ABSTRACT
Education has been cast as a cause of and saviour from the long depression that has afflicted the West since the 1970s. This chapter outlines the changing emphases of intervention from containing and managing the effects of the recessions of the 1970s and early 1980s through to the state-driven process of financialization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. It discusses the impact of these trends on compulsory and post-compulsory education in the United States and Britain. The chapter argues that financialization has witnessed the emergence within the education system of what is called the subprime student arising from the expansion of the state-supported student loan system in both nations. The chapter suggests that these reforms – coupled with the instrumentalism to which education has been relentlessly submitted over the course of the long depression, has left the sector in a precarious condition.
