A Matter of Degrees

T. Frank, Rendezvous with Oblivion

We begin with utopia—the utopia known as the American university system. It is the finest educational institution in the world, everyone tells us. Indeed, to judge by the praise that is heaped upon it, the American university may be our best institution, period. With its peaceful quadrangles and prosperity-bringing innovation, the university is more satisfying than the church, more nurturing than the family, more productive than any industry.

What universities produce are dreams. Like other utopias—like Walt Disney World, like the ambrosial lands shown in perfume advertisements, like the competitive Valhalla of the Olympics—the university is a place of wish fulfillment and infinite possibility. It is the four-year luxury cruise that will transport us gently across the gulf of class. It is the wrought-iron gateway to the land of lifelong affluence.

It is not the university itself that tells us these things; it is everyone that does. It is the president of the United States. It is our most respected political commentators and economists. It is our business heroes and our sports heroes. It is our favorite teacher and our guidance counselor and maybe even our own Tiger Mom. They’ve been to the university, after all. They know.[..]

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist who has refashioned himself into the Lord Protector of Learning in recent years, says the same thing, constantly: you’d better have the schooling and the skills that employers demand if you want to make even a minimal living. The higher education mantra is possibly the greatest cliché in American public life.

And so the dreams proliferate. Education is the competitive advantage that might save our skins as we compete more and more directly with China and Vietnam and the Philippines, the journalists say. Education is what explains income inequality, chime the economists, and more education is what will roll it back. In fact, education is just about the only way we can justify being paid for our work at all; it is the only quantifiable input that makes us valuable or gives us “skills.”

Quantifiable, yes, but only vaguely. No one really knows the exact educational recipe that is supposed to save us. It is, again, a dream, a secret formula, a black box into which we pour money and out of which comes uplift and enrichment and wish fulfillment. How a college education manages to do these marvelous things—Is it calculus? Is it classics?—is a subject of hot controversy. All we know for sure is that people who go to college are affluent; it follows naturally that if you send more people to college, you will have yourself a more affluent country.

It’s simple, really. Get yourself a bachelor’s degree from a “good school” and those dreamy dreams of yours can come true. Get something else, like a cosmetologist’s license or a membership in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and you lose.

What everyone agrees on is this: higher education is the industry that sells tickets to the affluent life. In fact, they are the only ones licensed to do this. Yes, there are many colleges one can choose from—public, private, and for-profit—but collectively they control the one credential that we believe to be of value. Everything about them advertises it. The armorial logos, the Gothic towers, even the names of the great colleges, so redolent of money and privilege and aristocracy: Duke and Princeton and Vanderbilt. If you want to succeed, you must go to them; they are the ones controlling the gate.

What they sell, in other words, is something we believe to be so valuable it is almost impossible to measure. Anyone in her right mind would pay an enormous price for it [or cheat to get in].

Another fact: this same industry, despite its legal status as a public charity, is today driven by motives almost indistinguishable from those of the profit-maximizing entities traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

The coming of “academic capitalism” has been anticipated and praised for years; today it is here. Colleges and universities clamor greedily for pharmaceutical patents and ownership chunks of high-tech start-ups; they boast of being “entrepreneurial”; they have rationalized and outsourced countless aspects of their operations in the search for cash; they fight their workers nearly as ferociously as a nineteenth-century railroad baron; and the richest among them have turned their endowments into in-house hedge funds.

Now, consider the seventeen-year-old customer against whom this predatory institution squares off. He comes loping to the bargaining table armed with about the same amount of guile that, a few years earlier, he brought to Santa’s lap in the happy holiday shopping center. You can be sure that he knows all about the imperative of achieving his dreams, and the status that will surely flow from attending a “good school.” Either he goes to college like the rest of his friends or he goes to work.

He knows enough about the world to predict the kind of work he’ll get with only a high school diploma in his pocket, but of the ways of the university he knows precious little. He is the opposite of a savvy consumer. And yet here he comes nevertheless, armed with the ability to pay virtually any price his dream school demands that he pay. All he needs to do is sign a student loan application, binding himself forever and inescapably with a financial instrument he only dimly understands and that, thanks to the optimism of adolescence, he has not yet learned to fear.

The disaster that the university has proceeded to inflict on the youth of America, I submit, is the direct and inescapable outcome of this grim equation. Yes, in certain reaches of the system the variables are different and the yield isn’t quite as dreadful as in others. But by and large, once all the factors I have described were in place, it was a matter of simple math. Grant to an industry control over access to the good things in life; insist that it transform itself into a throat-cutting, market-minded mercenary; get thought leaders to declare it the answer to every problem—and, last, send it your unsuspecting kids, armed with a blank check drawn on their own future.

Was it not inevitable? Put these pieces together, and of course attendance costs will ascend at a head-swimming clip, reaching $70,000 a year now at some private schools. Of course young people will be saddled with life-crushing amounts of debt; of course the university will use its knowledge of them—their list of college choices, their campus visits, their hopes for the future—to extract every last possible dollar from the teenage mark and her family [and of course a lot would cheat to get in]. It is lambs trotting blithely to the slaughter. It is the utterly predictable fruits of our simultaneous love affairs with college and the market. It is the same lesson taught us by so many other disastrous privatizations: in our passion for ​entrepreneurship and meritocracy, we forgot that maybe the market wasn’t the solution to all things.[..]

In March 2012, two hundred thousand protesters took to the streets of Montreal, clashing with police and triggering the Quebec legislature’s passage of Bill 78, which placed strict limitations on Canada’s traditional freedom of assembly. What motivated this demonstration, among the biggest acts of civil disobedience in Canadian history? Financial malfeasance? Another war in Iraq?

No and no. What brought the vast throng to the barricades was a proposed increase in Quebec’s college tuition rate, from an annual average of about $2,100 to $3,700.

Americans could only observe this spectacle with bewilderment. For decades, we have sat by placidly while the average price of college has grown astronomically.

Then again, Americans know something about higher education that Canadians don’t: the purpose of college isn’t education, per se. According to a 2011 article in the Review of Economics ​and Statistics, American undergrads spend less time at their studies nowadays than ever. At the most reputable schools, meanwhile, they get great grades no matter how they perform.

But we aren’t concerned about any of that. Americans have figured out that universities exist in order to open the gates of social class, and we pay our princely tuition rates in order to obtain just one thing: the degree, the golden ticket, the capital-C Credential. The question that naturally follows is: given the rigged nature of the higher-ed game, why would self-interested actors continue to play by the rules? The answer, to a surprising extent, is that they don’t [..]

It takes only a few hours researching these subjects to make you start to wonder about the swirling tides of fraud that advance and retreat beneath society’s placid, meritocratic surface. Eventually you start wondering about that surface, too, where everything seems to be in its place and everyone has the salary he or she deserves. The diploma mills hold up a mirror to the self-satisfied world of white-collar achievement, and what you see there isn’t pretty. Think about it this way: who purchases bogus degrees?

Many of the customers, of course, are simply people who want to go to college and are taken in by the scam. Many others, judging by how the industry advertises itself, are desperate people whose careers are going nowhere. They know they need a diploma to succeed, but they can hardly afford to borrow fifty grand and waste four years of their lives at Frisbee State; they’ve got jobs, dammit, and families, and car payments to make. Someone offers them a college degree in recognition of their actual experience—and not only does it sound attractive, it sounds fair. Who is to say that they are less deserving of life’s good things than someone whose parents paid for him to goof off at a glorified country club two decades ago? And who, really, is to say that they know less than the graduate turned out last month by some adjunct-run, beer-soaked, grade-inflated but fully accredited debt factory in New England?[..]

I don’t defend fraudsters, of course. But as we wring our hands over the low-level cheaters who get jobs with mail-order degrees, it is important to remember that the pillars propping up our legitimate system are also corrupt: that the sacred Credential signifies less and less each year, even as it costs more and more to obtain. Yet we act as though it represents everything. It’s a million-dollar coin made of pot metal—of course it attracts counterfeiters.