First, this is part of a broad, deeply misguided attempt by Occupy-types to exaggerate and misrepresent the plight of the college educated. For a movement of genuinely left-wing origins, it is absolutely bizarre to me to witness this obsession with what is, by almost any metric (domestic or international), a privileged class. Go through the demographics, and you'll find measure after measure that demonstrates that college graduates are in better shape than the national average, to say nothing of the lower class. People respond to this by telling me that, well, the recently college graduated are a separate situation. But that's not really true. The economy is improving, and the positive effects are overwhelmingly being enjoyed by the college educated.
And of course they are; the system, after all, is built by and for the college educated. I'm reminded of this great piece by Kevin Carey, which tracks down the subjects of similar doom-and-gloom articles about downtrodden college graduates from the past. As you might expect, after their flirtations with dropping out, positive or negative, they were assimilated into the machine of American advancement. If you are optimistic about that system, you could view this as a positive correction. If you are critical, you can see it as the inevitable reassertion of privilege. Whatever the case, it shouldn't surprise you to know that for most college graduates, these flirtations are temporary. The rewards that the grinding lifestyle of American "success" offers are just too tempting. I wonder again: how many of those protesting now will be paid in full members of the system they protest, in five years? In ten? Only time will tell. But the odds are high that many of them will slump into that life. It might please you to think of the hippie-to-yuppie movement as some sort of unique failing of the Boomers, but it is a recurring cycle.
This is particularly disappointing:
It is also an inevitable consequence of just how available higher education has become. With limitless student loans and freefor-all admissions to for-profit colleges, education is no longer a surefire indicator of class or race
This statement is absurd. Are race and socioeconomic class "surefire" indicators of education level? Of course not. But they are very highly correlated. Speaking as someone who spends his life researching college education, that's as close to a truism as you can find. Even with the rise of for-profit universities, less than a third of Americans has a bachelor's degree. The racial college achievement gap is large, and it's not shrinking; it's growing. Social class is extremely determinative of access to college education. From 1970 to 2006, those from the highest income quartile had a better than 70 percent change of holding a college degree. Those in the lowest quartile? 10 percent. I wish the data was a little fresher, but there's no evidence that there's been any major changes in the last half-dozen years. Abrahamian has fun with the fact that she applied to grad school this year, but indeed, the National Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the greatest job growth of the next ten years will belong to those with a masters degree (PDF). This is fifteen-seconds-worth-of-Googling stuff. Perhaps I don't know what left-wing business is anymore, but I am sure that it has nothing to do with denying continuing inequality in access to education and what that means economically.
I further don't understand the continued phenomenon of the essay that at once weeps for the college educated and questions the value of a college education, but is so fussy in its discussion of where the author went to school. I don't blame anyone for having tangled feelings about attending an elite institution. But this piece and pieces like it are so pregnant with the author's desire for that elite nature to mean something, it's suffocating. After all, the implicit logic of this piece, like most like it, is "even for me." Even for me, a Columbia grad! I could write this piece. But I went to a "directional" university, a noncompetitive, open-admissions college that nevertheless flunked out a lot of people and was too high a bar for many local people to clear. The point would necessarily be blunted, because after all, such graduates are not expected to flourish as Columbia graduates are expected. I would like very much if those evincing disdain for college education to stop being so showy about their own. How many of these articles are written by people who took their own advice and actually chose not to attend to college?
David Leonhardt dealt with all of this very well, in a piece where he considered research that demonstrates, Abrahamian's assertions notwithstanding, that college education increase wages even in those job sectors where a college education is not required. And he has exactly the right attitude for "the skeptics themselves, the professors, journalists and others who say college is overrated. They, of course, have degrees and often spend tens of thousands of dollars sending their children to expensive colleges." As he says, "I don’t doubt that the skeptics are well meaning. But, in the end, their case against college is an elitist one — for me and not for thee. And that’s rarely good advice." Like so many of the new, purportedly left-wing arguments against college, Abrahamian's piece poses as the work of the oppressed while its existence is predicated on privilege.
The oldest, most sinister seduction for any left-wing intellectual is to mistake concern for the underclass for being a member of an underclass. No, neither Abrahamian nor I are members of the moneyed elite. But we are very fortunate, very lucky people, and that exceeds even the narrowly quantitative. After all, I'm living on $13,000 a year. But I have social capital that other people who make that much don't and can't have, and that makes a huge difference. I live a comfortable life. My guess is that many of those for whom Abrahamian speaks do as well.
Update: I've been writing about the need to reduce college tuition for a long time. I've been writing about the need to help those with student debt for a long time. I'm in favor of strong measures to curb tuition and of broad forgiveness of student loan debt. These are real problems that need to be addressed. But from a practical standpoint, solving them means being honest about their depth and the relative position of those who are afflicted with them. From a critical standpoint, understanding them requires an absolute fidelity to the facts, about privilege, and class, and structural inequity. And from the standpoint of political action, no movement is healthy if it is predicated on the complaints of a group of people whose problems are historically assured to improve.
Malcolm Harris, who is building his Internet celebrity on this issue, doubles down on all of the bad impulses this kind of thinking engenders. He is here using the language of revolution to justify what is, at its essence, a dispute among the ruling class. He reminds me of nothing so much as the autoworker who curses the "foreigner" who he imagines has stolen what he thought was coming to him. Because Harris knows that his complaint is ultimately a direct expression of entitlement, and the entitlement of those who presumed they would be rewarded by our corrupt system, he has to build a case that is simply antithetical to the left-wing project: the notion that recent college graduates are the dispossessed around which a revolutionary movement deserves to be mustered. Read his piece. I don't exaggerate.
It should go without saying that this is a project I want nothing to do with. I feel for those struggling under student loan debt, in part because I am myself, but I will not engage in the sophistry and dishonesty that asserts that they are the class that most requires liberation.
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