Education, Unltd: Part 4 – closing thoughts
I have only offered limited comment on the PBS documentary at the heart of this 4-part series of posts. A lot of the discussion it attracted was understandably US-centered, and I’m just not qualified to discuss the detailed structure of American higher ed. My take-away was more philosophical.
I suppose my first point is how ‘the American Dream’ is repeatedly referred to by those involved, throughout the programme. Several of them went from ‘rags to riches’, so arguably it fits them.
But the product they’re now forcefully selling to prospective students is an American dream perversity: the message is firstly, whatever your personal characteristics, American prosperity and success will be denied to you unless you have accreditation from an institution that itself has accreditation (irrespective of its own characteristics). Secondly, you have to pay for this accreditation. You will not break through in society unless you pay up. Society’s “answer” has been to fuel the accreditation system with a subprime loan system that is easy to get into (no credit checks, no certainty that the applicant is going to be able to find gainful employment even with this new degree under their belt), but hard to escape from once you’re in, no matter how bad things get for you.
The issue for me is not really the profiteering. The practice here is no more abusive than other industries based on deceptive marketing over objective contribution to reputation (which traditional universities rely on, pouring money into research programmes, etc) that are undergoing huge, unsustainable growth (a bubble) based on overflowing and poorly thought-through Wall Street capital on one side (as in the mortgages market) to meet demand unlocked by idealistic but cretinous state-provided finance.
The issue for me is that the whole demand for education – which underpins the aforementioned perverse industry – is a nonsense. Education is wrapped up, institutionalised and commoditised, viewed as a universal ideal in the ‘product’ form it is offered, and extremely divisive between the underclass that has not purchased the product and those that have. It’s yet another barrier to entry, to social mobility, to liberty to explore ways to contribute to society in exchange for payment. It’s self-perpetuating, since the pressure to push more people through education means that the more apt/determined of students have to find new ways of distinguishing themselves – hence you see the sinister (but perhaps unintentional) sense in BPP up-selling the LLB after contributing to diluting the value of the GDL.
The best treatment of the topic I have come across is the short but ever so sensible and powerful Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich. I warmly recommend it to any that have ever thought about how to go about creating an open, accessible and liberal societies. How please he would have been with efforts like Wikipedia and other open learning, open access, “open society” movements.
Lastly, quite what role universities play in the future, sandwiched between the Internet on one side and privatised, commoditised education on the other, remains to be seen.
Related:
- Education, Unltd: Part 1
- There is a mortifying Frontline documentary out at the moment, produced by the USA’s answer to the BBC (PBS). Called College, Inc, it takes it as granted that US education is increasingly commoditised, and a fundamental commodity to future employment. A degree is considered invaluable to the productivity of the member of a workforce. And [...]...
- Education, Unltd: Part 2
- This piece continues on from Part 1, which looked at the basic dynamics of the for-profit US education industry: brokers scouring the country for underperforming schools that have held on to the very highly valued Regional Accreditation status, which is both prestigious and unlocks federal loans to students to pay for courses they can’t afford. [...]...
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