Fixing Futures: Politics, Citizenship, and Aspirational Policy Interventions in Chicago Public Schools

More young people than ever before are enrolling in post-secondary qualifications. Policy reforms across most OECD countries over the last three decades have led to the rapid expansion of the higher education sector. These shifts have placed significant pressure on established tertiary educational practices, and spurned a massive increase in new for-profit providers. Within these developments, levels of student debt have emerged as a key policy concern for many governments globally, with significant flow-on effects for how young people transition into the workforce, and make a life. Perhaps unsurprisingly, higher education reform has proceeded along well-worn lines of geographic, racial, and economic inequality. Alongside high-profile cases of young people being pressured into taking on large debts in exchange for dubious or bogus degrees is emerging a broader concern for how individuals and families identify, understand, and make decisions about their participation in higher education, and the value it confers against its corresponding economic, social, and temporal costs.