I’ve always been a sucker for tales involving getting rich (sort of) by flogging low-production printed matter to rubes.
This interest started when I learned about the early days of the exploitation film industry, during which itinerant showmen would go town to town renting theatres for short screenings of films that promised (but rarely delivered) salacious material. And just to compound the scam, actors (dressed as nurses and doctors) would sell the audience poorly printed “hygiene manuals” during intermission, giving young male audience members hope that they could bring home photos of some of the skin they had just been denied in the cinema.
That scam ended more than 50 years ago, but even today bloggers are told they can “monetize” their efforts by simply self-publishing a quick-to-market compilations with titles that all seem to begin “50 Top Ways to…”. And don’t get me started on the textbook industry (which at least has the good graces to produce quality material, even if their price/quality ratio might match that of the kind of encyclopedias once sold door to door).
Which finally gets me to my point, which is the analogy drawn by Eugene Linden in yesterday’s New York Times between his experience as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman in the 1960s and today’s higher education industry.
The books Linden sold were not the well-bound Britannicas some of us may have had in our family (or town) libraries growing up. Rather, they were cheap knock-offs sold to suckers – but a very specific kind of sucker that was caught up in an American belief system that said education was the only hope for parents to improve the lot of the next generation they had brought into the world.
The writer recalls how his best customers tended to have swing sets in the backyard, no other books in their house, and – interestingly enough – Wallace for President bumper stickers, which indicated to Linden that even these pre-cursors to Tea Party conservative populism were ready to put aside their suspicion of the academy (i.e., “pointy headed intellectuals”) to further their own children’s’ prospects through educational betterment.
With this experience laid out, Linden draws the analogy to today’s education sector in which a new generation of “scammers” target women, veterans and the unemployed to take out loans they cannot afford to obtain worthless degrees from for-profit colleges and universities.
A nice tale, especially if you are pre-disposed to dislike any business that carries the descriptor “for profit” (or prefer to let such companies serve as surrogates for out-of-control costs across the higher education landscape).
But if you will indulge a different set of spins on the same tale, I’ve never been enamored with any argument that starts by neatly sorting people Left to Right before coming to a conclusion.
For, as I learned during that terrific American Intellectual History course I took last year, the fault lines in American thought fall not between a Left-Right axis created to describe seating patterns in the 18th century French Assembly, but between our founding principles of Common Sense that presumed all challenges could be overcome by people working together in small communities (think of the jury system applied to all problems of society) and the philosophy of Pragmatism which gave us the tools to manage an increasingly complex modernity (albeit at the cost of turning decisions over to technocrats).
It was the Pragmatism (capital P) of William James and John Dewey that cemented into public consciousness the notion that education was the solution to individual and societal ills. And whenever we chant the catechism that anyone who wants to go to college should be able to do so, we are echoing common wisdom they put into place over a century ago.
But it is unease with being led by educated professionals who know better than we do that actually unites what we today call Left and Right, at least with regard to discomfort for the big (whether that be Big Government, Big Oil, Big Food or Big Education). And it is this unease that pushes so many of us to embrace the small (by buying a CSA or homeschooling our children) or shake our fists at (or organize politically against) whichever big institution we decide is acting villainously.
For Linden, the villain is for-profit schooling which he sees as taking advantage of the same saps he used to sell crappy encyclopedias to. But didn’t this sector of the educational economy emerge from our decision as a society to allow anyone who wants to go to school to do so, coupled with the fact that traditional colleges and universities (both public and private) weren’t interested in teaching the subjects these new students wanted to learn?
And once these villainous for-profits identified this new market, haven’t those same non-profit schools jumped into the game by offering degrees in those same vocational areas (and paid for by the same money) that for-profits collect from students, their families and governmental and non-governmental loans?
In fact, now that we have made it so much easier to enter the job market with a BA, it’s now the Masters or PhD that is used to distinguish one educated class from another (or, in more common parlance, “the MA is the new BA”). But as this blogger so eloquently pointed out, when it comes to creating and popularizing Masters and PhD programs in ever more fields, it is those distinguished non-profit educational entities that have entered the for-profit market.
Now none of this critique is meant to cast aspersions on the programs and opportunities that our national commitment to education have brought into being. Or, at the very least, it is not meant to substitute one set of villains with another. Rather, it’s a call to take a more serious look at what is working and what is not in order to see if “college for all” (meaning a formal educational program leading to a degree from an established institution) is the best way to achieve the goals for our kids we claim to desire. For this is the difficult conversation that students, parents, schools and government should be engaged in, just in case today’s educational cost crisis cannot be solved by shaming, regulating or jailing one set of bad actors out of existence.
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