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Why The Not-Rich Vote and Think Like The Rich
"Millions of Americans who by objective standards belong to the working class or lower middle class have persuaded themselves that they are part of the professional-investor elite, because they have worthless degrees from diploma mills, negligible amounts invested in stocks, and suburban trophy houses they cannot afford."
-YES. THAT.
HOLY SHIT.
NOT RICH-PEOPLE THINGS: DROPPING YOUR PLASTIC MONOCLE INTO A GLASS OF CHAMPALE.
True that.
yes, all of that
This whole time I thought I was Bildungsbuergertum but really I am Besitzbuergertum. How embarassing.
I don't think this will be required reading at University of Phoenix anytime soon.
I was once accepted to the University of Phoenix on a football scholarship.
Wait, I've got a better one:
"For a school with shitty academics, you'd think the University of Phoenix football team would be better."
I hate that guy, like, a whole lot.
I really like the paragraph equating the growth in the educational racket to that in the investment racket. It seems a fair comparison to me, and both rackets are increasingly and uselessly subsidized by everyone else, while everyone pretends that their respective functions are inevitably positive.
The argument in this article is… mass educational and/or investment attainment is a myth, and therefore we shoudn't encourage them? We should be spending our time ensuring high wages for uneducated workers and praying that the world doesn't pass us by?
Don't get me wrong, clearly a lot of pitches for both higher education and investment are total crocks and meant to create an illusion of attainment without the substance. But the conclusion reads like a recipe for utter disaster.
It worked for the Soviet Union.
That's why it's called a "dream."
Haha!
@hammerzeit I read more like, if we're going to be working to improve conditions for American citizens, we might start by ensuring that the minimum wage will keep body and soul together, and that nobody dies of neglect and starvation when he or she gets too old to work.
It is completely disingenuous to imply that there is an equivalence between the financial lobbies and the education lobbies, or between investing in education and privatizing social security. Last time I checked, education budgets across the land weren't getting a trillion dollars for causing massive ruin. Education budgets are always the first thing legislators take an axe to in a downturn, and the rising cost of a college degree in state universities reflects the continuing disinvestment in education that state governments have decided is the best course.
Now, the question of how many people should be going to college is partly the question of what kind of role education plays in our society. If, like this guy, you consider it basically vocational training, then yeah, there's a big proportion of people who won't turn any financial advantage from it. But that view assumes that college is nothing more than job training, and neglects the value of education in creating an informed citizenry capable of deliberative thought. We've really lost sight of that mission in this country, but I think most readers here would agree that we could certainly use a voting public capable of making better decisions.
Playing the stupid game of balance, and suggesting that education is somehow equivalent to the financial industries while we're in the midst of massive teacher layoffs and catastrophic budget cuts is certainly not helpful at this point.
To nuance the education argument a bit, much of the money spent in education goes to administration, physical plant, and research rather than instruction, which has given us these great-looking campuses from which people emerge with questionable educations.
Yeah, as someone who works at a university (at least for a little while longer), I was dumbfounded to be equated with investment banks as a "bloated industry." There's inefficiency here that could be better managed, don't get me wrong, but one of these industries is not like the other. At the end of the day, one of these industries is doing something valuable.
Exactly. The current "bubbles" right now are in for-profit education institutions and community colleges.
Community colleges sell the dream you will go on to a four year institution and finish up. The end result in a glut of English and design majors from second tier programs in fields where there really aren't that much demand. Traditional universities, eager for an easy score, admit these often marginal students.
For profit educational entities are a bit more upfront. Let's focus on the online entities, and not the vocational schools. They know that a good amount of their students don't give a rat's ass about coming up with intellectual discipline or the process to research and flesh out an idea. The online classroom discussions are nothing more than a couple dozen people quoting the textbook verbatim.
The student at this type of place wants a piece of paper that allows them to make $X/ hour more than they make now, or a $Y salary. Those that go to four year institutions are seen as wasting their time. Look at all the ads talking about "taking the classes that matter to MY field", and "instructors with REAL WORLD experience". I used to feel bad for those taken in by some of these programs, but the contempt they hold for people who actually go to a real college makes it hard.
Yes, people may have been sold a bill of goods by some in the financial complex, but its not nearly the hose job that certain sectors of the educational sector are selling.
@Smitros: I'll grant you that administration costs are where these cuts should be hitting. But your other two points? Physical plant fixes leaks, installs phone lines, and generally sees to critical infrastructure. Landscaping is a teeny tiny bit of the work they do, and I've seen it be the first thing to get drastically reduced.
And research? You're seriously suggesting that this society will be better off if we cut off research funding?
1. A lot of physical plant is vanity construction (though much of that is from donors with more ego than vision). I probably should have said capital expenditure. Maintenance is hard to argue with.
2. Some of the research that goes on is tied in with corporate interests in ways that may not be beneficial for others. The workings of agribusiness in our universities come to mind.
I don't know where you get your ideas about community colleges, but a great deal of their curriculum is pragmatic – horticulture, criminal justice, computer networking, training for electrician's or plumber's licenses, etc., etc.
For degree hopefuls, CCs (at least in California) have guaranteed transfer agreements with specific state schools, so the only real obstacle to a four year degree is… what?
There is no problem with the path to the degree. The problem is they are complicit in a chain that is turning out the marginal college grads.
Community colleges are a great way to get a vocational education. One can argue that's why they were created in the first place. Its the community college programs that tout themselves as a back-door into a four year degree that are a bit disingenuous.
@Morbo: Again, speaking from my experience in CA, there is no "back door," the path is explicit. While a transfer is guaranteed, there is a cap on places within popular majors as there is for the 4 year students. So does that mean getting a slightly different bullshit degree in the humanities? Or does it mean finding a reward in studying something unexpected?
Do you really expect a BA to be the signifier for one's life path? When most people, the students included, know that employers see a 4 year commitment – an ability to sling bullshit and use MS Office.
The problem is, its not seen as a four year commitment, when employers learn they cannot sling/distinguish what is bullshit, and can't use MS Office, or learn a software package.
Speaking from my experiences in the private sector, those are the grads we are seeing come out of the lesser-tier state schools and private universities. Great academic resume on paper, but when you interview them, or give them a chance, its a disappointment.
The university system is turning out more of these disenfranchised BA's – and in THAT way, are perpetuating a bubble. And that bubble is very similar to me that for-profits create, and are much maligned for. (and rightfully so…)
The Gentleman's C for the hoi polloi doesn't come with the attendant social network.
What about the currency of fame?
In the future everyone will have fifteen minutes of Social Security.
I thought the whole point of the GI Bill and all that was not to raise wages but to make all Americans conversant with the causes of the Trojan War.
If you're going to dream, dream big!
I would like to read an expose of the myth of the mass aristocracy wherein tiara companies are taken to task for making us all feel like princesses.
Wow! A lot of this is spot on, and as someone who's spent most of his adult life either attending a university or teaching at one (some marginal, some top-notch), I've seen my share of students who were sold a bill of goods about how employable their BA makes them.
The issue, I think, is how our society presents options to young adults while walking a line between the messages of "people like you have no business attending college" on the one hand, and "you'll never amount to anything without that degree" on the other. (We need both plumbers and physicists, and there's no shame in either.)
As a child of educators (and a college dropout), I've long thought that we need fewer paths to Liberal Arts education and more paths to specifically vocational education. When I was in college, the two were confusingly conflated, and I dropped out shortly after I realised that my degree in comparative lit wasn't preparing me for anything besides the stoner bull sessions I participated in between parttime jobs.
Though I largely agree with his description of the symptoms I find his diagnosis wanting.
People, generally, want more than they have. They frequently subscribe to and employ ideas with the aim of attaining more than they have. Occasionally a particularly bad idea will become very popular and lead to a crisis. Therefore the john law fiasco, tulipmania, the housing bubble ect. ect.
Even if there were some mass delusion when it came to class identity I cant see how events would have differed if there weren't. Furthermore, I do not think such a mass delusion exists.
The writers problem is a one common amongst progressives and that is the tendency for progressives to forget how weird they are. The writer sees many people self identifying as middle class despite not fitting his criteria for middle class status and concludes they are so desirous of the label that they allow themselves to be convinced that they are more prosperous than they are. This leads them to make decisions as if they were more prosperous than they are.
If he had remembered he were weird he might have taken time to consider two important assumptions implicit in his thinking:
do most people actually regard being middle class as such a big whoup?
do most people actually define middle class the way he does?
The answer to both of these is no. Most people don't care much about class(at least relative to progressives) and have a vague conception of it. They refer to themselves as middle class because they neither feel poor nor rich and therefore, they guess, are middle class.