Interesting and rather sad article from the Atlantic on the ways middle class parents frequently find their children slipping. Once upon a time, hard working and enterprising young men could find jobs. Today, they are shut out by a combination of globalization, large scale immigration, the increasing efficiency of manufacturing, and the false hopes of debt-laden credentialism. The increasing pressure to obtain credentials, as if a college education obtained by someone with a 100ish IQ really means anything, creates a double bind: large levels of nondischargable debt and false hopes of a rise into the middle class.
It would be no small benefit if Americans and their employers started to view college degrees with a lot more suspicion when it comes to whom they hire. The degree adds little, and the type, while showing the valuable trait of stick-to-it-ness, also shows the less valuable trait of jumping through hoops unimaginitively. It would be far better if most people just started working rather than pretending their down market diplomas were worth the trouble. America would be just fine with fewer communications and packaging majors. And this would free up money, energy, and entrepreneurship far more than the stay-in-school-until-you’re-30 message we often hear growing up. It made sense for those Baby Boomers selling the formula of their youth, but now it’s just as often an albatross that has very little value added. Plus it tends to encourage a play-it-safe set of rules that men in particular do not benefit from, nor does the economy as a whole, as the drive, risk-taking, and energy of yesteryear are often stifled by the debt and conformity mandated by decades of higher education.
I say all this, incidentally, as someone that loved school and learning. I have a graduate degree, and I studied liberal arts as an undergraduate. But it should be plain that this path is not for everyone, and students, schools, and society as a whole are hurt by hammering all these square pegs into the round hole of credentialism.
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Let’s not forget the summum bonum of the Civil Rights Movement: Affirmative Action, gleefully enforced through the courts.
I’ll admit to not finishing the article, but what I got through reading seemed to be the same old stuff about how important it is to go to college. But there was really no evidence or discussion of why this is. Even if the article does later address the question, I still think we as a society generally just accept this as the way things are, without much critical reflection, despite its vast import.
My feeling is that improvements in manufacturing and immigration only partly explain the trend. I think most important is that globalization is sending middle class jobs overseas, because the middle class are the ones most actively engaged in actual production. Meanwhile, globalization is enriching the managerial class, whose importance is only growing as they manage international businesses rather than domestic ones. The result is that growth in the free market portion of our economy flows to low paid services which support the ever richer managerial upper class. The middle class is increasingly dependent upon the non-exportable sector, primarily government, which is in turn dependent on foreign production (to buy our debt, and more recently to keep the dollar afloat as a reserve currency while we buy our own debt).
There’s a whole lot of conjecture in everything I wrote above, but at least it explains something. Simply saying that college is really important these days begs the question of why much of the rest of the world can productively employ its middle class, even in places like Germany.
David M, try reading the article before commenting and humiliating yourself.
The problem is that the average white person has an IQ of only 100, which is barely enough for the brain to remind his lungs to breath and his heart to beat. And the average minority is even lower. Imagine how much better the world would be if the average human had an IQ of 125!
Well, you strike me as a dick, but having gone back and read the rest of the article, you are admittedly a correct dick.
The article concludes the same euphemistic hand-waving for ‘human capital,’ equating it with education, not intelligence or low time-preference. John Sherry appears to fall on the spectrum for Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Whatever he’s doing now (“teaching” pre-schoolers? teaching them what–how to tattoo their calves?) is probably the best he can ever hope for. I’m going to guess The Atlantic actually meant “janitor.”
In a society where everybody could find their own level without all the rent-seeking and monetary games he’d do fine. Give him a social safety net, and he even has a shot at some dignity in old age. But that’s the best we’re EVER going to be able to do for him. We should be thinking how to structure a society where people can find their own level and live with some dignity and without being preyed upon, not throwing money around pretending everybody can be a philologist or neurosurgeon.
*with the same old euphemistic…