From Citizens to Asses: the Trouble with Higher Education

💡 Higher education has never been about measurable worth in terms of advancement and salary.

Higher education has always been about:

🚀 personal development

🚀social responsibility

🚀civic engagement

🚀building a better self and from that...

🌍 a better world.

An Economist piece has created quite the stir by declaring that the elite MBA is falling to produce career advancement and personal enrichment in the students who pursue it. That higher education got tied up with social advancement is a reality distortion field. The MBA is only 125 years old, emerging from Harvard which is almost 400 years old. It's an experiment that failed. It emerged to train the ruling class (no GI Bill yet) to make more money for their family businesses and understand the impacts of the industrial revolution. It's is a sidebar to the mission of the university.

It's one thing to say that higher education and its mission has evolved to include social and professional advancement, it's another to erase the history of higher education and its mission all together. Instead of being in the business of creating socially responsible and civilized, voting citizens, we are trading it for an industry that cranks out enslaved asses who become sullen and withdrawn when they fail to gain access to every instinct their id produces. Scott Galloway does a great job at creating empathy for this class of human and makes an excellent argument for why it needs to be addressed if America is to continue flourishing. Here, forgive me if I sound a little contemptuous. In honesty, I think they are victims even if I'm going to compare them to ignorant asses. Because people who fall for this line of thinking about higher education being useless are depriving themselves. Where did we go off track?

The GI Bill

The GI Bill was a revolution of epic proportion. It introduced thousands and eventually millions of working class and dependent class individuals to the joys of learning about our world. I am a beneficiary as a first-generation college student, Pell grant recipient, who grew up on Social Security.

Bringing the unwashed masses ("deplorables," I guess) to the university was about "vocational rehabilitation." Why? Among other things, like rewarding soldiers for their service, World War was creating a class of killer warriors whose human instincts were subordinated to the demands of waging war and they returned, damaged, broken, and unable to embrace civilized and domestic life. Don Draper is another man in a Grey Flannel suit. The danger of males returning to civilization after war was duly noted by the government. So "vocational rehabilitation" was put on the university as a place where men could study and be prepared to re-enter the work force and the domestic space as domestic citizens. The Federal Government decided that place should be the university.

But the ultimate mission of the university never included this idea. The MBA was less than 50 years old at this time. To be true to its original mission the opportunity should have been about providing soldiers and all humans, regardless of social class, access to full human experience. Because more than salary, education increases human happiness. Ping pong, endless supplies of cereal, and kombucha on tap brings immediate gratification. But education irrefutably creates better health and human happiness that lasts. That higher education may improve their careers and earning potential and that employers may prefer civilzed happy and higher functioning humans, is a happy side effect. That side effect has been in decline for decades because the corporation would rather automate than pay for knowledge capital. It's also because when the opportunities are limited expanding the number of eligible candidates will have diminishing returns. It's math. In the final determination, the happiness and health of human employees is not really that important to the industrial organization. Their pliability is. Depression, poor health, and fear of job loss creates that much more, to use a word, efficiently.

You might be able to stop a giraffe from eating leaves off high tree tops and teach it to limbo. It's not designed to do that but you might succeed. However, if you try to ask it to do both it will be able to do neither. Similarly, the education people received was supposed to make them better humans and better VOTING citizens. A better ruling class. In America we wanted the population to be the ruling class regardless of social order. In either case, this was about creating better citizens, not better employees. That came later (and has failed miserably). "Marketing" and "Business" as majors allowed corporate entities to off load the responsibility of training employees and professionally developing them to the university. We started creating majors for job functions rather than for broad expansive knowledge of history, principles of science, learning about the world through art and literature, the rise and fall of civilization, and higher mathematics. Instead of creating well-read critical thinkers who can think for themselves and create new jobs, we tried to train them to specialize in carefully determined ones. Why train a person in computer science, engineering and complex systems? Instead teach them to code. When code is becoming automated, why teach them anything at all? They tried to make the university their hand maids. It failed. The university, trying to expand their mission from it's original one to include employee training, started to do both its original mission and its new one badly. They also created a class of people who expect to be managers when socially they are still workers. It's awkward. It chafes. (This may or may not be me.)

This means that the federal money given to institutions was not welfare for those institutions nor for its students. It was subsidy to the corporate world who no longer had to pay for the training and upskilling of their employees the way they used to. Who couldn't deal with unruly laborers, (remember the scene when Stanley Kowalski starts fights on the workroom floor?). Thus the university warehoused 18-21 or 18-25 year olds in their most productive years in environments that didn't benefit the company. As time passed many of them hadn't even enlisted or performed military service. It was no longer benefitting industry. Only the individuals. And they emerged with opinions and socially responsible ideas, incompatible with quick profits. The university started benefitting political candidates who at least appeared to side with social value. The Cold War meant that it wasn't Grumman making weapons; our universities were creating ideological weapons and placing them into the hands of our young instead of literal ones.

It's understandable that business leaders would start to find this distasteful. Especially since these young educated people--gender challengers, Jewish people, Muslims, "homosexuals" nonwhites, women--emerged less pliable and more confident. This isn't good for us. Come here. We will give you ping pong and cereal and play stations and kombucha on tap. What 18 year old wouldn't find this appealing? Gay, intelligent, religious, female-identifying or artistic ones, might not. Good luck innovating or capturing audience attention without these folks. Is it any wonder we are losing the innovation race?

I'm not the first person to describe Silicon Valley companies as Pleasure Island for young males. I may be the first person to describe this class of individuals---some call them the "broligarchy" or "tech bros"--emerging from Pleasure Island as precisely the asses Walt Disney portrayed in Pinnocchio.

But perhaps I digress. :)

In the meantime, the current administration is waging war on Cold War ideologies in the university to dearm the population, mainly so it will vote along with its interests and that a seat of liberal soft power--a traditional check and balance against Industrial power--will become weaker. Some cases are more complicated--the politics of campus anti-semitism is a concrete problem that needs addressing--but on the whole this is all about upending soft power. USAID is global soft power. International student exchange is soft power. The Kennedy Center and the arts and education. Soft power.

Elizabeth the I knew she couldn't take out theatre and the open rebel William Shakespeare that defied her brazenly from his stages. Knowing the soft power of the arts, particularly amongst the Catholics who were catechized with art and theatre in the countryside, she didn't silence the arts but became a Patron and advocate of them. Had she approached the matter in the way we see the hard power conflicting with soft right now, she would have had her head roll the way of her sister's. The one thing that makes me rest easier at night as I watch the things known to keep a society healthy, strong, and resilient be dismantled is that because I was a poor chick from Brooklyn who got a Pell grant once upon a time, I know throughout history, power seekers who did not embrace soft power, lose.

Hello, JP, Founder of Singular XQ, here. Lot's going on in nonprofit world, and it's been a tough time where our very existence is threatened. However, our resolve has hardened on the need for technology education in the general population. If you understand this and agree, please, like, share, subscribe. Consider supporting us at whatever level you can. Many sources of money evaporated overnight. We are, as ever, keeping ourselves, anti-fragile. We will endure! Thanks for your continued support. We see you.