The main mission of higher education should be to prepare students for productive careers that benefit them, their communities, and the country. Over the past few decades, the focus on competition and profit has hampered these beneficial outcomes through high student debt and the trend toward lower college attendance. How can the system be reformed to fulfill its mission at an affordable cost? This post provides concrete, systemic solutions to making higher education affordable again.

In the spirit of the upcoming 2026 Oscars, we took a look at capitalism in the movies. There's not enough room for all of them, but here's a small selection of standouts that masterfully show the negative and positive sides of capitalism.

When a private company runs a prison as a business, the ethical baseline for how inmates should be treated can easily be shuttered down on the list of priorities. If the main concern is stockholder dividends, then it's far too easy to replace the primary goal of rehabilitation with the primary goal of financial gain. A profit-driven model can then lead to negative outcomes that seriously impact the prisoners, their families, and the rest of us.