In modern America, there is no clearer distinction between the haves and have-nots, the winners and losers of the American economy, than in the higher education system.
People from well-to-do families still have nearly unfettered access to the Ivy Leagues, which in turn are overrepresented in key positions in the government and high-powered finance. Just to give an obvious example, one-third of President Biden’s so-called “most diverse cabinet in history” are Ivy Leaguers.
Meanwhile, middle-class families are sending their kids to state schools with an estimated 8% year-on-year tuition inflation, meaning the cost of attending school doubles every nine years. This often means taking on mountains of, ultimately, unserviceable debt. Working-class families enjoy a substantial leg-up from federal programs like Pell Grants, but the inflation of tuition means, as I have argued elsewhere, that Uncle Sam is getting charged rack-rent by colleges. Plus, working-class kids oftentimes get saddled with debt just like their middle-class contemporaries, only they frequently don’t have the correct preparation for college and flunk out early. Or if they do finish their degree, they oftentimes run into class-culture barriers that keep them out of high-paying work. Meaning a comparatively little debt can be just as difficult to manage as a higher-paid former student with a more considerable debt load.
The problem gets even worse when we look at the true unemployment rate. That is, if we look at the number of people who can’t find the kind of work that would allow them to afford to pay their bills, which we might think is a prerequisite for paying off debt.
An Oct. 2020 report from Axios intentionally sought to parse out the difference between this so-called “true unemployment” rate from the reported national unemployment rate. They defined “true unemployment” as “a person who is looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage — but who can’t find one.” By that metric, the unemployment rate in January 2020 was a staggering 23.4%.
In other words, the job market is so bad that it doesn’t seem that getting on the college debt cycle is really paying off. The unemployment rate is high for recent college grads, but the official unemployment numbers also obscure the reality that many recent college grads have no prospect for work that would allow them to make good on their debt investment.
Therefore, college is a two-tiered system in America. For the already wealthy, it is an opportunity to signal status and make connections for future success in high-powered jobs. For the middle and working classes, it is a narrow gate to financial stability that oftentimes doesn’t pan out. Colleges exaggerate privilege and exacerbate disadvantageous circumstances.
UTM is actually an exemplary school in regard to keeping the quality of education high and tuition low. In the past few years, tuition increases have been modest even though it, like other schools, has just about doubled in-state tuition since 2012 according to stats at TheCollegeFactual.com.
Nevertheless, in a national sense, this paradigm is creating an unstable economic situation that threatens to bring higher education down with it. As the poorest and simultaneously most-educated generation in history becomes a larger part of the economy, they will have less disposable wealth in order to send their children to college, and that’s on top of having fewer kids because of the precarious economic situation. Colleges, I think, are realizing that Americans are catching on which is why international enrollment, before the pandemic, was hitting all-time highs.
One of the key ways in which colleges have made themselves precarious is by positioning themselves as unnecessary middlemen between the world of work and new high school graduates. There is no reason that most people can’t be trained on the job, as has been the norm in nearly all of human history, even for specialized work.
What’s more, U.S. employers are signaling that college graduates frequently don’t graduate with the skills they need to do the jobs that their degree supposedly makes them qualified for. It is clearer by the day that college degrees in the modern capitalist paradigm are social-status signifiers. They identify people who are willing to conform to the socially normalized avenues of advancement and who are willing to take on crippling debt to get the career they want, i.e. the kind of employee you can expect to be loyal to a fault. Another metric that reinforces this “performative” paradigm for college degrees is the sizeable percentage of jobs that used to only require a high school diploma which now requires post-secondary education. The jobs didn’t get harder, employers just prefer college graduates either (as some put it) for their so-called “soft skills,” or because (as I am cynically inclined to believe) an indebted workforce is a more pliable workforce.
Despite spending almost a thousand words bagging on colleges, I have cherished my time at UTM, but I didn’t enjoy it because I felt like it was going to land me a great job. I enjoyed it because there is a simple joy in being a scholar, in actually learning about the world around you and having your eyes wide open to things like politics, culture and art, a kind of mental paralysis that a quality education can remedy.
If universities were seen as the centers of learning and scholarship that they once were (and maybe downsize a bit in the process) they would be able to recapture their comfortable niche in society. Granted, there will always be the Ivys that turn championship-winning lacrosse players into the next Secretary of State through the transmutative power of social elites in close proximity, but that’s no reason that average Americans can’t enjoy a fairer system of employment preparation while also becoming scholars in their own right.
In an ideal world, employers would be expected to train entry-level workers in most jobs, as they do in Germany. Workers would enjoy enough free time to take classes at a local university, which, rather than being a place you go to get a round-about job certificate or to delay adulthood for four years, would be a place of real learning. This or something like this, I think, is what is required to save U.S. higher education from the niche it has carved itself in our extractive economy.
Painting By / Louis-Emile Adan
