Do tenured professors have higher income, job security, daily freedom, political influence, and social status than the overwhelming majority of people in the United States?

And would this lifestyle be at all sustainable if you did not charge the obscene price of $250,000 for each student?

Academia has much to answer for, much to answer for. You have absolutely no idea how angry young people are at you. Their rage is, as yet, unfocused; they don’t know why they are poor and jobless. We shall wait for the Waiting for Superman of higher ed; that wait shan’t be long.

The banksters violated us from afar, you violated us up close and personal. You shamed us into going to college, took our money, saddled us with endless debt, and promised us a good job at the end of the rainbow with a wink-wink nudge-nudge.

That job isn’t here. The debt is here. Did I mention that the job isn’t here, but the debt payments are here?

Are you doing anything about that? Are you going to petition the administration for debt forgiveness and give up your salaries and grants and job security to the starry eyed young people you deceived so brazenly? No.

You have raped the middle class and taken years of savings from countless families. $500,000 to put two children through school is fifteen years of after-tax income for the average American. No one expects you, or Leiter, or DeLong, or the various Crooked Timber writers to actually turn the lens inward and realize how terribly you have wronged us. What is more likely is some sort of nervous joke about how the faculty lounge chairs aren’t gold plated.

But it is stunning how totally oblivious some in academia are, railing on about the banks without the slightest hint of recognition that their entire world depends utterly on the same kind of usurious debt slavery.

There was a lounge built in a new classroom and office building in the late 1990s. Basically a few couches and chairs and some subscriptions to several periodicals, behind the coffee bar on the ground floor. It wasn’t used much (students tended to sneak in there at night for meetings and studying) and so it was converted to offices a few years ago. There’s some wish for a better designed social space that might be used more among the faculty to help promote conversation and connection between different departments, and that might come up in our current planning. But yeah, luxury doesn’t quite seem the watchword here or just about anywhere I’ve visited. Johns Hopkins used to have a ghastly faculty lounge/restaurant with waiters in formal dress, but I think almost none of the faculty used it or liked it.

Is that what it’s like at Swarthmore? Because, usually, the faculty lounge isn’t like that at all.

Having said that, I want to ask if anyone else has detected a change in Burke’s rhetoric. I think that he is approaching crusader status.

2. The reason post-secondary education is now viewed as crucial as much or more to do with the actually existing job market as it has to do with anything that higher education in general is arguing, in two respects. First, the disappearance of unskilled and semi-skilled manufacturing labor wiped out a huge range of jobs for which no higher education was needed or sought. The post-manufacturing economy that we have in its place, whether you like it or not, requires higher aggregate levels of education, training and knowledge. Second, particularly at the moment, the competition for skilled positions, both professional and otherwise, is now exceptionally intense. When an employer is hiring in many cases, they’ve got a huge number of fairly indistinguishable applications, and they’re forced to look for heuristics that will let them sort through their applicant pools. Again, like it or not, educational credentials are one of the obvious credentials to use, and they’d be used whether or not higher education suggested they be used.

3. You don’t seem to have grasped even the most basic points I was trying to make about highly selective private universities and colleges. The statistics you cite don’t apply to Harvard et al (high dropout rates) but to a very different type and range of educational institutions. The data on ROI for Harvard and its peer institutions is actually pretty damn good. I don’t disagree with you that there’s a big problem here with higher education in general, but like a lot of folks setting off on a jeremiad, you’re focusing on the wrong targets. You can criticize selective privates for a lot of things–their intrinsic elitism, their overly narrow vision of the public good, their general stodginess in curricular approaches, the pretentions of the methods they use to select their students. But the issues you raise involve problems that are vested elsewhere.

I might also point out that you can’t have it both ways. Either you want most Americans to make it through college because you think it is valuable, and you’re furious at the average university for countenancing high dropout rates in combination with high tuitions (at which point you need to ask: what is it that you think would be valuable IF that problem could be addressed) or you think most Americans shouldn’t be in college under any circumstances. At which point I think you can move on past Go, collect $200 and start looking at a different challenge on the game board, namely, what’s your vision of the 21st Century American economy in which no advanced or post-secondary education or training will be needed by most workers?

Really?

http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news_events/features/2011/Pathways_to_Prosperity_Feb2011.pdf

Thus, over the past third of a century, all of the net job growth in America has been generated by positions that require at least some post-secondary education….The message is clear: in 21st century America, education beyond high school is the passport to the American Dream.

and yet

In short, the majority of students who go on to college fail to earn a degree on time, and many of those never successfully complete their degree. As a result, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States now has the highest college dropout rate in the industrialized world.

This seems extraordinarily structurally similar to subprime: lure in people who can’t afford it, offering false hopes of a high ROI (whether through appreciation of land or higher paying careers). Many of them can’t make it through and drop out or lose their house. But the lender/college runs all the way to the bank.

Are you denying that Harvard and higher ed in general have been pushing “College for All” for the last forty years? Or are you defending this all-out campaign to market false hopes to every young American?

A couple of things. First, blogs are not just publications, they’re social venues. It’s worth figuring out what the local scene is like, both so you don’t show up to a dinner party expecting it to be a bar fight and so you get a sense of what discussion of your favorite points has been like in the past. I’m a professor, so forgive me the assigned reading, you might find that I’m fairly congenially inclined to some of your points:

https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/2011/05/03/on-the-bubble/
https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/2011/01/28/skills-competencies-and-literacies-oh-my/
https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/2010/09/22/learning-the-rules/
https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/2010/07/30/tenure-from-a-wide-angle/
https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/2010/06/02/precautions-and-paralysis/
https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/2010/03/11/what-color-is-your-leaden-weight/

And that’s just some fairly recent posts. These are old themes here, and the issues that you express such strong feelings about are issues that worry me too, if less stridently and intolerantly.

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Second, let’s get something clear here. When I talk about bankers, executives and politicians above, I have a pretty specific set of them in mind, which I should think is clear enough if you’ve been alive and paying attention in the last five years. The individuals who deserve comparison with rioters and looters are the people in those categories who have broken the law, behaved unethically with the resources and power trusted to them to such an extraordinary extent that they have caused massive damage to whole communities or society as a whole, including many people who never once entered into any relationship or contract that rendered them exposed to such danger, or those who have betrayed a public trust through grossly cynical and self-serving behavior.

This is not all, most or even a lot of bankers or executives. Maybe it’s most politicians, I suppose. You mention usurious mortgages put together by calculating bankers looking to keep their customers one step out of poverty. As I look out the window of my house, I see a lot of moderately priced suburban homes ($275,000 to 325,000 or so hereabouts) owned by professionals, small business owners, middle managers, and retirees, all of them purchased with reasonable mortgages. The bankers who arranged those mortgages have nothing to apologize for. We need them.

As we need all sorts of professionals who provide services: lawyers, doctors, architects, psychiatrists, plumbers, you name it. Teachers and professors too. The question of what such services should cost is always a tricky one. We trust to markets to set a price no higher than what people will pay, but at least some of these services are hard to forego if the price is too high. When that is most potently the case, as with medicine, some kind of social, governmental constraints may be in order. Higher education wasn’t that important fifty years ago, but perhaps now it is.

On the other hand, that’s why we and most other countries built public university systems in the first place: to insure that there were fairly priced and accessible institutions of higher learning. The cost of higher education has gone up, and the reasons are complex. (Faculty aren’t as big a part of it as you think, but they’re certainly one contributor.) But our collective support for keeping the price down has also eroded, along with many other public goods. Anyone as angry as you are about what’s happened with the pricing of higher education might want to direct the lion’s share of anger at your state legislators first.

You might also want to consider what kinds of institutions you’re angry at. What’s the higher ed equivalent of a subprime mortgage lender or someone selling complex financial instruments designed to pass risks on to an unconsenting public? I’d nominate for-profit higher education, much of which takes a huge amount of public money to subsidize extremely low-value educational services that are sold to vulnerable and desperate customers. Maybe you have something else in mind, but if you don’t have anything specific, just “ARGLEBARGLE I HATE PROFESSORS” then you’re the same as a guy who wants all plumbers or all doctors or all bankers wiped out. Which is not where I’m coming from and not really much help unless it’s some small subset of a general nihilism that you’re selling.

As for highly selective private institutions like Swarthmore or the Ivy League? Look, I have no beef with the existence of luxury goods or consumer capitalism either. All of what I’m preaching comes straight from the pews in the church of liberalism. As I look at my 15-year old Saturn with the plastic interior molding falling off, I’m reminded that I’m unlikely to ever own a Mercedes-Benz (I have to say you have some odd ideas about how much professors make) but I don’t grit my teeth in fury every time I pass a Benz dealership.

Selective private colleges and universities educate a miniscule fraction of the students enrolled in higher education in the United States. They draw more attention, favorable and unfavorable, than they proportionately deserve. Much of the time, public discourse about the academy, professors, faculty, curricula, you name it, is focused on this teeny handful of institutions. Now that is partly because the graduates of these institutions do in fact have magnified social and economic influence, and partly because these institutions train a substantial proportion of academic doctorates. But if you’re concerned with higher education overall, and its role in American society, you’d be much better off starting the conversation with your focus on public institutions and community colleges–and particularly in the latter case, there is a great deal good to be said, and much of your fury is misplaced.

There is no doubt, in any event, that selective private colleges and universities are a luxury service. They choose for reasons of their own, ethical and otherwise, to offer those services on a discounted rate to some families. There isn’t any obligation or need to attend such an institution, though I think most of them do a pretty fair job of returning both tangible (employability!) benefits and intangible ones to the students who do attend. I think many of them could do better, and live up to a whole slew of public obligations more forthrightly. But neither is Harvard stalking the middle-classes of Miami, Wichita and Pasadena with the equivalent of subprime mortgages.

Professor Burke and his colleagues “have looted and rubbished the lives and futures of so many fellow citizens with little regard for the consequences”. Student loan debt is no joke, and the sums involved are just as substantial as the mortgage industry.

What we want to see is some introspection, some admission of fault, some admission that guaranteed lifetime employment on the backs of the middle class is as grotesque in these times as yachts and croquet.