UC Berkeley

This dissertation advances scholarship on how financialization – the increasing power of financial ideologies and markets – has transformed diverse organizations, including non-profits, state institutions, and households. In three papers, I explain how financialization has contributed to rising organizational inequality in U.S. undergraduate education education since the 1990s: 1) “The Financialization of U.S. Higher Education” develops new quantitative measures to find large but skewed relative increases in the financial costs and returns from endowments, colleges’ institutional borrowing, equity offerings by for-profit colleges, and student loan borrowing, 2) “The Transformation of U.S. For-Profit Colleges,” uses a unique college-level and multi-wave longitudinal dataset to show how the spread of shareholder value ideology led to a new industrial-scale business model with negative consequences for student outcomes, and 3) “The Ivory Tower Tax Haven” explains how long-standing tax exemptions have supported new endowment investment strategies that have fueled rising expenditures to maximize the prestige of the wealthiest universities. Altogether, I highlight the importance of finance ideologies in the shifting balance of resources between and within the many heterogeneous types of U.S. colleges.