The Life of the Mind, and other stories
It’s certainly no secret that graduate school in the humanities is a risky proposition, entailing years spent toiling for little to no money, very often debt, and very rarely full-time, tenure-track positions upon graduation. Thomas Benton (strangely, a pen name for a tenured professor at Hope College) has been doing the work of publicizing the structural difficulties associated with academic life. It’s sobering for anyone considering taking this path, and well worth the time.
Benton’s latest article expands a bit on the intriguing class issues that, according to him, are at the center of the problem.
But the system over which the privileged preside does not ultimately depend on them for the daily functioning of higher education (which is now, as we all know, drifting toward a part-time, no-benefit business). The ranks of new Ph.D.’s and adjuncts these days are mainly composed of people from below the upper-middle class: people who believe from infancy that more education equals more opportunity. They see the professions as a path to security and status.
The myth of the academic meritocracy powerfully affects students from families that believe in education, that may or may not have attained a few undergraduate degrees, but do not have a lot of experience with how access to the professions is controlled. Their daughter goes to graduate school, earns a doctorate in comparative literature from an Ivy League university, everyone is proud of her, and then they are shocked when she struggles for years to earn more than the minimum wage. (Meanwhile, her brother—who was never very good at school—makes a decent living fixing HVAC systems with a six-month certificate from a for-profit school near the Interstate.)
This is incredibly persuasive and important to me, and points at a strong disconnect in the way that America generally talks about education. It’s well-known that a college degree raises lifetime income substantially. But beyond that, there’s a class of graduate degree with strong job prospects associated (Wharton MBA, Stanford JD, etc), as well as a class with quite murky prospects (online masters, unaccredited law schools, PhDs in the humanities). The difficulty is not so much the uselessness of the degrees themselves (though that’s certainly problematic) but the deep debt loads many students are resigned to take on to complete the degree.
Government has certainly played no little role in reinforcing this. The easy availability of federal student loan money, which is disproportionately directed towards disadvantaged students, is what has in large part enabled the rise of the for-profit university.
This is an issue which cuts to the core of discussions surrounding equality. Simply making money available for students to get some degree (any degree!) has become, in many instances, counter-productive. The problem will be challenging to fix; industry incentives strongly support more federal money in education and less federal oversight (if any exists at the moment). It’s high time to realize that education may, if driven by the financial interests of for-profit colleges, lobbyists, and the generally benign Classics department, be a force for increasing inequality.
-John
Related posts:
- What is the educational value of intercollegiate sports?
- Are too many students going to college?
- Is exercise part of education?
- A classic education for the rest of us
- No one reforms my kid’s education
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