College Wasn’t Built to Be a Marketplace. But We Turned It Into One, and Inequality Is the Price

Higher education in the United States is increasingly organized like a market, where institutions compete for students and students evaluate degrees as investments. That shift is often framed as a move toward efficiency and choice. But markets do not distribute opportunity evenly. They sort it. As colleges compete on price, prestige, and selectivity, inequality is not corrected. It is structured into the system itself.

Over the past several decades, the language of markets has come to define higher education. Students are encouraged to think of degrees in terms of return on investment. Institutions differentiate themselves through pricing, branding, and rankings. These changes are often presented as neutral adaptations. But they reshape how education’s value is defined.

When education is treated primarily as a private investment, its worth becomes tied to measurable economic outcomes. Earnings, employment rates, and institutional prestige serve as proxies for value. Some institutions are understood to confer greater value, regardless of the actual quality of education they provide.

Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital helps explain this dynamic. Educational credentials carry social meaning beyond their practical function. A degree from a prestigious institution signals legitimacy and distinction, reinforcing hierarchy even as the system presents itself as meritocratic. George Psacharopoulos observed that while individuals capture private returns from education, the social returns distributed across the broader economy are equally significant and often greater (Psacharopoulos, 1994). A system organized around prestige and private gain systematically undervalues those broader returns.

These symbolic distinctions interact with existing inequalities in access, preparation, and resources. Students from more advantaged backgrounds are better positioned to enter institutions that carry higher symbolic value. They are more likely to possess the cultural capital: familiarity with institutional norms, access to guidance, and confidence navigating bureaucratic systems that these environments reward. Critical race scholars name this advantage more directly: whiteness has itself functioned as a form of property, carrying social power and the capacity to exclude (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). As race-conscious admissions retreat under color-blind pressure, the logic contested in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2019), opportunity is shaped less by ability than by prior access to racially uneven forms of capital.

The financial structure of higher education reinforces these dynamics. Rising tuition and widespread reliance on student debt, now exceeding $1.7 trillion nationally, mean that access to high-status institutions is often mediated by financial capacity. Students are not simply choosing among equal options; they are navigating constraints that shape both access and outcomes.

The result is a stratified system in which credentials differ not only in content but in social recognition. Bourdieu described this as reproduction: institutions maintain social hierarchies by rewarding forms of capital that are already unevenly distributed (Bourdieu, 1986).

Reframing higher education as a public good would not eliminate hierarchy, but it would change what the system rewards. As long as market logic defines value, inequality will remain built in. The question is not whether higher education can be efficient. It is whether it is organized to distribute opportunity, or simply to sort it.

Andrew G. White IV, PhD, is the dean of Enrollment Management at NYADI: College of Transportation Technology.