(2019-04-29) Guinn Starry Eyes And Starry Skies

Rusty Guinn: Starry Eyes and Starry Skies. the importance of post-secondary college education in America IS a myth – one of our most powerful.

whenever we talk about college in America, we are nearly always talking about the meme of college! (Theater)

College! is a meme of equality

College! is a meme of human progress

College! is a meme of meritocracy

The Myth of College is an idea which permits us to declare it to be synonymous with these principles. The consequence of this declaration is that we may also declare that any opposing idea denies those principles. You don’t hate equality, innovation and merit…do you?

And just like ‘Yay, Capitalism’, well…capitalizes on our desire to signal our deeply held belief in the power of rewarding economic risk-taking to convince us to permit distortions in economic risk-taking, ‘Yay, College’ exploits our belief in equality, innovation, merit and education to convince us to permit distortions in the capacity of our university and degree system to deliver ANY of those things.

educational attainment has been on a steady, long-term rise in the United States for more than half a century. This is a good thing

But what is the right level? Leaving aside the Myth of College for a moment, do somewhere between a third and a half of jobs in the United States require what an undergraduate program teaches?

I am confident there is a vocational need for four-year college for no more than 10-15% of adults

Am I saying that only 10-15% of adults should go to 4-year universities? No!

Look, preparing for a career isn’t the only reason you might think about spending four years at a university. But most of the reasons we provide are also conflations of the type that are so common when we deal with other abstractions, myths and memes

What are these ‘conflations’ and ideas? How about ‘it’s about discovering yourself’, as if one couldn’t achieve that by traveling the world? I am sure you’ve heard ‘it’s about learning how to think critically’ or ‘learning how to problem solve in a group setting’ or ‘developing confidence and communication skills’, too, as if college is somehow better equipped than other settings to deliver these lessons. We are also fans of ‘it is an important opportunity to network’ or ‘to build lifelong friendships’, which are great, but also tautological rather than fundamental (i.e. college is important because others consider it important).

There is one reason – and in my opinion, one reason only – to attend college that does not relate to vocation, preparation for a life of research or teaching, or the fact that a critical mass of one’s age cohort is already there: Because college permits us to be wrong, offensive and awkward in exploration of new and uncomfortable ideas and knowledge in a setting with low consequences.

The Myth of College is that it grants invaluable life experience, broadened horizons and deeper skills that no other 4-year experience for a young adult could match. The Zeitgeist of College is that it is now (grudgingly) really about preparing workers for long and prosperous careers. The Reality of College is that it sells a license to use a credential.

There is an income premium from university degrees, but also emerging evidence of an evaporating wealth premium after we have adjusted for family size and life cycle.

I think that the growth in credentialism has also created an arms race among institutions and a greater separation of the credential value of so-called elite institutions from the rest.

in our obsessive celebration of the Myth of College instead of the direct celebration of its wondrous underlying traits, we unwittingly granted our university system unabridged letters patent to oversee the right of Americans to earn a good living.

In short, we created a trade guild. You know, what the Romans called ‘collegia.’

What did they do with this power, you ask? They did this. They extracted every ounce of the credential premium for themselves as a license fee.

blame all of us. Because it really took all of us to create the Common Knowledge which imbues our most prized traits in a single social institution.

And no, college debt isn’t the sole cause of whatever is (not) happening to the net worth of college graduates. Timing of favorable investment environments, the inability of these generations to acquire real estate assets, and the concentration of jobs with these remarkable income differentials in cities with extreme rent costs all play a role, too.

We didn’t JUST create a system to extract wealth premium from college students through debt-fueled, brutal college cost inflation, we ALSO pulled forward financial asset returns to benefit existing asset owners through the use of extreme monetary policy and extracted a portion of that wealth premium through NIMBY housing policies in every major US city outside of Texas

Now we’ve got to figure out what to do about the hell we created on the paving stones of good intentions

What are those problems?

Unnecessary Productivity Loss:

Constraining Paths to Prosperity: Through hundreds of billions in non-dischargeable debt,

Distortions Relating to a Generational Wealth Gap:

Hampering Household Formation

Some people of a similar political persuasion to me would say the right answer is to do nothing

Except there is nothing natural about this market. The price students paid / are paying for these credentials is a reflection of decades of public policy permitting and encouraging the extension of credit for college to anyone and everyone who requests it. The demand side of the market has been aided by the artificial impact of twelve years of publicly funded curricula, messaging and ‘education’ designed explicitly to feed as many students as possible to the guilds of post-secondary education.

Others, like Senator Warren, have said that the solution is 'jubilee'

It’s a tough thing for me to get me to believe that layering on more public policy will ever fix the distortions caused by public policy

The Jubilee proposals don’t just fail to get to the root of the problem. They exacerbate it – grievously.

Guess how much the like of Bucknell, Tufts and SMU will adjust their planned annual tuition hikes over time in response to a policy providing $50,000 in debt jubilee or college cost reductions? If you answered $50,000 (or more), you win

I believe challenging the assumption of university entitlement to not-for-profit status is the sine qua non of ANY solution to the student loan crisis.

As for the Myth of College? I don’t know how we move away from it

Education, colleges and the student loan crisis sit at the very center of our non-financial zeitgeist

The language we use to write and speak about education is powerfully connected to everything else we write and speak about

its powerful connection is also the result of similarity in the meaning we attach to education, and how that meaning is shared with topic-crossing ideas like justice, creativity, discipline and progress.