f The Lie of the Mind
My sister-in-law Billie accrued significant debt while she was in college, a life choice she now rues. The other day she publicly posted this article and advised the college-bound in her network not to get student loans. A discussion resulted.
I was not under the impression that scholastic debt is all but ubiquitous for undergraduate degrees, but the others in the discussion suggested that it is. I deliberately used the term scholastic debt because of a distinction I made between taking out student loans and racking up consumer debt while in college—diamond rings¹, clothing, the must-have Apple product.
In the discussion, someone brought up college advertisements on TV promising “financial aid for those who apply” and targeting families who are hoping to send their first generation to college.
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This image activated my schema for advertising, education, school, and consumer goods, and in a constructivist synthesis that Piaget would be proud of, it occurred to me—this idea of college as consumerism². My previous distinction between debt types made less global sense.
College is like an iPhone.
(A) College, particularly in “ever greater amounts”, is an indicator of privilege³ more than it is a cause of privilege, like must-have Apple products.
(B) A college degree is a status commodity. And the more you have, the higher the status. Like those iWant Apple products.
(C) Most of all, college is not a sustainable educational process.
One of the professors at the college where I work assigns an advertisement analysis every quarter. Part of the assignment is to determine what the ad is really selling us on. The stereotrope is that cheap American lagers sell us on bikini babes. College sells us on any number of fulfillments, and if we buy into the idea that our purchase opens up to us a narrative we have not been able to create and sustain ourselves, it’s like buying bad beer.
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Everyone in the discussion was a Mormon woman. I started thinking about the Mormon women I know, Mormons by belief or by birth, and the way they consume college, and it seems to me that it’s especially wasteful. Some go to college classes like some women go to the mall, like others to the bottle. Bling for the brain. Anodyne for the mind. Buying [into] the idea that participating in this narrative gives them fulfilling involvement they have not been able to create in their lives.
Consume responsibly.
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¹ I went to BYU.
² consumerism: “a social and economic order that’s based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase commodity goods in ever greater amounts”
³ cf. The Big Lie of the ‘Life of the Mind’, an article my boss posted.
Wow! That was quite the article (the one on not taking outs student loans). I hope that many are affected and follow his advice! I had no idea how prevalent taking student loans out to pay for college is. Yikes. And if so many of those girls are using it only for mall-ish purposes, as you suspect, then the waste is compounded. To become financially shackled for something you’re not absolutely serious about seems ludicrous!
Nice post. :)
Hmm, your professor’s article reminds of the beautiful day on campus when my brother N explained to me that UNIVERSITIES EXIST FOR PROFESSORS. My young idealistic self was shocked, but over the years I have come to see that this one things explains many, many things about universities.
Was the GI bill (which paid for a whole generation of American men to go to college) the brainchild of an academic?
Here is another look at Higher Education and debt. It’s about the cost of “lower” higher education. Someone I know who has no college education posted this as relevant to him.
@persimmon: Thank you ^_^ yes, it pays to be serious about it. I emphasize the reason they may be serious about it can still be unsustainable.
@Yendilady, I was woefully ignorant of the GI Bill. I did some researching. I thought it was so interesting I’m going to put some of it here, though most of it is tangential. The bill was first drafted by Harry Colmery, a lawyer who was himself a veteran. I was hoping to catch a whiff of who Colmery’s buddies were, and what his/their relationship to institutional education was. Colmery considered college The Way to ameliorate the horrors and harms of war. He said this: “To those who are already mourning over the cost, I suggest two things: if we can spend 200 to 300 billion to teach our men and women to kill, why quibble over a billion or so to help them have the opportunity to earn economic independence and to enjoy the fruits of freedom and civil and religious liberty, the things for which they fight.” (Source.)
I have a lot of thoughts on this and related subjects, which I suppose is only natural for a 31 year old who is still in college (thankfully, without debt). I think a big, big part of the problem is that we (meaning, middle-class Americans) have two stated uses for college. The first is to provide a liberal education; the second, to prepare for the job market. That these two things are wildly at odds with each other is very rarely discussed.
I had a longish conversation with a friend of mine who attended professional school about the weirdness of professional school; you go and learn all kinds of things, and then, when you graduate, you go to work for a company which teaches you how to actually pursue your profession. Would it not make more sense (I asked) for people who wished to follow that profession to just…start working in it?
Despite the fact that he had just spent fifteen minutes talking about how he had had to learn everything his job entailed on a day-to-day basis when he actually started his job, he simply couldn’t see my point. It was inconceivable to him that one could practice a profession like his without elaborate schooling on the abstract principles undergirding the profession, /despite the evidence of his own experience/.
In short, for most professions, college is a really stupid way of learning how to do your job, and yet the vast majority of college students think of college as job training–with parties and madcap antics (at best) and jaw-dropping debauchery (at worst) as a strong sideline, or perhaps the main attraction, depending on the student’s personality.
Most people do not want a liberal education and make no effort to get one; it is filed under “getting through my general requirements”. Those who do are often mislead (as in the Big Lie article) by the fact that college is explicitly put forward as a path to employment into thinking that getting a liberal education makes you employable, when in fact it must be understood and valued as an end in itself–because the chances of your finding employment with it are slim.
Here entereth the discussion of “universities are organized for the benefit of professors”. ;)
sealionii said: “I think a big, big part of the problem is that we (meaning, middle-class Americans) have two stated uses for college. [...] That these two things are wildly at odds with each other is very rarely discussed.”
I used to think this problem was hidden when I first came across it (in high school), but now I think it is very commonly discussed — I see it in a lot of places. I wrote this piece with the assumption that my audience would consider basic the clash of these ‘two stated uses’. That is, < professorially > “I assume everyone has taken the prerequisite for this course.” ;) I wonder now if I see it out of proportion (even for my circles) because I look for it.
“In short, for most professions, college is a really stupid way of learning how to do your job,”
What jobs do you think college (university) is a really good way of learning how to do? Looking at it through this glass, what job besides a professor? Yendilady’s brother N seems to make more and more sense. I just read a story of a woman with not even an elementary school education who is a skilled surgeon in Africa.
“Most people do not want a liberal education and make no effort to get one; it is filed under “getting through my general requirements”.”
The first I heard the term ‘liberal education’ was when my dad brought it up in terms of answering me why he thought BYU is a much better school than the U of U. He said that BYU was the place (in the state) to get a liberal education, and that it was okay for my brother to go to the U because he would be able to get a liberal education himself, but he really wasn’t sure that any of his daughters would be able to do that. It was a rankling thing to say. It gave me—I took from it—a lot to think about.
To make less oblique one theme of the original post, I have, since that discussion with dad in high school, discovered that college is not at all a good place to get a liberal education. But it is nearly the only place to make it look like you have gotten one. What is baffling to me is all the protestations of people with an eye on the life of the mind that they have better attained it with elaborate schooling, blind as your friend, sealionii, to evidence of their own experience.
It may be commonly discussed in some quarters, but I do not think those quarters include the mind-spaces frequented by the majority (probably the vast majority) of prospective college students and their parents. Where do you see it discussed often, Lady J? Perhaps I am looking in the wrong direction, so to speak.
For what professions is college a /really/ good way to prepare for the profession? Good question. Being a professor; doing scientific research; possibly engineering. Universities considered as “institutes of technology” are often quite successful, although insofar as they are institutes of technology they deliberately de-emphasize the “liberal education” side of things. So, in a way, that just highlights the problem.
I think college is not a bad place to begin to get a liberal education, ‘tho it is greatly hampered in the present time by the fact that there is no longer much consensus of what a liberal education should consist of. (We might do better to go back to Grammar, Rhetoric and Dialectic…) However, one can easily get a B.A. (or B.S.) without having acquired a liberal education, unless you have been pretty careful about building it yourself…which you might do at much less expense at the library, as we learned in Good Will Hunting.
PS. How do I get the comments to produce italics for me?
I see it in articles, and in conversations with my colleagues, and on college-related threads on forums generally unrelated to education. I also remember that when I talked with my BIL who graduated from HS last year the cross-purposes of vocation vs. education wasn’t a new idea to him. (He has not, so far, been very interested in going to college. It’s been interesting to take my temperature on the issue and see how I respond to someone I’m closely connected to not going to college.)
(And to bring this full circle, he’s applied to two colleges, been accepted to both, and declined both opportunities. One was a state college that offered him a full ride and one was a private uni where he would have had to pay everything and purchase a lot of debt.)
You use HTML. < i > stuff to italicize < / i > except with no spaces.