both economic and social status, baby boomers and to some degree Gen Xers have been left bewildered”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“But the government’s college debt was priceless on paper—because Congress could use the make-believe future repayments to balance the budget. To the Congressional Budget Office, the phantom revenue of skyrocketing loans that could never possibly be repaid became an asset and thus a form of “deficit control.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“The real U.S. “student debt crisis” is what all of us owe to our young people to do better.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“Ultimately, changing America for good will start with changing our mindset, the one that arbitrarily—and foolishly, we can now see—picked the age of eighteen for flipping the switch that turns education and growth from a public responsibility into a private one,”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“Today, we’ll need to address the societal inequality caused by our past mistakes in failing to provide growth opportunities to all of our young people.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“Pennsylvania—spent more money on incarceration than on higher education. That’s the inevitable outcome when a resentful society would rather lock away its young people, like the ones I met sweating and spreading mulch in a West Philadelphia park, than make the effort to give them a second chance.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“People are looking for outlets—as we become more digitized, we become more isolated from tactile experiences, yet a lot of people want and need that.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“Yes, shifting the burden to make higher education a public good would look very expensive on paper. But how can we afford not to?”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“America’s failure to invest properly in its most valuable, and most fragile, human infrastructure—its young people awkwardly entering adulthood—can only be seen as a gobsmacking failure.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“the eighteen-year-old cutoff for free public education seems not only arbitrary but cruel.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“women also hold a greater proportion of America’s $1.7 trillion college debt burden.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“But for the New New Left of the 2020s, the place where the rubber really hits the road is student debt.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“I only have a high school education. But I got a good union job. I go to work every day, go to church on Sunday. I hunt. I fish. I’m pro-gun. Why am I a bad guy?”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party make me feel bad about myself . . . Donald Trump makes me feel good about who I am.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“In Pennsylvania, high public-college tuition caused largely by lack of political support meant that student borrowers had the second-highest average debt of any state,”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“The then-teenager was blown away by the curvaceous, modernist design of Temple’s student-activities center—so much so that it made him want to learn more about architecture.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“Like many Jewish Americans, she didn’t lose any close family members in the Holocaust but heard grim tales of more distant relatives, and read other horror stories from the war years. Those feelings were triggered as she watched Trump on the 2016 campaign trail, lashing out against Mexicans and other immigrants and stoking violence at his rallies.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“large numbers not only faced food insecurity around not having enough to eat—nearly a third at the four-year schools”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“more than half of 2021’s #RealCollege students were challenged by anxiety as well. A good chunk of that was surely about what waited for them on the other side of college: massive debt.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“At Kutztown, student life has become defined by dealing with life’s emergencies.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“Americans saw college through the narrowness of their carefully constructed silos.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“In 2020, two psychologists published a survey of the American class divide when it came to happiness; in 1972, the difference between people with or without bachelor’s degrees had been very small, but it had steadily grown to a huge gulf by 2016, the year that, coincidentally or not, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“And the smart elites who promoted this myth of a meritocracy apparently weren’t bright enough to see that that resentment would become the driving political force of the twenty-first century.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“College started becoming more expensive and less accessible right at the very moment it became critical for getting a good job.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“every generation or so, America’s leaders made a consequential decision that moved the nation further and further from the G.I. Bill’s promise that higher education could be a public good.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“It would have been impossible to predict from a 1962 perspective how the desires for personal freedom might someday metastasize—steered by the generations coming up right behind them—into things like open-carry gun ownership or refusing to wear a mask during a pandemic.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“Public approval of scientific research spiked to 88 percent in the mid-1950s. It would never be that high again.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It