Thomas Frank on The Great College Trap

Founding editor Thomas Frank’s essay from Issue 23, “Academy Fight Song,” exposed the lie being sold to our young people—that if you go to a “good college,” all of your dreams will come true. Those colleges don’t necessarily always have you and your best interests in mind, however. He writes:

We don’t pause to consider that maybe we’ve got the whole thing backwards—that the big universities expanded in their heyday to keep up with industry demand, not to build the middle class. Instead, what everyone agrees on is this: higher education is the industry that sells tickets to the affluent life. In fact, they are the only ones licensed to do this. Yes, there are many colleges one can choose from—public, private, and for-profit—but collectively they control the one credential that we believe to be of value. Everything about them advertises it. The armorial logos, the Gothic towers, even the names of the great colleges, so redolent of money and privilege and aristocracy: Duke and Princeton and Vanderbilt. If you want to succeed, you must go to them; they are the ones controlling the gate. [. . .]

The coming of “academic capitalism” has been anticipated and praised for years; today it is here. Colleges and universities clamor greedily these days for pharmaceutical patents and ownership chunks of high-tech startups; they boast of being “entrepreneurial”; they have rationalized and outsourced countless aspects of their operations in the search for cash; they fight their workers nearly as ferociously as a nineteenth-century railroad baron; and the richest among them have turned their endowments into in-house hedge funds.

A lot’s changed since the good ol’ days of GI bills and land grant colleges. There’s no longer any guarantee that trading a couple years of your life and a couple thousand dollars will buy your entry into the middle class.

So what’s an ambitious seventeen-year-old of 2014 to do, when the job market is sagging, and private colleges demand upwards of $60,000 a year tuition? Saddle herself with a lifetime of loans so she can prepare herself for . . . what, exactly? Maybe she’d be better off looking up the syllabi, reading the books, and hiring someone to tutor her in French.

These were the topics of discussion on Thursday night’s Radio Open Source, a program on WBUR hosted by Christopher Lydon. Thomas Frank’s portion of the discussion is now online as a podcast, which you can listen to here, or in the player below: