So sometime during the presidency of George W. Bush, it became clear that college education in America had become a scam. Yes, that’s right. In addition to dropping the ball on Al-Qaeda before 9/ 11, involving the US in a disastrous war with Iraq, allowing China to grow unchecked economic might, and fucking up the economy so badly that he started a Great Recession, W also managed to push college education in the US right over the cliff of irrelevancy and greed. What an accomplished president!
To understand just how badly Millennials got screwed, we have to travel back in time to when it really did seem to the world like America was legitimately great. The US had saved Europe, and was Marshall Planning the world back to some sort of post-war economic health.
GI BILL SENDS VETERANS TO COLLEGE
A little thing called the GI Bill back home was producing some of the most spectacular wealth building results in the history of capitalism, creating an American white collar middle class. People who knew things, invented things, designed things. People who created things and pushed the scientific envelope and pushed everything forward so boldly and successfully that Americans believed in something they called progress.
Things in the world actually were getting better. You see, the GI Bill allowed veterans of World War II to go to college, so they did. For boomers and kind of sort of Gen X, a college education was a golden ticket to middle class prosperity, more prosperity than the nation had ever seen. The richest American generation on record; the succeeding generations are not so prosperous now.
Boomer Americans who did not go to college did not have a golden ticket, maybe a bronze ticket at best. The divide was stark. It was easy to see why going to college was a legitimate goal, dream aspiration for working class folks. It really was an effective key to upward social mobility. The American system worked.
The American system worked due to a couple of things that were later disparaged and even despised: government and taxes.
You see, back then there was this public spirited investment by America and by American state governments in public colleges and universities. College educations were subsidized by taxes because college educations benefited the entire country.
Boo. Hiss… We hate things that benefit the entire country or so Ronald Reagan persuaded America. He started by enthusiastically taking after what had been the jewel of the United States higher education system, the University of California campuses, Berkeley, UCLA, et cetera. Yeah, so back when he was governor of California, he had already embarked on an aggressive program of making Americans mediocre again, by attacking the UC system.
That was way back in the 1970s. Things did not get better. Public disinvestment in colleges and universities increased. Which made colleges and universities become donor whores. They sold everything they had, their reputations, their integrity, their teaching, their scholarship, their common sense, their time, their intellectual inquiry, the principles. Whatever intangibles had made universities in the United States the absolute envy of the world.
COLLEGES SELL OUT FOR DONORS
They sold, they sold their souls for donors, corporations. Government contracts, endowment chasing and God knows what. They became dime store hustlers for the next big donation. They became gross. So while colleges and universities were salivating over donors and endowments and forgetting students and scholars and teachers and academics, they were also raising tuition.
That’s how enshittification works. You make something worse while simultaneously charging more for it. Universities were paradoxically getting richer and crappier at the same time. Capitalism, libertarianism gotta fucking love them.
So while colleges and universities are becoming cesspools of cess or something, Americans have not yet realized that a college education is no longer a golden ticket to prosperity. Thanks to the Reaganesque devaluation of work and the elevation of finance, and thanks to globalization, wages for even white collar workers are not rising. The only thing that’s rising is asset prices. But people don’t realize that’s the new world order under neoliberalism.
College and Social Mobility Become Unconsciously Decoupled
So every damn kid and their pet dog is still encouraged to go to college to achieve that social mobility that is actually becoming just a cruel fantasy. And now it’s time for the villain of the piece to make a grand entrance. Student debt. Twirling its mustache and swooshing its cape, it lures in the unwary, the children of the immigrants, the formerly middle class, the formerly working class, the children of people who cheat their way into Stanford.
The children of celebrities who pay to get them into USC on a sports scholarship for a sport they don’t play. Everybody believes that a college education is still magic.
What an opportunity for an economy based on finance and debt. Just saddle an entire generation or generations with crippling debt. Almost $2 trillion of it now.
biden Finally Tried to Do Something About Student Debt
So Biden tried to do something about this two decades, two decades after reasonable people realized that the student debt problem was killing the social mobility of entire generations. So thanks Reagan. Way to torpedo that American dream. Thanks, libertarians. Thanks Fox News. And yeah, thanks Boomers, but there’s more.
Because the greedy maw of capitalism cannot exercise its maximum destructive power without the benefit of the profit motive. So yes, for-profit colleges and universities sprouted up like toadstools on summer lawns. Since everyone still believed they had to get some sort of higher education, and since getting into old fashioned private and public schools was not possible for everyone.
Capitalism filled a need, a need to find some way to make young people and people who still believed in social mobility get into debt and suffer. Yeah. Oh, well, sometimes even a good scam will lose its luster. People started to figure out they were being scammed by for-profit universities and not-for-profit universities.
Nowadays, the reputation of colleges and universities in this country has taken a real hit. Of course, if we’re being fair, the reputation of everything in America has taken a deserved hit. The core problem right now is that college graduates can’t get jobs. AI is not likely to make that less of a problem anytime soon.
Colleges Produce Human Expertise, Something an AI Economy Seems to Despise
Even if AI is not the direct reason for layoffs and no hires, it’s a handy excuse. The raw underlying reality of capitalism is that workers are just inputs and wages are just expenses. Labor isn’t necessary if it isn’t necessary. Nothing about capitalism guarantees employment for anyone. It’s not about work.
It’s about ownership. So industrialization seemed to create a vast yawning maw of greed for cheap labor, but America’s not an industrial economy anymore. And there’s little, if any, demand for expertise in the age of AI, and expertise is what colleges produce. Oh well. So college enrollment, which, which reached sort of a peak before Trump’s first term is now declining.
People start college, but they don’t finish it.
About 42 million Americans these days have some college but no degree. Demographic shifts lead to declining college enrollment as well. There just literally aren’t that many people graduating high schools these days because there just literally aren’t that many young people these days.
The boomers were a bulge generation. There were so many of them. There’s just not nearly as many traditional college age kids these days. Meanwhile, when Reagan was president, the US was about 80% white, non-Hispanic white. Minorities really were minorities. White people constituted an overwhelming majority. Overwhelming. That’s not the case anymore.
What that means to colleges and universities today is that people expect something different from college than people in 1976 did. Furthermore, young men aren’t enrolling at rates comparable to young women, and this has been going on for a while. So where does the US college and university system go from here?
I don’t personally think the glory days of American universities are coming back, and I don’t think it’s worth getting into loads of debt to get a college degree these days. The thing is, college degree, a college degree does not pay off right now in terms of status and economics the way it once did.
But the experience of college is still, I think, valuable. It exposes you to diversity, which is actually one of the joys of life. I know people on the right, and people like Tucker Carlson say, no, no. The strength of a nation is as being homogeneous, but the actual joy of life comes in diversity and travel and new ideas and learning and broadening your horizons and getting perspective and not feeling or being so trapped in your little silo anymore. Or your hometown.
The College Experience Still Makes Life Better
It’s about knowing that there’s more out there for you, being exposed to the humanities, even philosophy, it just makes your life, your mind, your heart, and your joy in life bigger. So I think that’s still valuable. And it’s not that no young men are getting that; some young men are, but it’s about half the number of young men are getting college now, as did decades ago.
It’s good that there are more, uh, black and Hispanic and Asian people going to college and getting degrees than there used to be because everybody deserves to have their horizons broadened. But what I tend to think is that getting some college as many people do now is enough. You don’t have to, and I wouldn’t recommend, getting yourself in terrible debt to go all the way to a degree ’cause quite frankly, the extra learning that you get from completing the degree is not that impressive. So. I don’t have a fix for anything, but I would tell young people today, and I’m obviously not a young person myself, go ahead. Get an AA degree. You don’t have to get a bachelor’s degree.
Get outta the house, get into college.
Get some learning. Get some experience. Get some life under your belt before you strap yourself to the capitalist grind, but don’t feel like you have to stick it out for a degree. That is probably never gonna pay off for you the way it did for the boomers.
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