I am currently working on a book, The Politics of Higher
Education, Jobs, and Inequality. One of
my main arguments is that there is a bipartisan consensus that higher education
is the solution to all of our economic and social problems. There are several problems with this stance:
1) producing more people with college degrees does not create more good jobs;
2) higher education itself magnifies economic and social inequality; 3)
political officials focus on higher education so they don’t have to talk about
underemployment, exploitive labor practices, globalization, automation, de-unionization,
de-professionalization, privatization, poverty, the minimum wage, and social
welfare programs; and 4) the belief in higher education as a fair meritocracy
serves to justify inequality.
These myths surrounding higher education and the economy
were on full display during
Arne Duncan’s and
Larry Summers' presentations at
the Aspen Festival of Ideas this week. Duncan
argued that since the value of having a college degree has never been greater,
we have to find ways of making colleges and universities more accountable. For Duncan, this means that instead of the
government simply giving schools more money with no strings attached, we need
to judge higher education institutions on outputs like their graduation rates
and number of Pell Grant students.
Although these are important issues, they do not address the question of
educational quality. Instead, the Obama
administration is developing their own method of rating and ranking schools,
and this feeds into the logic of the meritocracy and the idea that we know how
to judge learning in a quantifiable way.
Duncan argued that while student debt levels are too high for
some students, college is still the best investment a person can make. What he did not say is that one reason why
college students on average earn so much more than students without college
degrees is that the wages for people with only high school degrees or less has
gone down so much. Moreover, over 50% of
recent college grads are either underemployed or unemployed, and many of these
grads are working at jobs that do not traditionally require a college
degree. Thus, while earning a degree
does increase your odds at earning more, the main reason why is that so many
people are earning less.
Duncan and others appear to believe that college degrees
produce jobs that require degrees, when in fact, there is very little relation
between these two factors. In fact,
since wealthy students graduate from college at a much higher rate than anyone
else, higher education often serves to increase income inequality. Higher education thus cannot substitute for
broader economic public policies, and at a time when public higher education is
seeing decreased funding, it is absurd to ask higher education to be the
solution to all of our problems. For
example, Duncan claimed that higher education is the key to keeping high-pay,
high skill jobs in America, but this perspective fails to look at the role of
corporations seeking to increase their profits by outsourcing jobs and
replacing full-time workers with part-time employees.
In what we can call the narcissism of the meritocracy,
political officials believe that since higher education helped them to attain
their success, then everyone else should be able to do the same. The flip-side of this myth is that the people
who are not successful only have themselves to blame. In discussing President Obama’s own career,
Duncan used this example as proof that the system works. However, we know that
Obama is a rare exception, and our meritocracy is turning back into an
aristocracy.
Duncan also believes that the Obama college ranking system
will give consumers more information so that they can make better decisions in
picking a school, and this process will create a free market structure where
people will vote with their feet. In
other terms, the colleges and universities that are not performing well in the
ratings will lose students and then they will be forced to change. This whole logic is based on the false
ideology of the invisible hand and social Darwinism. In
the underlying belief in the rationality of the free market, the idea is that
only the fittest will survive, and everyone else will be disrupted or
eliminated.
In his interview, Larry Summers added to this neoliberal consensus
by claiming that what is preventing higher education from advancing and serving
the students are the dual evils of tenure and shared governance. Referring to the
debate between Jill Lepore and Clayton Christensen, Summers argued that technology will force schools to
either adapt or die. He added that since
the average professor is around fifty, these institutions will not experiment
because all of the new technology companies are led by young people. The implied solution then is to get rid of
tenure and shared governance and let these schools experiment and
innovate. What Summers did not say is
that these institutions have already innovated by replacing professors with
part-time, non-tenured faculty.
While the current President of Harvard, Drew Faust, did push
back on some of Summer’s ideas, she said that faculty would be much happier if
they spent their time on their own expert areas and did not waste time on
learning about school budgets and other issues concerning shared
governance. In other words, she also
believes that shared governance should be handed over to the expert
administrators who continue to multiply on our campuses.
Like Duncan, Summers believes that it makes no sense to have
35,000 professors teach calculus at their individual schools when a small
number of great professors could teach thousands online. Under the banner of increasing equality of
opportunity, Summers wants to eliminate most of the faculty. Here we see one of the ways that higher
education, jobs, and inequality are linked:
technology allows managers to replace workers and increase inequality by
allowing a few stars to make all of the money.
Of course, the whole idea of stars is based on the meritocratic idea
that we can fairly judge and assess quality.
In the desire to turn every aspect of our lives into a market, the myth
of the fair meritocracy plays the Darwinian role of sorting society into a
small number of winners and a large number of losers, and higher education has
now become on of the main sources for this generation of inequality.