The size and cost of US public higher education, funded largely by government, grew continuously for nearly twenty-five years after World War II. In the late 1960s, as the nation's economic growth slowed, the question of who should pay for higher education came under fresh political scrutiny. Decades-old no-tuition policies at the University of California and The City University of New York (CUNY) became targets of neoconservative critiques of the proper role of government support for public services. In California, this was done as Governor Ronald Reagan promoted a partisan austerity to win favor with business and other conservative elites. He justified cuts to higher education financing as a rebuke of protesting students and inept administrators and, later, as financially necessary given voters’ reluctance to pay more taxes. In contrast, federal and New York State politicians forced austerity on city leaders to satisfy bond holders during New York City's severe fiscal crisis. Reformers argued that CUNY's no-tuition policy was emblematic of the city's overindulgence of its residents. No-tuition policies became impossible to defend in the context of the stalled economy and growing conservative movement, whose members embraced government austerity.

This article argues that the now-widespread US practice of residency-based tuition differentials for public higher education institutions is a twentieth-century form of higher education exceptionalism carved out in law and state policy, contradicting otherwise cherished and protected rights of free movement. This contradiction has been enabled in part by the vague standard of constitutional protection for the right to interstate mobility and in part by fiscal deference to public universities that quickly recognized the potential benefits of higher nonresident tuition rates. By both defining higher education as outside of the “necessities of life” and upholding a narrative that the children of state residents had a special entitlement to lower tuition as a kind of “legacy” taxpayer inheritance, courts, legislatures, and educational institutions built a modern higher education finance structure that discriminates against the mobility of “newcomers” and any student with a complicated family structure or residency status.

This essay examines the history of what is commonly called the town-gown relationship in American college towns in the six decades after the Second World War. A time of considerable expansion of higher education enrollment and function, the period also marks an increasing detachment of higher education institutions from their local communities. Once closely tied by university offices that advised the bulk of their students in off-campus housing, those bonds between town and gown began to come apart in the 1970s, due primarily to legal and economic factors that restricted higher education institutions’ outreach. Given the importance of off-campus life to college students, over half of whom have historically lived off campus, the essay argues for increased research on college towns in the history of higher education.

Nearly 70 percent of American students enroll in postsecondary education immediately after graduating high school. Yet college and university completion rates remain highly disparate across social and economic groups. White students in the US are 20 percent more likely than Black and Latino students to graduate, and students from high-income backgrounds are roughly five times more likely to graduate than their lower-income peers. As a result, many students leave higher education without a degree, bearing debt that cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. The upshot is that much of the $1.7 trillion in student loan obligations today is held by those who cannot afford to repay it—an immediate crisis for millions of individuals and a looming threat to the US economy. How did we arrive at this juncture? And what should we do from here?

For this Policy Dialogue, the HEQ editors asked Sara Goldrick-Rab and David Labaree to explore the past, present, and future of pressing issues facing American higher education. Goldrick-Rab is professor of sociology and medicine at Temple University as well as President and Founder of the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice in Philadelphia. She is also the chief strategy officer for emergency aid at Edquity, a student financial success and emergency aid company, and founder of Believe in Students, a nonprofit distributing emergency aid. Labaree is a past president of the History of Education Society and the Lee L. Jacks Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. Their dialogue takes readers on a quick and heady jaunt across time, across the country, and across almost all institutional types in higher education.

HEQ Policy Dialogues are, by design, intended to promote an informal, free exchange of ideas between scholars. At the end of the exchange, we offer a list of references for readers who wish to follow up on sources relevant to the discussion.

This essay examines the first detailed study of gifted African American youth: Lillian Steele Proctor's master's thesis from the late 1920s on Black children in Washington, DC. Unlike formative research on gifted children by educational psychologists, Proctor's investigation emphasized children's experiences at school, home, and community in determining their abilities, opportunities, and accomplishments. Proctor's work also anticipated African American intellectuals’ critiques of racist claims about intelligence and giftedness that would flourish in the 1930s. In focusing on the nation's capital, her investigation drew from a municipality with a high proportion of African American residents that was segregated by law. Proctor pointed directly to systemic racism as both contributing to the relative invisibility of gifted African American youth and in thwarting opportunities to realize their intellectual potential. In an environment of racial subordination and segregation, these gifted children found themselves excluded from cultural resources and educational opportunities.