You pay for test prep courses to prove you have the work ethic to pay a hundredfold or a thousandfold more to prove you have the work ethic either to pay more yet to prove you have the work ethic to get a job or, if you’re less ambitious, to directly get a job. In some cases, you do this to qualify for a job doing something that actually requires training and actually needs to be done, like engineering or medicine. In many others, it’s for jobs of dubious necessity, like lawyering (Japan maintains a horrific but small prison system using a small national pool of lawyers), or racketeering in a suit (“analyst,” “consultant”), or bullshit for morons, like marketing and, since we’re shameless enough to call it that, communications. You may be just as useless with passing grades from Depot as you will be with a bachelor’s in communications from Ryerson, but the outfit they give you in Regina is better, and you know how to do PT, fuck horses, electrocute Pollacks, this and that. ‘
No, not the red uniform. That one is gay and retarded.
Oh, are we back on that one again, eh? What a shock.
You start the test prep process sometime in adolescence, or maybe in the thick of puberty. You’re hormonal, confused, and unemancipated, trying to figure life out under the auspices of hostile institutions and irresponsible adult authority figures. The pressure is insane. YOU are insane. You have to pad your resume with varsity sports and “service” projects. Student “senators” are a dime a dozen, but maybe, if you wish upon a lucky star and hire Rick Singer, Harvard will care. You’re special. Okay, maybe you aren’t special. Goodness, no, there is not an Olympiad just for you. You don’t have disabilities; you have disability to get deez grades right here. Eyyy, 4.20 GPA, baby. On second thought, maybe you are disabled, just not the kind of disabled that has you all gimpy and shit, not wicked retadded or anything like that, Macky Mack, just real anxious or cis-Rainman artistic or whatever. Ask your doctor if ADHD is right for you.
If you get the thick packet back in the mail, you figure out how to pay for it. If your parents are rich and accommodating, they do the honors. If not, you get to enter into nondischargeable usurious loans with zero collateral, theoretically secured by promises of third-party employment years in the future. The role of the colleges as payees in this scenario is tantamount to a shitty roommate who doesn’t have the money to pay the light bill today but his one buddy totally will a few months ago, and he’s also got this other buddy of his, but hey, ya just gotta keep asking us for the money if we don’t it, but ya gotta be chill about it, just be a bro, man. Anybody involved in a shady roommate arrangement who acted like colleges and student lenders do in the “education” racket would be a pariah. Those they’d already burned would be warning friends and family to run. What the schools and lenders promise is that other, usually unspecified employers will offer graduates a premium on the job market, but definitely not right now, and only if the eager young things bust ass in the meantime. Their “buddies” they’re vouching for in this analogy, America’s celebrated Job Creators, are notorious serial liars, abusers, and deadbeats.
Think about it for a second. Anybody capable of jumping through the hoops of high-stakes scholastic life and not just cheating the whole way is already capable of holding down gainful employment in a way convincing employers that the investment risk of providing on-the-job training is tolerable. There are stoners working part-time in comic bookstores who could make that cut. The years of schooling at student or parent expense are an extended for-profit buck-breaking program.
It’s a fractal ritual. If it feels like hazing, it’s because it’s hazing.
The premise of American higher education is that students have to prove themselves over and over for a chance at future opportunities to keep proving themselves under overwhelmingly artificial stakes that never really do and really never should be lowered to a level that is bearable and reasonable. This is batshit insane. It’s an affront to human dignity. What? You assholes hustled enough money out of my parents to buy a house in a sensible market, and now–forget equity for anybody else in this rotted-out society–now that I’ve officially put up with the full course of this horseshit, you won’t guarantee me a basic fucking job? Word on the street at Dickinson, of course, was that direct job placement cost an extra $50k.
A service that puts its customers something like $90k A YEAR in the hole relative to what they’d make as buck privates in the Army had damn well better turn out to be lucrative somewhere down the line. The claims to this effect are bullshit. Maybe they’re true, or maybe not, but if truth and accuracy were germane, they’d already be on the ledgers in accounts receivable.
College graduation is famously responsible for big boosts in lifetime earnings and overall socioeconomic status. The correlation is obvious; scumbags who can get away with hiring only college graduates for no particular reason will hire only college graduates, on more or less the same rationale that generally bars nongraduates from medical and law schools. Other than guild gatekeeping, what the hell is the actual causation? Nobody fucking knows. The methodology of studies comparing educational, professional, and socioeconomic attainment is trash. There are too many variables at play, the researchers are too ignorant and sloppy to correct for them, and peer-reviewed scholarship in many fields is pervasively corrupt. One shits bricks to imagine this in the esteemed science of economics. It raises questions of ethics and credibility to have universities commissioning their faculty to investigate the value of university degrees. Come the fuck on. The conflicts of interest are glaring, and it’s not like there aren’t literate, thorough laypeople who could figure this shit out without being hired by the subjects of their studies.
The obvious impulse in these studies is to paint higher education as a fruitful business catering to smart, hardworking young people who are going places in life. It doesn’t pay to examine to tease out the effects of each level of education from the effects of other levels or education (shit like medical doctors, who earn lots of money, having to go to college along with communications majors who are possibly aware of insulin) or from the web of privilege and crony favors college graduates so often enjoy, with varying degrees of dependency on their being college graduates. Here it’s worth returning to the falling-down Manayunk drunk I used to know who slept all night on a post office loading dock after jumping a fence to escape the Philadelphia Police (That crew? Loud but lazy?) and another time ate the R6 tracks at a cost of about $3,000 and God knows how much Novocain. Would his drunk-ass father have hired him on in the family tool business for $110,000 a year as a dropout if he hadn’t made it through college? I can only speculate, but I’d wager somewhat less than $7k a week on fewer than six online poker screens at a time on Oh Hell Yes. Nothing about that story sounded like prevailing market forces.
There are many such cases. They skew the statistics, but getting a rough idea of just how powerfully requires ventures into sociology, or maybe just thinking shit over, like what the employment of mid-functioning alcoholics with advanced gambling problems at above-market salaries in businesses their parents own says about America.
Just as importantly, every do-gooder involved in smugly opining about education and earnings in The Economist needs to be banished to the salt mines. The labor movement never got where it did by making sure everybody stayed in school. Richard Florida, a moron, has a whole shtick about how places like the Research Triangle are prosperous because they’re educated. Nah, the Triangle stole most of its wealth from more fertile parts of the Piedmont and Lowcountry. Maybe it isn’t the full story, but it isn’t contradicted by the sightseeing I did the first time I took the train through Rocky Mount.
College is supposedly important as a rite of passage. I wouldn’t trust anybody I’ve heard commenting on this grand purpose to have the philosophical depth or breadth to tell me a thing about how the world works or how it ought to work. If the kids need to leave home, couldn’t they start by getting jobs? They need to learn how to function independently as adults? First of all, the American college model sure as hell ain’t it, but even if it were, it wouldn’t be as useful as finding and maintaining gainful employment. Colleges insist the college experience is a crucial proxy for adult habits and skills their students will need in order to function as employees, but in the meantime they’re generally warned that it’s unwise for them to work when school is in session, unless they’re on scholarships with a work component, a double standard raising its own flagrant ethical red flags. If the kids need to learn workplace skills, why the hell do they have to stay out of the workplace at least nine months of the year in order to pay to be taught these skills in academic and extracurricular environments that resemble workplaces little or not at all? This seems a lot more like a campaign to shake down and emotionally manipulate entire families than to help young people adjust to circumstances they can actually expect to face at work.
The same thing goes for the pissant premise that students don’t have time to cook their own meals. Why not? If the point is for them to learn how to function as adults, why the hell doesn’t it make sense at least to encourage and facilitate their efforts to do some of their own damn cooking on a regular basis? “You mean home ec.” No. “You mean culinary.” No! All I mean is not somehow leaving the development of basic skills in activities of daily living to bipolar arts majors at Skidmore who throw dinner parties. A cumulative deficit of, say, 500 or 2,000 hours that a student otherwise would have spent cooking as an undergraduate on account of admonishments to take meals from institutional food services in the interests of efficiency and productivity will probably have an adverse effect on cooking ability as a graduate presumably responsible for living on some kind of budget. It fucked me up, in any event.
Do we need Malcolm Gladwell to write a goddamn book about this?
Everything about this model comes across as insincere and ulterior. What, exactly, are the good reasons for luring adolescents away from home en masse to be formed into adults in ultrahigh-turnover, ultrahigh-stakes, obscenely expensive institutional settings? Are there any? How much of this shit is NOT traumatic conditioning? Schools that explicitly strive for 25% annual student turnover campaign to increase turnover further with study abroad programs. Why? This is going to fuck a lot of the kids up. This gets people into weird headspaces. It is not good. And why does it seem so consistent with over-the-top extracurricular workloads and fraternities whose initiation rituals make Yorkville Varsity Wrestling look wholesome?
Some dipshit student body president or valedictorian or whatever who was tapped to read a portion of the platitudes at one of Dickinson’s commencement ceremonies–all I remember is that she was a woman, as I suppose we’re still allowed to call her–chose to read a section from “Oh The Places You Will Go.” Stephen Smith, the first non-Bean CEO of LL Bean, told his crowd about a vision he had as a young man of the Allegash backcountry backpack containing the things he carried with him in his life, for the purposes of occasionally packing and unpacking them along the way. What the hell is wrong with these people that they’re invited to make public comments and they choose to fill their speeches with excerpts from children’s books and stories about how they astrally summoned the world’s most unergonomic backpack a whole career before they first learned of it in real life? This country has dire social problems, and they shame crowds into sitting through their horseshit exposed to whatever elements springtime happens to bring in the name of decorum. It’s disgraceful.
Compared to the rest of this shit, the concept of college and maybe graduate school as a holding pattern for young people who would otherwise flood the job market is refreshingly justifiable. The industry is thoroughly disingenuous about this, but it isn’t a particularly bad policy per se. We still need less slack in the job market, not more. Too many bad employers and managers have yet to be adequately humiliated for humiliating employees, applicants, and ultimately the rest of the nation. If this is what we’re doing, though, we need to be honest about it. We need to cut out the song and dance about meritocracy.
Maybe the results include young people being irresponsible. Boohoo. It isn’t ideal, but it’s manageable, and it’s nothing that doesn’t already happen regardless of the incentives and disincentives the authorities try to deploy. Ben’s Ass, of all people, is right about the ill effects of age segregation. He’s obnoxious, and he may be full of shit about other claims of his, but on this part he’s right. Of course, as a university president, he was part of the problem; those who are steadfastly against age segregation will find jobs in age-integrated settings.
Here’s the thing. Everything about this debate is totally beside the point. The whole college system, along with the professional system beyond it, is designed to keep the upper strata ensconced in segregated environments. If these systems weren’t, they wouldn’t exist in recognizable forms. The extended adolescence of college and graduate life, which is often a red herring for circumstances uncomfortably reminiscent of Michael Jackson’s upbringing, is a feature, not a bug. It’s the same with every other form of strategic atomization. Many hangs are wrung about the delay of family formation into parents’ thirties and even forties, and sure, it can be bleak, but anybody who’s involved in a halfway cohesive age-integrated community of any sort is around babies, toddlers, and schoolchildren as a matter of course.
The real problem here isn’t rumspringa for twentagers. It’s entire neighborhoods and parent associations that take Hondurans for such good nannies that surely they’d also make great wet nurses.
There’s no educating an upper class out of this decadent style of thought and argumentation. There’s only hostility.
There’s no buying these lessons, either. They’re the lessons that own you, Yaakov. They’re the lessons that own you.
Murica Derp 