Fees Rise, Class Divide: Higher Education, Inequality, and Student-Led Social Movements

Abstract

Efforts to privatize the funding of education generally, and higher education in particular, mirror policy developments in other areas of the welfare state in advanced capitalist societies. Despite the seemingly inexorable march of welfare state retrenchment, this outcome is not guaranteed. In this dissertation, I adopt a social movement analysis approach that builds on and develops further insights from legal mobilization studies to show the ways in which the people most affected understand and respond to these patterns of retrenchment. Much of the extant literature on retrenchment and privatization has looked at the role of policy feedback effects in producing interest groups that supplant the role of social movements and labor unions. Comparing the emergence of tuition fees and student resistance in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, I show that under certain conditions, social movements and coalitions between impacted groups and labor are likely to emerge and, in some cases, may even succeed in reversing or influencing welfare retrenchment. This study contributes to socio-legal scholarship on the ways in which law matters to the conception of movements, how activists mobilize law strategically, and how legal mobilization plays a constitutive role in developing activists’ legal consciousness and their very understanding of their interests.