[Superb article](https://www.aaup.org/article/purge-higher-education#.XjNJYGhKgdU) by Eva-Maria Swidler on the plight faced by small, non-elite liberal arts colleges in the U.S.:
> Simultaneously, elite institutions are increasing their wealth in what Brian Rosenberg, the president of Macalester College, has called higher education’s gilded age. Colleges and universities are beginning to divide into two groups: those with increasing prestige and growing endowments and those that struggle and sink. Higher education’s polarization of resources mirrors, or might in fact be ahead of, the widening inequality in society at large. [...] In short, the middle class of American colleges is disappearing just as the middle class itself is.
It's the [best piece](https://www.aaup.org/article/purge-higher-education) I've read on the crisis. And it's not just rich-get-richer stratification: There's a sharp treatment of inequality-fueled status-seeking, and a troubling meditation on the particular challenges faced by progressive and alternative schools.