Learning to love accumulation by dispossession: How US university students value paying tuition and an elitist social order

Introduction

How do people come to value extraction through having extraction exercised upon them? Accumulation by dispossession (ABD) defines the neoliberal economy – extraction rather than exploitation, rent seeking rather than profit, taking rather than making. ABD has enabled the severe concentration of wealth under conditions of weak growth through the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich (Harvey, 2005). This has generated a highly unequal society dominated by the entrenched wealth of a rentier elite (Piketty, 2013).

Most research emphasizes that people consent to the elitist, extraction-based neoliberal economy because it is obscured as freedom enabling market competition: individual entrepreneurs-of-the-self maximize human capital to become nimble workers who can best position themselves in the hyper-competitive labor market. People consent to neoliberalism at the ideological level wherein neoliberalism is portrayed as optimal outcomes achieved through heightened capitalistic competition. They thereby consent to the material reality of neoliberalism which works through the mechanisms of accumulation by dispossession. This begs the question: how, if at all, do people consent to ABD through the very process of having ABD exercised upon them?

While not being able to fully take on this important question, I ask it of higher education. This promises to be informative as higher education sits at the center of the productive economy, is a primary route to upward mobility, but also has traditionally played a pivotal hegemonic role in inculcating the core values of the dominant system (Scarritt, 2019). The privileged position of higher education provides resistance to extraction while education’s totalizing nature works to make extraction appear valuable (Dolgon, 2017). How this tension works out speaks not only to how some of the least likely people come to value their extraction, but to crucial ways that a rentier-dominated society is supported.

Ultimately, I found a discourse in which students’ particular beliefs about the roles and functions of paying tuition got them to embrace a highly unequal elitist society based on ABD extraction. Students embraced having their wealth extracted through tuition because they believed it enabled them to become members of the rentier elite. They therein embraced a highly stratified, elitist, extraction-based society because they believed they benefited from it.

Essential to this process is tuition appearing to students as its opposite. As I will explain, these students did not see tuition as extraction. Instead, they saw their paying of tuition as enabling their success in particularly materially neoliberal ways. Rather than the neoliberal ideology of competition enhancing quality, they believed paying tuition protected them from competition while it provided value to the degree. They believed tuition enhanced their chances at labor market success not through increasing their competitive abilities, but through protecting them from competition from other students. And, rather than the value of their degrees coming from how well they competed in school, they believed the value of their degree came significantly from the paywall of tuition making degrees scarce and thus valuable. They saw college not as learning or acquiring skills but as gaining a rentier asset – their fetishized credential – that entitled them to excess wages, that enabled them to capture rents. Students therein acquired a rentier sensibility in which they valued the processes of extraction and the highly unequal social order upon which such accumulation rests.

In what follows, I show how the research on the consent to neoliberalism emphasizes market ideology, leaving a gap of understanding how people consent to neoliberalism through the actual neoliberal processes of extraction. I then illustrate students’ embrace of a highly elitist society. And, finally, I show how students came to embrace this elitism through constructing tuition not as extraction nor as indicating successfully competing in higher education, but as a key rentier tool protecting them from competition while it provided their degrees with value. I conclude by summing my argument and elucidating some major implications and questions my findings evoke.

Neoliberal extraction and consent

Scholars generally maintain that people consent to the regressive neoliberal order, reluctantly or enthusiastically, through its utopian magic-of-the-marketplace ideology of individual freedoms enabled by frictionless market transactions, optimally allocating resources (Bourdieu, 1998; Davies, 2016; Gilbert, 2015; Harvey, 2010). Ronald Reagan’s soundbite encapsulates this well: “The nine scariest words in the English language are ‘I’m with the government and I’m here to help’.” People need to be liberated from the government and realize their freedom in the market. In general, neoliberalized institutions are shaped to train people in the entrepreneurship-of-the-self, to act as profit-maximizing individuals competing in the marketplace to become better workers through amassing human capital (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Brown, 2011; Foucault, 2010; McCarraher, 2019; Mirowski, 2012; Ong, 2006).

In the context of higher education, this means that “the ideal subject within the neoliberal narrative will invest in themselves and their futures by acquiring the necessary levels of ‘human capital’ to succeed” (Houghton, 2019:621; Olssen and Peters, 2005). Students compete with each other for places in the best schools and for the greatest accomplishments within schools (Deresiewicz, 2014). Tomlinson and Lipsitz (2013) call this “social pedagogy,” otherwise termed the hidden curriculum, where the institutions “generate not only market-oriented opinions but market-oriented personalities and dispositions as well. They seek to inculcate the imperatives of the market inside individuals.”

Market transactions also carry a ready justification for inequality: unequal outcomes result from a fair process of meritocracy (Guinier, 2015; Littler, 2018; Markovits, 2019; Sandel, 2020; Sen, 2000). In the equality of opportunity environment of universal market access, ability-plus-effort meritocracy provides just outcomes. Acquiring consent to the extractive regime of neoliberalism thereby occurs through obscuring appropriation as market transactions through which everyone has the opportunity to succeed and thrive.

But markets are not how neoliberalism actually works. Neoliberal reforms have generated severe inequality and the vast concentration of wealth through “draconian policies designed to restore and consolidate capitalist class power,” specifically by enabling vast new mechanisms of extraction (Harvey, 2007: 75; Pew Research Center, 2020; Sassen, 2010). Harvey terms this accumulation by dispossession: the political assertion of elite power through laws that enable them to collect rents, to invent new mechanisms to charge for things that used to be free and otherwise expropriate wealth (Christophers, 2020; Ward and Aalbers, 2016; Žižek, 2012). Rent captures value from politically generated shortages, whereas profit depends on economically increasing productivity (Hardt, 2010). ABD is taking rather than making (Mazzucato, 2018).

In areas like higher education, the state relinquishes its social role of providing education and instead opens it up to processes of capitalist accumulation. This “new wave of ‘enclosing the commons,’” transforms rights to the public good of education into individualized private investments (Harvey, 2005). It employs the credit system to leverage greater windfalls, generally three times the actual cost of education provision (Newfield, 2016). Tuition is itself a form of accumulation by dispossession, a form “most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2005). Tuition simultaneously erases the common property right to education as a public good while it engulfs students in needless debt at the mandate of financial powers.

These practices pervade the economy, as seen in such industries as healthcare, education, real estate, law, incarceration, insurance, in poverty relief, and arguably in the turn to technocratic managerialism over the past 40 years (Desmond, 2023; Graeber, 2015). Beyond coercion, however, most explanations do not show people actively desiring their exploitation, but as rather resigned to it, such as through normalization, fatalistic cognitive dissonance, and learned helplessness (Khalili, 2025; Littler, 2018).

Thus, as much as the works addressing consenting to neoliberalism focus on market ideology, they leave unanswered the question of how people can come to value the chief mechanisms of neoliberalism itself: how do people come to value extraction, not obscured as markets, but through the very process of having extraction exercised upon them? And in this, how do they come to value a rentier-dominated society? This is important because the extent that people see extraction as in their interests, they help normalize such processes, valorize the individuals practicing them, and consent to the sociopolitical order it is based upon. Markets have meritocracy. Expropriation amounts to reverence of the wealthy. The rentier elite are not deserving because they worked hard but because they are rich, the true definition of aristocracy: rule by the best. Thus, to some degree, understanding more direct routes to the consent to the true mechanisms of neoliberalism speaks to the emergence a different social order. Rather than revering the capitalists and their meritocracy, valuing extraction means revering the wealthy and their aristocracy.

Methods

This paper comes out of a larger project on neoliberal higher education run through the Intermountain Social Research Lab (IMSRL). For over 10 years, IMSRL has subjected undergraduates to intensive research training. IMSRL runs students through all aspects of a qualitative research project, including writing proposals, crafting interview instruments, collecting data through open-ended interviews, and analyzing and presenting primary results, all in the short span of 9 months. Students pick their topic of interest and craft their projects to intersect with the privatization of public higher education. To develop the research instruments and the proposals they emerge from, faculty provide extensive written and oral feedback, with students undertaking major rewritings every week. Students then interview other students from around the university who volunteer, motivated by a $10–20 incentive, drawn from a list of random names provided by the university’s data center. The research has IRB approval from Boise State, and all students acquired certified training (CITI).

Our subject university is a public school with over 20 thousand students, in a generally liberal city in an otherwise conservative state. Like other state schools, enrollment is generally open to any and all who wish to pay and attend, with the concomitant 6-year graduation rate just less than 60%. Students are predominantly white (70%), though with first generation students making up around 35% of the student body, and Hispanics 15%. Interviewees roughly corresponded to these demographics.

Readers should use some caution when making generalizations about my findings. The strength of qualitative research lies in its ability to identify trends and processes. Though with some work, their generalizability can be addressed. I identify a strong trend amongst the student body. The strength of the findings rests in how widespread they are within the student population (70%) and, more importantly, how readily students articulated these points of view. On the other hand, these findings could be impacted by the higher than national average (59%) white college student population – though the proportions match well those at schools in liberal white states like the University of Vermont (80%). The conservative standing of the state where Donald Trump won in 2024 with 67% of the vote could similarly affect the findings. And, arguably, the higher than national average (22%) of first-generation students could create a greater focus on return on investment from tuition. Nevertheless, the extent of this ideology at other institutions and across the country could be readily investigated by interviewing and/or surveying students on their thoughts about how free college education would impact the value of their degrees.

To date, we in IMSRL have conducted several hundred interviews on wide ranging topics centered around higher education, including on such things as: race, gender, sexuality, neurodiversity, disability, self-commodification, managerialism, climate change, commercialization, food insecurity, vocationalization, and STEM fetishization, among others. Almost every year, we ask subject students how their lives would be different if college were free. And every time we get a majority of students wanting to pay tuition. After the idea of free higher education became a national talking point, particularly through the first presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, students largely intensified rather than stepped back from their defenses of tuition. Clearly, the deeper meanings behind this hegemonic defense of the status quo needed explaining. And this article addresses part of the issue. All names are pseudonyms.

Tuition as providing entitlement in a valued rigid hierarchy

We asked students how their lives would be different if college were free. In a particularly telling response, one woman stated: “I feel like a lot more people would go, but at the same time we wouldn’t have the lower jobs that we need, for instance McDonalds.” This student believes and advocates for the paywall of tuition ensuring that less people go to college and instead work in menial jobs. I use this quote to illustrate a fairly widespread discourse about higher education that students have internalized, a particularly neoliberal form of elitism.

This elitism emphasizes three key facets about society and the role of higher education therein: (1) college helps maintain a necessary rigid hierarchy, (2) going to college guarantees students a high place in this hierarchy; and (3) this is a hierarchy based on entitlement rather than any other criteria such as meritocracy, learning, democracy, or justice and humanity. This is a particularly neoliberal elitism in that placement in the otherwise traditional capitalist hierarchy is not determined according to capitalist criteria about innovating the means of production but through the core neoliberal method of the rent-collecting entitlements of wealth.

In the above quote, the student sees paying for tuition as helping to maintain a rigid hierarchy from which she believes she benefits. She says she needs people to work at McDonalds and similar “lower jobs,” and that making college widely accessible through eliminating tuition would threaten this need. She believes that widely accessible higher education could potentially provide broad social mobility: lower economic barriers to higher education could eliminate McDonalds-types of jobs. But such students see this is a threat to themselves. Having to pay tuition means that those who cannot pay will serve in the dead-end menial jobs that tuition-paying people like her need. She, in contrast, believes she is insulated from such a fate as her ability to pay tuition puts her in the higher echelons of the hierarchy, those in need of – served by – menial workers.

Fleshing this out, another student, Wendy, echoes the above stance about McDonalds by clearly stating the core benefit of paying tuition: “The exclusivity.” She sees herself buying exclusivity, a higher tier position within the hierarchy maintained by tuition’s barrier. She elaborates:

[once] everybody gets an associate’s and they’re all working at, let’s say, a fast-food restaurant. . . because we can’t just make everybody a business manager. There’s a balance of the roles in society and in business. . . you can’t take a whole hierarchy and just shift it up a level because who’s gonna fill this down here?

She sees that higher education is about maintaining and not shaking up the existing order. “There’s a balance of the roles in society and in business,” she says, embracing our capitalist hierarchy. Workers must stay in their subordinate positions, and managers have college degrees. We cannot offer free college education because “you can’t take a whole hierarchy and just shift it up a level because who’s gonna fill this down here?” At first pass, she articulates the need for a rigid hierarchy in society in thoroughly capitalist terms. Higher education plays a central role. Elite educated managers must oversee uneducated workers. This is an open statement about what scholars term the hidden curriculum, that schooling “prepares students for future stratified work roles” (Margolis, 2002: 7). Rather than obscuring this training in the norms and practices of the school, however, these students openly advocate for deliberately reproducing a stratified society.

This starkly contrasts a meritocratic discourse about getting ahead through working hard. Rather than assuming hard work is part of college, such students de-emphasized learning, even recognizing that the school itself does so. Many students made such statements as “All I need is a piece of paper so I can get this job.” As with students elsewhere (cf: Tomlinson, 2017), they adopt instrumentalist understandings wherein they pay tuition to get a credential that provides them a ticket to labor market success. They see themselves as customers buying an empty credential that identifies them for higher places in the labor market.

These students therein take a thoroughly neoliberal turn in their advocacy of hierarchy. Not only does society need a hierarchy, economic barriers provide a core means to maintain this stratification. It is the paying of tuition – not working hard, being insightful, mastery, or social benefits – that decides the allocation of the scarce resource of higher education. Students therein adopt the notion that the wealthy are entitled to status and privilege simply because they are wealthy.

Returning to Wendy’s quote, like the McDonalds quote above, she illustrates the stark separation between managers and workers through fast-food restaurants. But such an understanding of fast-food restaurants is actually new. Such jobs used to be mostly first-time or temporary. Only in the past 20 years have they morphed into jobs for people trying to be middle-class (Schlosser, 2001). The old Keynesian order held some means for people – mostly white men – to work their way up a company ladder. The neoliberal order, in contrast, has created middle-class jobs with little to no chance of upward mobility, such as fast-food jobs.

Thus, she is advocating for the paywall of tuition to help solidify the neoliberal order: for labor relations that eliminate substantive possibilities for upward mobility. As such she is saying that those with money deserve high positions. She is advocating for an order that is not even based on meritocracy defined in the “thoroughly revolting terms” of ability-plus-effort (Sen, 2000). Instead, she is advocating for an order based on entitlement. Meritocratic discourses hold that the rich are deserving because they work hard. Here she is saying the rich are deserving because they have wealth. Thus, she is saying that the organization of society should serve the wealthy – and it should do so specifically because they are wealthy.

This is exactly the point. The neoliberal transformation of society came about through the political means of elite class power breaking the core of what had been considered stable and relatively lucrative middle-class jobs: offshoring manufacturing to break the back of labor unions (Harvey, 2005). So her threat that free college means everyone will be working in fast-food jobs as a natural market function is actually her helping further the neoliberal political agenda undermining worker power.

A major irony here is that their beliefs about their elitism do not necessarily bear out empirically. Twenty percent of all degrees, particularly vocational-like specializations, prove economically detrimental (Zaloom, 2019). And that is for students who actually graduate. Six-year graduation rates at public universities – to say nothing of for-profit ones – hover around fifty percent, meaning almost half of the student body loses money by attending college. Further, there has been a large and rapidly growing class polarization, not between those with and without college degrees, but between those attending different kinds of institutions (Bleemer and Quincy, 2025). Much of this is due specifically to the low-quality learning provided by universities and embraced by many of these students, such that instead of providing upward mobility, universities now “knock lots of college-educated people out of the middle class” (Newfield, 2016). Rather than buying material entitlement, these students are buying ideological justifications for entitlement that may not serve them and could very well do them harm.

In sum, these students see themselves benefitting from a rigid elitist system maintained by entitlement and dominated by rentiers, a system that ultimately increases inequality and the extractive costs of tuition. And they are doing so through justifications surrounding the key mechanism of their own wealth extraction, paying tuition. Not only do they see their degree as an empty credential providing them a ticket to labor market success as has been occurring generally in higher education (Tomlinson, 2018), they see it as entitling them to a high place in the hierarchy. This focus on buying credentials, on the pure instrumentality of the degree, however, generates threats to students regarding higher education’s substance.

Paying tuition provides protection and value

The commoditized credential removes the intrinsic value of a degree – any learning, human growth, or even technical skill acquisition that occur as part of the educational experience. As such, “when the primary goal of education is merely to earn a credential, the most rational students figure out how little they can do to earn their degree” (Mintz, 2021:85). This also serves money-centered universities who seek the least demanding but wealthiest students (Armstrong and Hamilton, 2013; Harrison-Walker, 2010).

As students believe they are positioning themselves in a labor market, however, the lack of substantive value in the degree – the lack of working and learning – opens up students to challenges regarding competition and value: (1) if they are not applying themselves in school, students who actually do work and learn can position themselves better; and (2) if they do not learn in school, what does the value of their degree come from?

I found that students see the paying of tuition as addressing both of these problems. First, students expressed multiple ways in which having to pay tuition protected them from competition. While neoliberalism claims to work through market competition, in practice, neoliberal domination works through subverting the market, through gaining politically leveraged protection from market competition. Just so, we found that these students attempting to position themselves well through acquiring a credential wanted tuition to protect them from competition: from qualified students, from having to work hard, of having to go to better schools, and of getting higher degrees.

Second, these students believed that tuition provided value to their degrees specifically through creating shortages which made their degrees more valuable. Rather than enhancing their skills, furthering culture, increasing the knowledge base of society – or, in capitalist terms, improving the means of production – these students employed the neoliberal logic of value coming from scarcity. Believing tuition provides value and protection from competition, students herein come to directly desire the accumulation by possession visited upon them in the form of tuition. They believe tuition provides a particularly neoliberal rent collecting resources: tuition keeps other people out, enabling market subversion, and tuition creates artificial shortages that pump up the value of their degrees. In short, they believed that the wealth-enabled extraction of imposing tuition grants them access to the ability to capture rents themselves.

Tuition enables scarcity, providing value

Many students saw the value of their degree coming from tuition making credentials scarce. They believed that having to pay tuition prevents many students from going to school, limiting the number of degrees conferred, and thus creating shortages that make actual degrees worthwhile. One student put this in stark terms: “Your degree would just be worth zero shit and it would definitely go into a box in the attic.” His absoluteness and extremity – “worth zero shit” – show that he is not simply seeing scarcity as an element of value, but that it is the predominant source of value.

Many other students shared this tone. “I think everyone would go, and therefore degrees wouldn’t mean much.” Or: “It would lessen the value of it because I guess more people have access to it.” Indeed, two surveys with 10% margins of error found that over 70% of students agreed or strongly agreed that free tuition would lower the value of their degrees.

Additionally, students variously assert that value does not come from learning. They regularly said they only wanted to get a piece of paper. And when they did want to learn, they found that the university also frequently downplays or undermines learning – reinforcing important findings from other scholars (e.g., Armstrong and Hamilton, 2013; Arum and Roksa, 2011; Newfield, 2016). For instance, in speaking about a general education class, Henry said: “I believe in learning through struggle and failure. It’s kind of hard to fail in that class.” Here, Henry desires to be challenged so that he can learn. But instead, the university offers easy classes with little to no learning.

Arron similarly complains that he never has been able to contribute to a class, finding, for instance, that discussions in online classes were “more ticking a box to get the grade for the assignment.” Even when students are looking for meaningful content and learning, the university fails to come through. In providing easy classes with little learning, the university reinforces the notion that the key aspect of college is paying tuition, not learning. Paying provides a credential that will net a well-paying job – and that the value of the degree does not come through learning but through paying tuition.

Valuing extractive tools

This notion that scarcity creates value, and even is the prime source of value, lays at the core of neoliberal political economics. In contrast, non-neoliberal capitalism holds education economically as an investment in the means of production, and politically as normalizing workplace hierarchy (Bowles and Gintis, 1976). Humanistic takes on higher education, as Dewey (1930) prescribes, see value coming from the ability of education to enable students to have open experiences, to experiment, and to “form habits of independent judgment and of inventive initiation.” Put in more strictly economic terms, people prosper doing what they are interested in doing (Newfield, 2023).

Politically, this humanist frame challenges the status quo, emphasizing the ability of younger generations to experiment with, confirm, and contest the knowledge they encounter, and the social arrangements through which they occur. Ironically, the advocates of neoliberal higher education promise something similar, supposedly training students in creative destruction to meet the challenges of a highly dynamic economy. Many scholars have pointed out, however, that the highly standardized methods that make higher education profit as a business fail to provide dynamic workers for businesses (Marchand and Runyan, 2011).

But these students are not just saying scarcity creates value. They are saying that tuition-generated scarcity creates value – and that their paying tuition gives their degrees value. In contrast, they say that with free tuition, “my value, I agree, would decrease drastically. Because there’d be so many more people getting it.” As noted above, this perspective defies the customary claims within neoliberal higher education that competition creates value. The students we spoke with saw tuition as protecting them from competition. They specifically did not have to derive value from going to a better school, of getting more degrees, or even doing better in school. Tuition protected them from all of that.

Instead, students are asserting a rentier-based notion of the running of the political economy. Rather than seeing themselves better positioned in a labor market in order to gain less exploitative wages – that is, to exercise more control over the means of production, they see their paying of tuition as buying an asset that entitles them to extract rents. Extracting rents and the rentier economy it is based on is distinct from a capitalist economy focused on generating profit. Profit prioritizes the economic creation of wealth through investing in the means of production. This includes exploiting workers through paying them a wage based on the amount of their work and the class struggle over the means of production. Rent, in contrast, does not generate new wealth but instead employs political methods to demand payments and thus is “merely extracting value produced by other means” (Hardt, 2010:348). Rent comes from politically enabled extraction not economically derived exploitation.

Rentiership has increasingly dominated the world economy: “the extraction of economic rents from the ownership and/or control of assets and resources, rather than profits resulting from the production and sale of new goods and services” (Birch and Ward, 2023). In the last half century, neoliberal innovators have crafted many other mechanisms to extract wealth, including

a raft of techniques such as the extraction of rents from patents and intellectual property rights and the diminution or erasure of various forms of common property rights (such as state pensions, paid vacations, and access to education and health care) won through a generation or more of class struggle. (Harvey, 2005: 160)

Rent and the rentiers who control it gain money through creating various political devices that enable them to demand a payment for the use of something.

Thus, with the assertion that tuition provides scarcity-derived value, students uphold a rentier understanding of society. Students effectively want the state to institute policies – tuition in this instance – that create barriers to entry, the core rentier mechanism that artificially inflates the value of an asset and enables it to generate rent (Christophers, 2020). They believe they are buying an asset that entitles them to capture rents. They see themselves buying a ticket to a good job: an asset, the ticket they hold because they bought it, that means they can demand excess wages and therein become one of the few members of an elite club. And in receiving this property, they see themselves using it to get higher wages – rent-based not productivity-based wages.

So, paying tuition appears to students like accessing rentier assets: they have high barriers to entry that students believe provide their value, and students believe the asset provides them with excess payouts. Through this understanding, the extraction of tuition appears as its opposite, as enabling students privileged access to the means of extraction.

Teaching elitist rentier capitalism

Higher education encourages this understanding. The rewards from an education are deferred – students do not know what wages they will earn until years after they get their degrees. So students cannot immediately verify they are gaining such an asset. The common discourse coming from higher ed explicitly uses the concept of the college premium: that over the course of a lifetime, someone with a college degree receives hundreds of thousands of dollars more in income. For instance, the Association of American Universities (AAU, 2023) cites a Federal Reserve study to highlight that a “college education offers a 12.5% rate of return for the typical graduate, a rate that is ‘well above the threshold for a sound investment.’” That is, one of the major collective voices for higher education treats degrees as an investment device – an asset to purchase and with which to collect a premium.

Universities tend not to put this in terms of labor market competitiveness. The typical “junk statistics” universities use to justify tuition generally come from mid-career incomes (Newfield, 2023). Universities do not want to make claims about students’ fates upon graduation and how well their bachelor degrees do immediately on the job market. Universities instead emphasize the long-term positive impacts. As such, they treat credentials like assets that will net students not greater market competitiveness but premium wages – universities speak of degrees as rentier assets.

This inversion is typical of how mainstream accounts present the workings of neoliberalism as their opposite. As Harvey (2005) pointed out overall, while neoliberal proponents claim the policies enable markets to provide the most efficient and optimal outcomes for all, neoliberalism in practice amounts to draconian policies enabling the wealthy to concentrate power. Instead of seamless markets, neoliberalism enables “the ever-increasing rent-seeking practices of oligopolistic capital” (Palma, 2009 cited in Christophers, 2020). Any and all investments are treated as enhancing the productive system whereas in an ever-increasing portion of the economy investments mean purchasing rentier assets benefitting not from productivity but from extraction. Indeed, as Sayer (2015) argues, much of the legitimacy of the neoliberal order stands on presenting the expansion of rent-seeking instruments as wealth creation rather than wealth extraction.

This has many consequences. Tuition not only becomes a means of extracting student wealth, it becomes an instrument to train students to value the rentier system. Students do not see themselves as skilled labor gaining more control over the means of production, as in classic class conflict. Instead, they see themselves as owners who make rents from withholding or otherwise manipulating their property to capture above market-price windfalls. That is, as tuition becomes ever more oppressive, students lose mechanisms for class consciousness and instead adopt the dominant ideology.

Capitalistic, ideologically neoliberal, and humanistic approaches argue otherwise: that more education is better. The first two argue that more education is needed to train and indoctrinate people into capitalist social arrangements, to enhance productivity, and even to have increasing enrollment make money for universities. Humanistic frames hold that education enhances our wellbeing, autonomy, self-worth, and capacity for democracy. Such a position can even overlap with capitalist frames, that everyone is better off, that production works better, the more everyone is educated. In fact, until the neoliberal changes, capitalists argued against rent, deriding it as unproductive crony capitalism (Christophers, 2020).

More consequentially, students taking this stance are adopting elitist positions. In one telling quip, a student feared that, regarding free tuition, “the masses might take advantage of it.” Beyond the fear of an educated populace, the rentier frame is inherently elitist in that they do not see themselves as workers but see themselves as property owners – with such property limited to only those who can pay.

This is a particular kind of entitled elitism. Rather than limiting education out of quality concerns, they want to prevent widescale access to privilege – specifically to the privilege of gaining a valuable credential for doing little work. They want to limit access to the formula that Cs get degrees, because they see scarcity as making this formula work. They want to prevent access to entitlement. They want to limit access to what they see as a kind of property that enables them to collect rent – without having to work hard. And this is typically neoliberal in that wealth – the ability to buy the ticket – rather than shrewd economic investments, artistic creativity, or meritocratic gumption determines people’s fate. That is, they want to uphold a rigid, elitist, rentier system because, in seeing tuition as a rentier asset, they believe they benefit from it.

Conclusion

In this paper, I argue that students believe that paying tuition makes their degrees valuable by (1) protecting them from competition and (2) creating artificial scarcity. With this belief, they revere the actual material rentier mechanisms of neoliberalism, leading them to embrace the rigid, wealth-based hierarchy particular to neoliberalism. In making students believe that tuition is not extraction but its opposite – a rentier asset – higher education employs extraction to make students value extraction, training them that they benefit from a rentier system based on accumulation by dispossession. And in this way students acquire a rentier sensibility to support a rentier society.

One important consequence of these findings is that they help indicate the emergence of a new hegemonic order. As previous works have strongly indicated, neoliberal hegemony depended upon an understanding of personal freedoms enabled through market relations. This ideology helped obscure the extraction driving neoliberalism. My work, in contrast, finds students advocating against market relations and for extractive rentier practices. That is, my work indicates some emergence of neoliberalism legitimated as actual neoliberal extractive practices. Instead of revering the innovative entrepreneur, this perspective venerates employing wealth to extract wealth. Instead of lionizing capitalists, people identify with aristocrats – leaders not deserving because of hard work, but because they are wealthy. These are just indications, and much more work is needed to investigate any acceptance of such an order. But these findings complement the recent uptick in work on authoritarian populism (e.g., Brubaker, 2017, 2020; Hunger and Paxton, 2022; Scarritt, 2022) and the turn to more feudalistic relations (Dean, 2025; Graeber, 2018; Scarritt, 2015, 2024; Varoufakis, 2024).

My findings also indicate particular contradictions for higher education that need further investigation. Most immediately, while I mention several instances where students get this messaging directly from the institutions of higher education, we need further research into the ways universities communicate this elitist understanding to students and the larger implications therein. My work indicates that this elitist stance helps universities raise funds in the short term as students are more readily primed to pay ever increasing tuition. But, at the same time, such an understanding is premised upon limiting higher education, a stance inimical to the need for universities to expand enrollment. This tension is complicated, moreover, by the ways universities engage with hegemonic discourses, especially heightened pressures away from humanistic education and towards vocationalization. Research needs to illuminate how universities navigate these pressures, and how this consequentially reshapes higher education as an institution. Or, to put it more simply, how do schools’ adoption of neoliberal roles impact their training of elitist values?

Considerable work indicates that such processes could be widespread, particularly as universities have “handed over the reins of educational reform to marketers and Madmen” (Dolgon, 2017: 60). Over the past 30 years, universities have built large messaging machines to compete for tuition dollars not on the substance of education but for “paying for the party”: attracting wealthy students with good connections, happy with low quality education (Armstrong and Hamilton, 2013; Selingo, 2013; Tuchman, 2009). Shifting from working for corporate goals towards directly providing corporate profit through tuition, the PR barrage helped dramatically alter the common sense about higher education form a public good to one of individual investment (Clawson and Page, 2012; Readings, 1996; Tomlinson, 2017). While this messaging stresses markets, it is reasonable to believe that the infrastructure could variously turn towards more neoliberal accumulation by dispossession logics, especially given the financial sector’s windfalls from student debt (Ross, 2013). At the same time, calls for cost-free college and student debt forgiveness have reached national levels, changes that would arguably aid universities’ expansionist drive. How higher ed navigates these extreme pressures, and how they rope students into the struggle, needs investigation.

Finally, the valuation of tuition-supplied degrees as rentier assets leveraging support for an aristocratic order begs questions of other such instruments. Housing most immediately comes to mind, especially as the financialization of housing continues to concentrate wealth while citizen access to shelter deteriorates, though with many in the upper middle-class at least temporarily benefiting from price increases – from seeing housing as a rentier asset. More broadly, though, in all the many areas mentioned by Harvey (2005) where neoliberal reforms have successfully generated new instruments of extraction – from patents to pensions – questions must be asked about the hegemonic reverence of accumulation by dispossession and the consequent transformation of the social order.