I think this is the wrong way to look at it. Let me put it this way. The way I look at this issue is different.
The power elite discovered what a mass of highly educated people was like as a class. It was their worst nightmare. This was part of the social knowledge about society that was asorbed into the elite corporate culutre. Mass higher education in the post-WWII era produced the 1960s and a modernizaton of an anti-corporate state critique---with polymorphic and perverse socialist-communist tendencies.
The public education production system continued to produce the bulk of the liberal base which had an anti-corporate mind-set, except in its managerial caste production system of economics, business administraton, and law. But graduates from these fields really couldn't be counted on to undergo the disciplinarian hierarchy required of a managerial caste. So, corporate elites and their business culture turned to the most expensive private schools for the bulk of their upper tier managers and executives. In simple words. Private school work, public schools don't.
Since about the late-70s when I first noticed it, the administrations of public university and college systems were transformed into business models of operation. Administrators did not come from the ranks of faculty, but from outside the academy. This education-business elite were grown from within their own ranks coupled with other experience in government and business. When they got to work on the academy, their plans, decisions, and actions were all tailored to the concept of a business operation, with the needs of the business made primary. The very concept of a liberal education was beyond them.
This process continued to devolve back to the pre-WWII model of higher education--where it now resembles Thorstein Veblen's pre-WWI generation. The business of education is business.
Simultaneous with the above developments, similar processes were at work on public K12 education---and similarly fought battles insued and were lost.
Joanna: "One outcome of this could be a grass-roots education movement (a la Freire) that redefines what it means to be educated and distinguishes the meaning of an education vs the meaning of a degree."
I had to look up Paulo Freire to understand the above quote. Here is the wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire
``There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the 'practice of freedom', the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.''
The whole article is worth reading. It goes into a theory of educatioo based on teacher-student, student-teacher. I don't think many people will understand this concept, unless they were lucky enough to have kids who seemed to spontaneously develop this relationship with their parents. I was really lucky on that score. Looking back at parenthood, I think I was always learning in an intuitative way. We had no other frame of reference,
Eric Beck: ``It doesn't make much sense to me for people who admit that public education is a essentially a system for teaching control and discipline to turn around and defend the system and insist on its continuation. Talk about participating in your own repression..''
The way around this double bind, is still education, You simply fill the ranks of teachers, administrators and school boards with human beings, instead of corporate clones. Berkeley got into that civic minded habit sometime before I got here and has mostly maintained it as a social tradition. That's breaking down in the last few years under the sheer intensity of the pounding by the corporate-state.
These battles inside education have been relentless
CG