"Revolt of the Elites" (How colleges help consolidate ruling class power)

[villager]

The "College section" snippet from a longer article on actual vs. perceived elites in the ol' Dis-U.S.A.:

<snip>


For a century and more, the university degree has been the vital bourgeois credential. The same Hobsbawm wrote in his classic history of the 19th century — the bourgeois century — that, starting in the 1880s, “the chief indicator of social membership increasingly became, and has remained, formal education.” In what they call the classic age of capitalism, this hadn’t yet been the case; the bourgeoisie earned money, not diplomas. But once the upper middle class consolidated itself, a degree became what a patent of nobility had been for the aristocracy, establishing who was in and who was out.

The effects in the US were contradictory. On the one hand, colleges, in their role as four-year drinking clubs for rich boys, knit their alumni into a WASP mafia pledged to socioeconomic self-preservation. Distinctive speech, sports, and garb set them off from the general population, never talent. But as historians have noted, the WASPs were winningly cavalier about their reproduction as an elite. This is evidently what happens when a ruling class consists one half of heavy drinkers and depressives, and the other half of sincere egalitarians: poof! The rise of the SAT (a project of two Harvard presidents), the postwar commitment to “need-blind admissions,” the GI Bill — all of this transformed the universities into the main device of social mobility in the US, world leader in mass higher ed. The university has always both consolidated social class and eroded social class. Crudely, from 1880–1930 the consolidation function was dominant; from 1930–80, erosion increasingly crumbled the bourgeois palisades; and since 1980 or so, while considerable erosion still goes on, consolidation now counts for more.

A few well-known causes of the change lie outside the universities themselves. The obscenely undemocratic model by which public schools are funded by local property taxes means that kids tend to be better educated (and college-admissions counseled) in wealthier school districts, not to mention private institutions. And the SAT, having once upon a time, for all its bias and flaws, compelled the recognition that the inheritance of brains and dollars are independent variables, has been bent to different purposes by the private tutoring that rich families use to Photoshop the cognitive portraits of their ADD offspring.

The main reason, though, why universities are today more elitist than meritocratic is simply that going to one costs so much. Overall inflation since 1980 is 179 percent, while the price of a college education has risen by an astonishing 827 percent. Income distribution has skewed radically toward the rich across the same period. These days one year at a private college consumes less than a fifth of the income of a family in the wealthiest quartile. The same year, even after financial aid, would cost a family from the poorest quartile four fifths of its income. Meanwhile college grads earn 83 percent more than high school grads, and those with advanced degrees, 159 percent more.1

Over the past generation, in other words, US higher education went from being the main lever for equality to being the laboratory in which the elite — in the broadest sense — clones itself. During the era of high growth rates and spreading prosperity from the end of World War II to 1973, the American upper middle class was content to let its membership expand along with the economy, hence the primarily meritocratic role of the universities in the so-called Golden Age of capitalism. With the return, in the ’70s, of slower growth and worse recessions, the upper middle class began to close ranks, and the universities, pulling shut the iron gates around their leafy quads, decisively aided in the process. Hobsbawm on the late-19th-century university might as well be describing the neoliberal campus of the early 21st: “Its main function was not utilitarian, in spite of the potential financial returns from trained intelligence and specialized knowledge. . . . Schooling provided above all a ticket of admission to the recognized middle and upper zones of society.”

<snip>

http://nplusonemag.com/revolt-of-the-elites

[leveymg]

1. Today in America, a degree isn't even a guaranteed ticket into the middle-class.

The same thing happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union, where one saw PhD mathematicians working as carpenters or running escort agencies.

If anything, higher education is even more stratified today, during the Great Recession, than just a few years ago.

[xchrom]

2. and that archtecture is how we only hear one side of a story

in politics, news, etc.

it doesn't have to be a conspiracy -- they're all already in agreement.