Rethinking College and Work in the Future

I wrote a TMV post on 4/22/11 “Who Needs an Education Anymore” wherein I questioned the value of a college education in the 21st Century. Many other people have been thinking along the same lines for even longer, and in greater depth and clarity.

An excellent post on this topic was published today by long-time blogger Charles Hugh Smith on his very informative and thought-provoking blog “Of Two Minds.” Below are some selections and TMV readers can follow this link (http://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html) to read the entire article.

College education has joined the ranks of cartels feeding at the trough of the Finance Capital-Central State. The “end of work” will force a revolution within the education cartel.

I have addressed the “end of work” and the related transformation of education and industry for years: [List of links to 5 prior articles.]
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• The “end of work” is driven by global trends including web-enabled business and work, automation and robotics.
• Work, education, finance, governance and cultural norms and values are inextricably bound together: there is no way to transform one without transforming all.
• “Centralized factory” models for education, government, finance, energy and production have run their course and are now counter-productive.
• Education in the U.S. has been financialized along with everything else, burdening “customers” with huge debt loads in exchange for dubious future promises of value (just as housing never goes down, a college degree is a must, etc.).
• The education “industry” is now just another cartel in bed with finance that has captured the regulatory and governance processes via massive lobbying and campaign donations.
•Future opportunities are all on the other end of the spectrum from centralized concentrations of capital and political power, in localized, decentralized, self-organizing networks of industry, education and production.

As noted yesterday, what we really have in the U.S. is a corporate-colonial economy ruled by financial oligarchies and their minions in the Central State. Look no further than student loans which cannot be discharged in bankruptcy to dispel any doubts you may entertain about this.

The domestic populace is indentured colonial labor to the Central State, Finance, Corporate America and the Education “industry.” Want a “good job” in the government or Corporate America? Then you need that four-year university degree credential, and that of course is gonna cost you.
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As government implodes under its own corrupt, bloated excesses and Corporate America hires new workers overseas near their new markets, research and development and production facilities, then the value of costly college credentials will decline. If what you can actually do in the real world is more important than credentials, then the “career value” of credentials will revert to professions that have erected high barriers to entry and State-controlled professional guilds (license to practice, etc): doctors, nurses, attorneys, architects, etc.
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Here is an excellent, skeptical look at the supposed value of credentials and the bureaucracy of issuing them: On Credentials (Paul Graham)

“Let’s think about what credentials are for. What they are, functionally, is a way of predicting performance. If you could measure actual performance, you wouldn’t need them.
“So why did they even evolve? Why haven’t we just been measuring actual performance? Think about where credentialism first appeared: in selecting candidates for large organizations. Individual performance is hard to measure in large organizations, and the harder performance is to measure, the more important it is to predict it. If an organization could immediately and cheaply measure the performance of recruits, they wouldn’t need to examine their credentials. They could take everyone and keep just the good ones.
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“Academically Adrift” (Chicago; $25) was written by two sociologists, Richard Arum (N.Y.U.) and Josipa Roksa (University of Virginia). It is not a diatribe based on anecdote and personal history and supported by some convenient data, which is what books critical of American higher education often are. It’s a social-scientific attempt to determine whether students are learning what colleges claim to be teaching them—specifically, “to think critically, reason analytically, solve problems, and communicate clearly.”

According to this article, the book concludes many students are not learning these skills in college.

As many readers have pointed out over the years, the real value in an Ivy League education is the opportunities to network with wealthy, well-connected students and their parents, a point made in this excellent article: What Really Keeps Poor People Poor.
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Education, especially at the post-secondary level provides a strong filtering and sorting mechanism for society. There’s a reason why some companies will only hire Ivy League graduates. And it’s a big part of why the top schools have incredible pricing power. But what if you could develop an alternative signaling mechanism that rivaled or even eclipsed what schools currently do? I think that’s precisely what the reputation graph could become. It’s still way early but I could see the reputation graph ultimately playing a very important role in decision-making about people.
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Rick Davis of the excellent Consumer Metrics Institute recently published an extended commentary on the costs (and valuations) of education, which I excerpt below:

“It is an article of cultural faith that a good college education is the surest and most universal path to the “American Dream” — and by virtue of that cultural dogma any debt incurred while acquiring higher education is irrefutably good debt.
“We’re not so sure. We could argue that in the early 21st century — regardless of the U.S. cultural memory dating from the implementation of the first G.I. Bill through the 1980s — the growth of student loans may be a major drag on the potential growth of the economy for at least two reasons:
“– The crippling effect that the enormous personal debts are having on the spending potential of a whole generation of consumers;
“– The cost effectiveness of the education being so dearly bought.

Or, in a politically incorrect nutshell, are we creating a whole generation of hopeless debtors by foisting on them an exorbitantly priced education that will be of marginal value when they graduate?
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There are two critical economic differences between the educations received by [recipients of the G.I. Bill and current college students]:

– Subsidies -vs- Loans: For the most part, the educational components of the various generations of “G.I.” bills have been stipends or matching grants, not loans. For the class of 2009 the Project on Student Debt estimated that the average student graduated with $24,000 in student loan debt — and at one private school the average student loan debt was over $61,000.

– Relative Cost: According to the Trends in College Pricing 2010 report published by The College Board, a four year in-state education at a public institution is now priced at an average of $64,560 — while the same four years at a private institution averages $147,972. In that same publication The College Board reported that the real price of tuition and fees at public four year institutions (i.e., net of CPI inflation rates) had grown to be over three and a half times as expensive as in 1980. Over that same time span median real personal income grew by less than 30% — meaning that since 1980 the real price of tuition and fees at a public university has grown over eight times more than median personal income.
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The two economic issues are causally related: absent the exorbitant rise in tuitions and fees the debt levels would be more sustainable. Conversely, the availability of subsidized and securitized (and Federally guaranteed) loans — coupled with politically expedient reductions in underwriting standards (to spread the benefits of higher education to the economically disadvantaged) — empowered the rapid rise in tuitions and fees.

The parallels to the housing bubble can also be instructional. The solutions may have to be similar, and the higher education “industry” may experience the same kinds of pain as the housing industry has faced for the past several years…
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Are we really turning out independent, skeptical, curious and adaptable citizens? Critics have had their doubts for decades, for example:

From 7 Lessons Public School Teaches by John Taylor Gatto, New Society Publishers:

Students learn to accept:

1. Confusion as your destiny.
2. Hierarchy: You must stay in class where you belong.
3. Indifference: Not to care about anything too much.
4. Emotional dependency: Surrender your will/rights to the predestined chain of command who can withdraw your rights.
5. Intellectual dependency: Curiosity has no important place, only conformity.
6. Good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do.
7. Provisional self-esteem: Your self-respect should depend on expert opinion– children should not trust themselves or their parents, but need to rely on the evaluation of certified officials.
8. Controlled society: Constant surveillance and denial of privacy–no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate.

I will be extending this discussion of education later this week. As a worthy end note, consider this:

“The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things–the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.” (Samuel Johnson)

In a few prior TMV posts including one from 12/2/10, I highly recommended Mr. Smith’s Internet site along with another ten sites worthy of daily reading. I plan to link to these and other worthwhile blog sites more often. I may be able to write a lot less but provide TMV readers with more information and interesting opinions from a diverse group of individuals.

Marc Pascal
avenir99pm@yahoo.com
Phoenix, AZ