Via Yasmin Nair, this piece on Quartz lends credence to a phenomenon I myself have observed very often: people who attack the value of a college degree a) all went to college themselves and b) don’t extend that thinking to their children. Now I happen to think that a healthy economy and social system will present opportunities for those who don’t want to get a college degree, and I’ve worked with enough college students who don’t want to be there to know that no one should feel obligated to go to college. But there sure is an asymmetry between what our chattering class writes about college and their actual behavior.
Here’s another thing I’ve been chewing on for a long time. After decades of structural exclusion, women have come to take a clear lead in post-secondary education, not only at the bachelor’s level but more and more in grad school, too. Check out this chart.
Now as a grad student and college instructor, I’m admittedly biased. But I’m gonna go ahead and say that it isn’t a coincidence that as women have taken the lead in education, many (mostly male) pundits and writers have started concern trolling the value of education.
“But there sure is an asymmetry between what our chattering class writes about college and their actual behavior.”
This is true with everything: diversity (hardly existent in important media and political organizations), the importance public schools (none of these people send their kids to these schools), how marriage isnt that important (yet they are all married), energy conservation, anti discrimination/due process (yet often supportive of programs like stop and frisk) etc
This doesn’t seem to have anything to do with women, the piece is an example of another tasteless liberal obsession: social mobility. The structure of exploitation is taken as a given, but if the talented son of pauper has a good chance to become prince while the mediocre king’s son becomes pauper then, presumably, justice has been served. Reminds me of Randism somehow.
I’m not sure that this is really hypocrisy: I’m not sure how well positioned people who haven’t been to college are to criticize its place in our economy. I think my own frustration with college-as-meal-ticket began when I got my BA and looked around and thought, “That’s it?”
That said, you might be on to something about expansion of access being part of the story. I don’t know if you have to invoke sexism per se; could it be enough that what was once a differentiator is becoming less-so? Certainly when I hear people saying things like “now college isn’t enough, now you have to go to grad school” my first thought is “oh, come ON.” And I’m sure part of this is self-interest; but part of it is looking back at my own experiences and thinking, good lord, is this type of preparation NOT a good use of most people’s years of peak intellect and strength.
On a statistical note I think your graphic aggregating all degrees is hiding some of the story. I think breaking it down by degree category would be more informative. One thing that softened my “oh, come ON” response a bit was this essay by Tressie McMillan Cottom about the role of credentialism in black mobility. Tying advancement to something expensive seems to me like the opposite of encouraging mobility, but it’s true that at least it gives strivers something concrete and achievable to aim for. Anyway, one way you might expect to see this manifest is people in certain demographic categories needing to obtain more education to land a given level of job; changing demographics in college could be part of this.
How do you feel about the coincidence that just as women begin to predominate in the PhD pool, PhDs are expected to give up the hope of respected full-time jobs and make do with part-time, low-paid piecework?
Similarly! It’s all part of the same trend, I think.
Jesus Christ on a bicycle, you guys are serious, aren’t you? May I ask: what is the evil motivation of this misogynistic mostly-male pundit for advocating a wider post-secondary vocational path?
If mostly-he is also conspiring to somehow raise wages of the fellow men plumbers and gardeners, while suppressing the wages of the she-enemy MBA business consultants, then how do I join this conspiracy?
But if, as any decent conspiracy theorist would’ve figured, the evil motive is the opposite: to preserve high wages of MBA business consultants by curbing competition, then, with the female domination in mind, how is it reconcilable with mostly-male-pundit’s alleged misogyny?
You just can’t resist attaching a gender or race-related statistic to any opinion you don’t like, can you?