- By the time of Mr. Trump’s election, the Democratic Party had become a party of technocratic liberalism more congenial to the professional classes than to the blue-collar and middle-class voters who once constituted its base. In 2016, two-thirds of whites without a college degree voted for Mr. Trump, while Hillary Clinton won more than 70 percent of voters with advanced degrees.
Building a politics around the idea that a college degree is a precondition for dignified work and social esteem has a corrosive effect on democratic life. It devalues the contributions of those without a diploma, fuels prejudice against less-educated members of society, effectively excludes most working people from elective government and provokes political backlash.
- Here is the basic argument of mainstream political opinion, especially among Democrats, that dominated in the decades leading up to Mr. Trump and the populist revolt he came to represent: A global economy that outsources jobs to low-wage countries has somehow come upon us and is here to stay. The central political question is not to how to change it but how to adapt to it, to alleviate its devastating effect on the wages and job prospects of workers outside the charmed circle of elite professionals.
- The answer: Improve the educational credentials of workers so that they, too, can “compete and win in the global economy.” Thus, the way to contend with inequality is to encourage upward mobility through higher education.
From an article in the New York Times.
Disdain for the Less Educated Is the Last Acceptable Prejudice
Please share widely!
From the bottom of the NYTimes piece (emphasis mine):
Various sources (such as https://peoplepill.com/people/michael-sandel) report that Mr. Sandel graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brandeis University (1971) and then received a PhD from Oxford (1981) where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
So yet another well-to-do white male with impeccable academic credentials and a tenured Harvard professorship attacks the Democratic Party for being “the party of technocratic liberalism”.
I love phrases like this (emphasis mine):
That’s rich — a full-bore Ivy League professor lauding a candidate for not being “tainted” by all those awful “Ivy League credentials” that he himself has enjoyed for decades (Mr. Sandel has been on the faculty of Harvard since 1981). Talk about damning with faint praise!
This relentless narrative about the Democratic Party and the lie that it demeans those without a college degree omits some significant specifics.
For example, WHEN was this time that the Democratic Party was supposed to so glorious for working-class men and men? What were the racial and gender attitudes of all those sanctified “blue-collar and middle-class voters who once constituted its base”?
A college-educated white male who lives in a white middle-class town in a Trump-leaning white middle-class region of MA quotes a white upper-class Rhodes scholar and Harvard professor about how Democrats are allegedly abandoning “working class” men and women through the scurrilous tactic of working for decades to make post high school education more available to working class families — especially Black and Hispanic families.
Here’s what it looks like to me. The “glorious” history of the Democratic Party that this piece refers to is the period during which the Democratic Party was the home of Jim Crow segregationists from the deep south — and their enablers. Those “lunch-bucket Democrats” fought relentlessly against extending civil rights to blacks. They fought opening labor unions to blacks. They fought gender equality, and fought affirmative action. They STILL argue against MA law that insists on equal pay for women.
When the Democratic Party explicitly ejected its racist segregationists after the debacle of the 1968 Chicago conventions, these lunch-bucket “Democrats” joined Richard Nixon’s “silent majority”. When Ronald Reagan launched his campaign of lies, they called themselves “Reagan Democrats”. Many of them also called themselves Ditto-heads.
I’ll be more interested in reading pieces by Black contributors who don’t have college degrees. It is striking that there are so many pieces like this from well-to-do white college-educated men, and so few pieces like this from struggling Black families fighting to keep a roof over their heads and food on the plates of their children.
The Democratic Party fights to make higher education in all its forms available to every American who wants it. It always has. I hope it always will.
I feel that you ironically engaged in a credentialist based attack on the author rather than engaging in the substance of this critique.
Advocating for better higher education opportunity for minorities and critiquing the elite meritocracy as a self perpetuating ruling class are not mutually exclusive ideas. If anything, I take Sandel more seriously than someone implying an attack against Harvard is somehow siding with segregationists or pining for a world where blacks were not admitted to elite universities.
Tip O’Neil recounted the indignity of mowing their lawns and shining their shoes during his summers to pay his way through BC. As a fellow Cantabridgian who wasn’t invited to the yard as a student, only as the help or the annoying local, I share an aversion to rule by the best and brightest. They got us into Vietnam after all. The prodigy of my Alma mater got us into Iraq, backed coups in South America in the name of free markets, and otherwise got the big questions wrong.
Third way Neoliberalism failed at its promise to mitigate middle class job losses with newly credentialed knowledge economy workers. There are simply not enough of those jobs to go around, meanwhile we are going to have a nursing shortage, a teaching shortage, and a tradesmen shortage that will not be filled by fetishizing a liberal arts degree and denigrating honest labor. The Democratic Party should always be a party for working families, regardless of their education level.
There is no dichotomy between the Democratic Party always being a party for working families and the Democratic Party relentlessly striving to increase the accessibility of higher education to those working families.
We are talking about opinion here, and a crucial first step in calibrating opinion is examining the source. I don’t remember any “Neoliberal” party, and I don’t remember any promises that credentials will mitigate middle-class job losses.
What I remember instead is the sad truth that people without higher education have dramatically lower lifetime earnings than people with higher education. Black men and women without higher education have dramatically lower lifetime earnings than Black men and women with higher education.
Black men without higher education are punished for the rest of their lives by our economic system. Black women without higher education fare worst of all.
The effect of pieces like this is to attack, harm, and weaken the efforts of Democrats to make higher education available for all. It is particularly ironic that you — another white college educated male — describe these criticisms as a “credentialist based attack”.
White privilege is rampant throughout our culture. Pieces like this exemplify that white privilege.
That is a statement of reality. I’ll take phrases like “credentialist based attack” more seriously when they come from black men and women who do NOT have a college or graduate degree.
“There is no dichotomy between the Democratic Party always being a party for working families and the Democratic Party relentlessly striving to increase the accessibility of higher education to those working families.”
Agreed. So does John. So does Prof. Sandel. Stop beating this strawman and engage with the actual arguments the author is advancing.
Tom come back to this conversation when you’ve read the article and engaged with the scholarship. Otherwise you are just flaming John like you always do. It’s that kind of bullying that is killing this site and making it uninteresting. I like you both, but seriously, nobody comes here anymore and its because we can’t discuss ideas like adults. Attack Sandel’s ideas with facts please, not your own personal assumptions that people who question whether higher education is actually delivering on its promises are anti education, anti black, anti science, or whatever bromides you choose to send our way. Its corrosive to debate.
I read the article. I’ve read the scholarship. I understand the argument. The fact that I disagree with you or John about this does not mean that I’m ignorant or uninformed.
When Black authors write pieces that are flagrantly racist, then the pitch that accompanies those articles generally runs along the lines of “Oppressed people may speak from their experience in ways that their oppressors may not.” This was a staple of “scholarship” not too long ago. Similarly, when white authors write pieces that flagrantly display white privilege, then the pitch that accompanies rebuttals of those pieces often includes statements to the effect of “White privilege is often unconscious, and needs to be called out in order to be understood and changed.”
It seems to me that being “woke” today requires being aware of our own privilege, both as whites and as men. The treatment of women in West Wing, for example, is excruciatingly sexist even for those of us who love the show.
Are you familiar with “Waking Up White, and Finding Myself in the Story of Racism” (https://www.amazon.com/Waking-White-Finding-Myself-Story/dp/0991331303/)? That’s written by a local author who speaks to her experiences growing up in Winchester and working in Cambridge.
Here’s a quote from the thread-starter:
Is this an example of what you mean by “attacking with facts”?
This exchange, like so many before it, starts with a premise: The Democratic Party discriminates against those without college degrees. Factoids like the above are NOT factual defenses of that failed premise.
Why is it that you suggest that I “come back to this conversation when …” when you are not nearly so insulting to my counterpart who repeatedly makes the same failed pitch? Is that “factual”?
Is part of “[discussing] ideas like adults” attacking those you disagree with by saying that we haven’t read the pieces, read the scholarship, and understood the argument?
If you want “facts”, then surely we should examine:
Racism and sexism are learned, not inborn. If we are to eradicate racism and sexism from our government, then we must also eradicate it from our culture. If we are to eradicate it from our culture, then we MUST be willing to accompany scholarship with a candid and frank assessment of the sources of that scholarship.
The article erects and then knocks down a straw-man.
Here is the money-quote — a lie — lifted from the piece cited in the thread-starter:
Horsefeathers. No Democrat says this. Nobody. Not Bill Clinton, not Barack Obama, and not Joe Biden.
Here’s a classic non-sequitor (emphasis mine):
I know of NO successful politician who does not value the work done by EVERY worker. EVERY successful politician works to improve “the families they raise and the communities they serve”. Whatever “the dignity of work” means, it has ALWAYS been at the center of Democratic politics.
What happened to “critical thinking” when you read this piece?
The FACTUAL reason why so many millions of Americans suffer today is that so much of the wealth of today’s America is concentrated in the households of a microscopic slice at the top of the wealth distribution. THAT is why today’s young people — including you, John’s son, and my children — face a life that is MUCH more difficult than John or I faced at your age.
This piece is silent about that reality. It is not coincidence that it attacks the party that is working the hardest to change that reality. It is not coincidence that it appears in the New York Times — a mouthpiece of the 0.1% that did everything in its power to successfully insure that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren failed to gain traction in this campaign and that Hillary Clinton similarly failed in 2016. We should not forgot that the New York Times played a pivotal role in publishing the material stolen from the Hillary Clinton campaign by Russian operatives, and a similarly pivotal role in keeping the email “scandal” alive.
As much as I agree that it is crucial that Joe Biden win the upcoming election, it is worth noting yet again that of all the major candidates in this primary season, Mr. Biden is the candidate most friendly to Wall Street and the Sulzberger family who owns the New York Times. There is a reason why Mr. Biden was, for years, ironically known as “Joe Biden, D-MBNA”.
Whether intentional or not, this false attack on the Democratic Party is a distraction from the issues at hand and a distraction from the dynamics that are actually governing this campaign.
I am talking about the Sandel conversation, and also the work of Richard Reeves and other scholars I cited that our meritocracy is broken and does not actually reward merit. It is becoming a self perpetuating autocracy if we are not careful about heading this off now.
Clinton and Obama both talked endlessly about retraining workers with “the skills of the 21st century” and Obama and the 2012 candidates got into a heated argument about college promotion.
I start with the premise that everyone is entitled to the opportunity to feed their family and work backwards on making sure the supply of good jobs meets the demands of hungry workers.
I think others start from the premise that College is the great equalizer and anyone who does not get a college education is consigning themselves to a lifetime of lower earnings. Therefore it’s an input issue and we just expand college enrollment to solve that problem. That led to a lot of government entangled with the college financing structure without any real incentive for schools to lower costs.
Covid will force that disruption and shutter many mediocre schools. We will then be left with an elite tier, which claims to admit only the best and brightest while actually admitting scions of privilege and those with better access to the specialized training required to navigate the hoops to get in.
There’s a lot of literature out there, even from colleges themselves, that seems to be indicating that these assumptions which may have once held up are no longer true. The cost of the degree has skyrocketed while the value has flatlined or arguably even declined.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/02/17/study-suggests-college-isnt-great-equalizer-many-believe
I appreciate this more expansive presentation of your case. I mostly agree with it, and I certainly agree with your final observation.
I’d like to say more about your third paragraph:
We’ve discussed this before, and I think we’ve largely agreed before. The rub in this paragraph is the final premise — “making sure the supply of good jobs meets the demands of hungry workers.”
That isn’t going to happen in any first-world economy, unless there is total and catastrophic collapse of world-wide economic order. The days of an abundance of “good jobs” are over. They aren’t coming back. Robotics and AI are in the process of making today’s middle-management jobs just as obsolete as the production line workers of the 1970s.
We are generating more new wealth than ever before. The sources of that newly-generated wealth are held by tinier slice of the total population than ever before. The total amount human labor — actual hours worked by actual people someplace — is getting smaller and smaller.
We MUST find a different paradigm for distributing the wealth that our current economy generates. THAT is the challenge of today’s college students, and even more so the challenge of their children. That new paradigm can’t work if it hinges on how hard or long somebody toils at some job — no matter how gloriously that job is described.
No matter how well intentioned, we perpetuate a lie when we tell ourselves anything different from that. The supply of good jobs is smaller because we don’t need as many workers to produce the same volume of goods. That’s a fact. It’s not a Republican fact, a Democratic fact, a Progressive fact, or a Conservative fact. It’s just a fact.
I’ve agree with you already that the following hasn’t ever been true:
College is NOT an equalizer. It is NOT a guarantee of anything. It is an ENTRY COST. It’s the ante to play the game. Paying the ante doesn’t in any way imply that anybody will win the game.
Not paying the ante, conversely, guarantees that you will NOT win or even play the game for all but the most carefully cherry-picked of people.
I think we agree that we have a duty and obligation to make higher education available to every American. The only way America has a prayer of both remaining a representative democracy and also meeting the challenges of today and tomorrow is by building and maintaining a literate electorate who is able to collectively make wise choices.
I mean if we go full utopian I think most of us on this thread are cool with a jobs guarantee, family income, basic income, or some hybrid of all of that. I think that would really fundamentally alter college back into a truly liberal arts curriculum and away from the vocational/credentialing aspect it has taken on. Sandel also makes a very good point in his book talk, less so in the article from the Times, that he feels, especially as a philosophy professor, he’s lost student interest beyond his required course on Justice. Few follow up with philosophy precisely because it has such a bad reputation for utility on the job market compared to other majors.
So I think if we are powering toward a world of Automation and AI it should be the vision of Keynes where we have shorter work weeks and more leisure time to pursue personal excellence rather then exacerbating existing income inequalities. We both know the latter is the realer probability unless we act to solve that.
Tom’s critique, to the extent that I can detect an argument, seems to be an attack on a straw man. To the extent that elite colleges market exclusivity, they create a superstructure for class-based bigotry.
That doesn’t change just because some Ivy Leaguers are nice people and some working class people are not.
Where does the $30,000+ per year cost of UMA-Amherst for an in-state student fit into this convenient narrative?
Scott Galloway puts this together better than I could. Universities literally brag about the percentage of applicants they reject. You wouldn’t be able to get away with a $30K cost unless you convince the customer that they are getting something scarce.
His stuff on this topic is so good.
If It’s really all about educating the masses, they would admit everyone capable of doing the work. They don’t. It’s about building a post-industrial enclosure.
The point remains that the issue is ALL colleges. The thread-starter and the piece it links to explicitly targets Ivy League schools. Your comment named “elite colleges”. I’m sorry, but UMass-Amherst is not an “elite college”. It just isn’t.
I agree that the cost of college is out of control. That’s the point. Your comment ascribes those exploding prices to a conspiracy to “create a superstructure for class-based bigotry”. I think the many sources that describe out-of-control costs happening simultaneously with slashed research spending provide a more concrete explanation.
The GOP has been attacking education, intellectualism, academia, everything that comes along with that for generations. The GOP has been attacking science and research since the turn of the century because science and research reveals the depravity of GOP dogma — especially as it relates to climate change, health care, and economics. Since 2016, these attacks have been redoubled as the current administration tries to persuade us that the pandemic is the result of immigrants, China, and liberals (it’s hard to keep up with the scapegoat-du-jour).
The Democratic Party has been resisting these attacks for as long as they’ve been happening.
It seems to me that if we want to educate the masses — and I argue we MUST do that — then we should be eagerly and enthusiastically supporting those elected officials who also want to educate the masses.
I suggest that we should therefore be eagerly and enthusiastically supporting those who would:
Some of us seem to instead be attacking Democrats and long-standing Democratic efforts to promote the first two of those three bullets.
People with “higher education” get paid a lot more than people without. Why should we also give them a free “higher education”? What do we give to those whose vital jobs for the community do not require a “higher education”?
Now this to me is more of a both/and question. I think higher education has become a private commodity based on brand names instead of a public good. I think me and Tom (and I hope you) are on the same page that if we shore up higher ed funding into public institutions and end the subsidies and tax breaks for private ones that would do a lot to break this credentialism and level the playing field.
I think we can do that while also building more vocational schools and 21st century equivalents like coding schools that do not have to grant a four year degree but can lead to awesome paying job opportunities. I’ve always been both/and. I do think Democrats have focused on expanding college access to the detriment of shoring up technical training, and used ineffective mechanisms like Pell or student loans rather than insisting on fully funded public colleges and universities with low tuition and universal admissions.
Only in your mind Tom.
“Some of us seem to instead be attacking Democrats and long-standing Democratic efforts to promote the first two of those three bullets.”
I am not saying that at all. Sandel is not either. If anything Sandel is attacking the mindset that says only Ivy Leaguers are qualified to be president. That’s the whole point of his piece. We should take the Delaware graduate over the Wharton graduate in the fall. If Biden, like Harry Truman or Abraham Lincoln, lacked any formal education I would still pick him over the likes of Trump or Kushner.
The personification of credentials as conveying intelligence or expertise is what we are opposing. No one is calling for even less equal access than the status quo, Sandel is saying that education status has become a caste marker and ought not to be. Full stop.
You are unconsciously doing it by arguing if we had more voters with higher education we would not have arrived at Trump. This belies the fact that he is himself the beneficiary of an Ivy League education and most of his wealthy supporters and enablers are too. That until 2016, it was the GOP that led with white educated professionals. Or that in 2016 Clinton still won the popular vote and did so with large margins of non-whites without college.
I’ll be the first to admit we need to do a better job at the secondary level of teaching global citizenship. I try really hard to frame my world history class around that theme and the new civics curriculum the state is pushing at the 8th grade level will integrate participative democracy opportunities so its a lived learning experience. We want the contractor to know why the US goes to war as much as the Ivy League graduate, especially if it’s still the latter who sends the formers sons and daughters off to fight.
99% of today’s heroin users drank milk as children. Therefore milk is a gateway drug.
The thread-starter itself reminds us that Joe Biden is the first Democratic nominee since Walter Mondale without an Ivy League education. Since I think we can agree that Donald Trump is far and away the worst President in history, then we cannot blame an Ivy League education for giving us Donald Trump.
The implied premise of the thread-starter is that nominees without an Ivy League education are more likely to help working-class families.
During the same time that we Democrats were nominating people with those awful Ivy League degrees, the GOP put forward several nominees without that terrible stain:
Would we describe any of these three as being friendlier to working-class families than any of the Democratic nominees during this period?
This smear on the Ivy League is just that — a smear. It is a smear on the Ivy League and a smear on the Democratic Party.
You write “Only in your mind, Tom”.
The thread-starter implies that John McCain would have done more for the working class than Barack Obama. After all, Mr. McCain was “untainted” by an Ivy League diploma in contrast to Mr. Obama.
The clear implication of both the thread-starter and the cited piece is that John McCain would have been more effective at helping working-class families than Barack Obama. That’s not in my mind — that’s right here in black-and-white.
Would Robert Dole and have been better or worse for working-class families than Bill Clinton? Was Robert Reagan better for working class families than any Democrat before or after him?
This thread-starter most certainly DOES attack Democratic nominees — explicitly. You go so far as to blame the Ivy League for Donald Trump — perhaps you might want to walk that one back.
Whatever it is about our political system and culture that produced Donald Trump, it most certainly is NOT the result of Ivy League educations.
That’s a GOP talking point, my friend. It was Scott Brown who tried to make “Professor Warren” into an epithet.
So the author cites in this piece and his talks on the book the fact that the Labour Party that gave us the NHS has coal miners in the cabinet. Even in the 70’s and 80’s it was common for rank and file union leaders to become Labor Secretaries and presidents of their nationals without having gone to college. There is also the fact that the Supreme Court is now 100% from the top two law schools in America.
It’s a lot less likely they’ll pick state school graduates, even from top law programs like Michigan and Virginia, to become clerks. It becomes a self fulfilling cycle where only an Ivy Leaguer can get on the court when even in my parents lifetime there was a fantastic Supreme Court justice and Nuremberg prosecutor in Robert Jackson who did not even go to law school!
So we want more working class people in office. When the GOP goes after AOC for “just being a waitress” they display the misogyny, classism, and racism at the heart of their modern movement. I am saying it’s great that Obama and Clinton both came from working class backgrounds and excelled at the Ivy League law schools they attended. I also think there are probably even more figures like that coming up through our community colleges and the trades who deserve an equal opportunity at governing our country.
I’ll take the failed tailor shop operator with a high school education from Missouri over the Ivy Leaguer from Manhattan. You’re the one implying an Ivy League produces quality leadership, I am saying where someone went to school is irrelevant. We need to restore that mindset.
Obama and Clinton were good presidents because like Biden they were smart empathetic leaders who knew how to listen. George HW Bush, Trump, and Reagan were all bad presidents since they encouraged selfish desires and divided Americans from each other to win elections. The former two came out of the Ivies while the latter came from Eureka College. Where they went to school had no bearing on their success or character, which is entirely the point Sandel is trying to make. People who don’t go to college or don’t go to an elite college are perceived to be less smart, less sophisticated, and less capable of governing. That perception is both morally and factually wrong while also being highly illiberal.
I invite you show where I’ve argued that an Ivy League education better than a degree from some other institution.
You haven’t! Neither is the author! That’s his point! It’s not bashing but leaguers it’s saying it doesn’t matter! I feel like we’re going in circles. See his AEI talk which really shows the egalitarian perspective he’s taking. It’s not anti intellectualism at all.
My issue is with the way the thread-starter is framing the piece by Mr. Sandel.
Here is the second paragraph of the thread-starter:
I stand by my characterization of that as an attack on the Democratic Party and our long-standing efforts to make higher-education available to every American.
Harry Truman held office in a different time, different culture, and different world. Mr. Truman is much more highly revered today than he was when he chose to not seek re-election in 1952.
I’ve not said that an Ivy League [education] produces quality leadership.
I’ve instead argued against your claim that it is harmful — your exact words were:
I disagree that an Ivy League education is harmful. That is different from saying that it is required.
I was going to share this with you John and am glad to see you found it on your own. It’s a great piece and I really enjoyed his interview with Ross Douthat on an AEI webinar last week. Worth the time to listen.
https://www.aei.org/category/society-and-culture/religion/
I still don’t understand why speaking for both the economically disadvantaged and the socially marginalized are not variations on the same theme. It’s not a zero-sum situation between the two.
It’s not a zero sum game. The data shows, however that prominent Democrats look down on those without a college degree. For what its worth, I have had many personal experiences with this.
There is as well, the reality in this nation that where one goes to college means more to many than what one actually learned in college. Look at the headlines of wealthy parents bribing college tennis coaches to get their kids into the “right schools”.
Personally, my oldest son graduated in the top 5% of his high school class. He decided that UMass Amherst was his best option, financially. I cannot tell you how many puzzled looks and frowns I received from other parents who remarked “But he could do much better, did he not apply to other schools?”
My son is now a project engineer at a very competitive and highly sought after engineering firm. Most of the people he manages have their degrees from MIT, RPI, and the rest. The only difference is that he paid off his college loans years ago and they are still paying off theirs.
Yes, education, higher learning, all good, all worth it.
But in an imaginary world where 100% of the citizens have a PhD in Mathematics, with a masters in finance, a M.D. and a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering, we would still need some of these citizens to drive take care of the elderly in nursing homes, take care of the infants in daycare, stock the shelves at Target., deliver the packages for Amazon, change the oil and filter at Jiffy Lube….an endless list of jobs critical to our society and as we have learned recently, “essential”…..as Democrats, do we look down on these people as unskilled and offer them “free college” to improve their standing in society or do we instead, raise them up and respect them for the essential services they provide and fight for fair wages so that they can live in the same neighborhoods as those of us with college degrees?
You’ve made this argument before. Your “imaginary world” is just that — an imaginary world that has no relationship to the reality that working-class families live and that elected officials govern.
Your son, the “project engineer at a very competitive and highly sought after engineering firm”, almost certainly has a higher income than those people stocking shelves at Target or changing oil at Jiffy Lube. He is likely to live in a different neighborhood as well.
You were able to provide that education at UMass Amherst (my youngest son just graduated from there, by they way — it’s a fine school). There are MANY working-class families in Massachusetts who do not have that option because they can’t afford it. Many of my son’s high-school friends are doing the jobs you describe not because they want to, but because they CAN’T AFFORD IT — despite working hard and doing well in high school. They can’t afford it because the estimated annual cost for a Massachusetts resident at UMass Amherst (https://www.umass.edu/umfa/sites/default/files/netprice/npcalc.htm) is MORE THAN THIRTY THOUSAND DOLLARS!
I see no recognition in your commentary of how impossible that is for ACTUAL working-class families at the bottom of the economic ladder. Your commentary attacks those trying to address this offensive reality. Your commentary exemplifies those who eagerly slam the door behind them.
Our government has a duty and obligation to face the REALITY that those who have had access to higher education live more comfortably than those who are denied access. Fulfilling that obligation is not “looking down” on those without a college degree, it is instead doing everything in our power to ensure that every young person has an opportunity to share in America’s wealth.
The effect of your commentary is to make it harder, not easier, for those without the blessings that you gave your son (and that I gave mine). You are attacking those who are trying to make life easier for those without the advantages you have and that you gave your family.
Here is a prominent black woman who is a PhD in Education also attacking the Myth of Meritocracy. If anything, it has been black and brown voices making this argument since the time of the DuBois/Washington. Higher education is NOT sufficient to overcome structural racism and its actually dishonest and cruel to insist otherwise.
From her article:
My whole entire proposal is we give agency back to kids. We stop lying to them and say that everyone who is sucessful has to go to college and we create as many individually centered pathways as we can. It is a myth that a BA is a golden ticket to the middle class, my generation has already lived with those consequences. We should focus on making college more affordable, but we should also ask kids what jobs they want to have and tailor their post-secondary experience accordingly.
Had I known I had wanted to be a teacher at 17, I would have applied to different schools and programs and made better decisions. I don’t regret my path, but it has been a costly one. A good 5-6 years of earning potential wasted in dead end paralegal jobs after undergrad. Great, I did need a BA to get in the door, but it was a 40k/year door with a 45k ceiling. Meanwhile friends in the fire dept, construction jobs, cops, and yes teachers were all out earning me. My brother with an associates is still out earning me by a factor of four.
We need to connect kids to good jobs period. This might mean they will still require college, but we can enroll them in non traditional programs like the Regis/Middlesex Community College to reduce costs. Or enroll more young men into health care, first responder jobs, EMT programs, or the trades. I would much rather a society where everyone can enjoy a living wage doing a job that they can derive meaning from than a glut of overcredentialed baristas.
I agree with all this.
I invite your attention to another piece by Ms. Brown-Dean (https://diverseeducation.com/article/146932/), a piece that includes these marvelous paragraphs (emphasis mine):
I would love to hear what Ms. Brown-Dean has to say about this exchange we’re having here — I wish there was a way to solicit her comments.
Anybody who told you that a BA was a “golden ticket to the middle class” was lying to you. If I had known you as a high-school student, I would have told you the same thing I told my five children: A four-year degree is the best you can do to avoid being trapped in a lifetime of dead-end jobs with terrible pay, terrible benefits, and mind-numbing boredom. It guarantees nothing, and those threats — dead-end jobs with terrible pay, terrible benefits, and mind-numbing boredom — are a fact of life for EVERYBODY. A four-year degree makes it a little bit easier to avoid those traps, and the risk is still very real.
Somehow the meaning of “necessary and not sufficient” has been lost in this conversation.
I don’t think this is true for all cases. I agree it is for me, more a humanities minded person rather than a technical one, but I also think there was an internalized bias I had against teaching as beneath the ROI if an “elite” degree and toward jumping all those hoops to get it. Hoops I largely self taught myself to jump through with the help of my mom who was a secretary to a guidance counselor. Hoops a lot of students do not even know exist. So I think we need to streamline this process. We should reward big public schools that accept more students and offer hybrid learning all year long. We should stop subsidizing private schools. And we should also build more vocational schools to reduce the wait list to zero.
Tom, in short if you want to give a “higher education” and higher wages to some, what are you offering to the majority of us who do not need or may not want a higher education or a job that requires one, but it no less vital to the community?
I think this is the question Sandel is trying to ask to change the conversation. I think the conversation has been, at least for the last 20 years I’ve been paying attention to it, as getting all students prepared for college and shoving them out the door into the great credentialing sorting hat.
I think public schools, even at the K-12 level, could actually take on some of the features we pine for in the so called college experience. Wide exposure to different groups of people (I favor controlled choice and blowing up/merging districts to achieve this), arts and music, math science just for the thrill of it, and the freedom to take your own classes and take them pass/fail.
I think we’ve lost some of the joy with the standardization of testing, admissions, and being part of this pipeline.
Ironically, I think that least some of what you describe WAS available to me in my public high school in Montgomery County, MD. I graduated in 1970, ranked 221 out of a class of 602. I was not a stellar high-school student. I’ve ended up doing fine in life.
You are a generation younger than me, and I fear that your experience was greatly colored by the Reagan-era “Family Ties” attitudes. I had access to and support strong and vibrant vocational schools (at the high school level) for those students who do not thrive in a “college prep” (that was the term used during my youth) academic environment.
My wife is a product of the German public school system. A benefit of that system is that she received a PhD in Biology at no cost to her or her family. A disadvantage of that system is that she — and everyone like her — was slotted in about 4th grade into the track that led to her success. Many young women of her generation in Germany faced a very tough climb because of the widespread belief that putting girls into an academic track was a waste of valuable public resources.
I can tell you that parents hotly debated the “track system” while I was in grade school, and the arguments about who should be encouraged to attend college and who should not have been hotly debated at least since the 1960s.
It is hard enough for society to fairly address the ethical questions raised by adults who choose self-destructive behavior. It seems to me that the questions are even more difficult to answer when they involve children who are too young to decide for themselves.
We make public education compulsory in most states — that began here in MA. The reason for that is the widespread acknowledgement that a literate electorate is essential to the proper functioning of our representative democracy.
Separately from all the questions of choice, income, and lifestyle, I think that a reasonable case can be made that the crucial decisions of today and tomorrow require more than 12 years of education. I think many of the TERRIBLE decisions our government is making today are the direct result of an under-educated electorate.
There was a time when the physics of how CO2 behaves as a greenhouse gas were taught in High School. That time is, sadly, long gone.
I agree with you that we’ve turned education into a jobs-mill. I think that’s another Reagan-era failure that itself needs to be reversed.
Yeah I think we are in total alignment here.
Big Tech, which sadly is leapfrogging “big” government in many ways, is now rolling out its own certification process for coding. On the one hand I welcome it for the Revere kids, especially all the ones on our robotics and AI team, to have a cheaper shot to the top. On the other hand, this is exactly the kind of innovative stuff our community and state colleges should be doing.
We are experimenting with detracking this year, eliminating the distinction between honors and college prep. I have mixed feelings about it. My senior prom date was from Germany and had a similar experience with their tracking system which seemed to negate her artistic dreams and was part of the reason they moved here. Three other Europeans that transferred to Rindge for a year or two viewed it as incredibly easy and a time to party. So I think we can raise the rigor while ensuring equity. It’s a tricky balance. One even individual teachers struggle with.
This is more info on the Google partnership with community colleges:
https://analyticsindiamag.com/why-google-believes-you-dont-need-a-college-degree-to-get-a-high-paying-tech-job/
I think I’ve already answered this, but I’ll try again.
I support increasing the minimum wage to whatever constitutes a living wage — currently legislated to be $15/hour in MA. I agree with our senior senator that at least in some areas, a better number is $22/hour.
This is only a stop-gap measure. In the long run, we must replace the entire paradigm of a wage-based economy with a UBI and other mechanisms for ensuring that every American receives a fair share of the wealth that the American economy generates. I’m sure entire graduate departments at a legion of top universities will devote themselves to establishing what “fair share” means in that context.
My bottom line of the “higher wages” question is that we generate enough wealth in America that no American (where “American” means someone who lives here, and is intentionally broader than “U.S. Citizen”) should be hungry, sick, or homeless because of their inability to find food, healthcare, or a home.
I think that a higher education should be available to anyone who wants one, just like high school.
I think that a market economy will always value some jobs more than others. I think that government has an obligation to ensure that those preferences are not based on race, gender, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, and similar discriminatory practices.
I have ALWAYS maintained that higher education and higher wages should be offered to EVERY American. If some choose to decline the offer, that remains their choice.
I think UBI is quickly becoming a mainstream idea. I have my reservations, but I also think the pandemic has refuted most of them. It one had been in place it would have been much easier for the US to pursue a strict lockdown for 4-8 weeks without having a fifth of the national workforce laid off or waiting for aid. All those gig workers who’s gigs dried up because of public safety regulations would have been taken care of. If calibrated properly it would be big enough to keep people afloat during times of disruption and small enough so they look for work. Not dissimilar to SSD and UI which are already forms of BI that are means tested rather than universal. I also think paid leave and a family allowance will help us immeasurably.
There was a bill sponsored by Markey and Harris to provide what was essentially a UBI of $2000/month for the duration of the pandemic. Has anyone heard anything about it lately?
The “Monthly Economic Crisis Support Act” co-sponsored by Ed Markey, Kamala Harris, and Bernie Sanders remains on the table.
Mr. Markey confirmed in August (https://heavy.com/news/2020/08/covid-19-stimulus-check-retroactive-payments/) that it includes a retroactive payment of as much as $50,000 for each working-class family of five.
The proposal is to pay $2,000/month to each American earning under $100,000/year and $4,000/month to each family whose joint income is under $200,000. The bill also includes $2,000 per child up to three children. That’s $10,000/month for a family of five with a joint income under $200,000.
Mr. Markey reaffirmed that the bill stipulates that these payments would be retroactive to March of 2020.
I mean if McConnell won’t budge on $300/week instead of $600/week, its hard to see how the GOP would pass anything like this. If Trump wanted to actually win the election fair and square he would endorse this proposal and Medicare for All. Both policies are incredibly popular with the Obama/Trump voters who defected in 2016 in the Midwest. Stanley Greenberg has a new piece arguing that Biden should embrace these proposals.
https://prospect.org/politics/the-perfect-storm-working-class-voters-2020/
I agree that I’d like to see Joe Biden actively promote these.
I think it would help Democrats take the House and Senate as well the White House.
More importantly, a bill like this would enormously improve life for virtually all Americans.
Absolutely. Roll back all the Trump and Bush tax cuts on the wealthy and you can pay for a student loan jubilee and a modest basic income support for American families. All of this would put money in the hands of ordinary people who will spend it on their needs and jumpstart the actual economy.
Is it just me, or is the bulk of this thread an argument among three people who ultimately agree on the important points. I’m reminded of the Christian mantra: “In essentials unity; in nonessentials liberty; in all things charity.”