Tag: College

To be alive and conscious is a miracle in itself. Just that is enough. All we really need to do is contemplate THAT. However, “the world” or human culture will not allow us to do that–or more specifically, the world as reconstructed within each of us, will not allow us to do that. It’s of no use blaming external agencies for our plight. Alienation is in our mother’s milk. It is a direct result of, as Marx said, the capitalist system–but that system is not just something that cruel master foisted on to us. It is, instead, even more seduction than oppression. As currently constitutued it is a system designed to fulfill human desires and, if desires are not growing fast enough, it is a system designed to create those desires. This ability to manufacture desire creates a class of oligarchs who organize this process, a class of craftsmen/women who are the creative people who are just a class below, and the rest of us at various stages of the great pyramid that is modern predatory capitalism. I call it predatory because, as I implied, it goes out of its way to find each and every one of us and hook us in to the system using our own feelings of alienation as a hook. The system is profoundly ingenious and is worthy of respect and admiration. We need to stop calling referring to it (the economic/political/cultural system we live in) as somehow diseased or stupid. For example, I found it difficult to tolerate the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as “mistakes” that were based on false assumptions. I maintain that the people who count knew what they were doing and used these wars both for fun (not to be underestimated), profit and power. For those people the wars were not mistakes but boons.

But my subject is not to examine the systems that run our society. I want to establish two things. One, as I indicated above, is that we are each and every one of us, no matter our ideological positions, deeply a part of this system particularly internally. If we pursue courses that are contrary to the general flow of this system we have to recognize that we suffer, that we bleed, that we are more likely to be ill and poor–not so much from external forces of repression but the repression that we’ve internalized into our unconscious from all the unexamined messages hurled at us with deceptive force by the wizards and technicians of mind-control. This is not trivial. You can discount the influence of these forces all you want but inside your psyche these forces are profoundly important. If we reach the point where our intellect, our emotions, our spiritual force objects to these arrangements we pay and pay and pay. I believe there is a way to return to strength by understanding these forces within and without and my goal is to try and start a creative dialogue with as great a variety of people as I can towards finding a structure to pursue a course of strength, vigor and play to benefit all of us that sense so strongly something is terribly, terribly, terribly wrong and don’t feel so fucking powerless.

This is a diary about Chris Hedges’ column of 3/23, America Is in Need of a Moral Bailout.  Hedges’ column is mostly about universities, which are what concerns me here.  Hedges obliges one to ask as to whether universities have been completely swallowed up by capitalist discipline, and us with them.

(crossposted at Big Orange)

A new economics study by Joseph Altonji, Prashant Bharadwaj, and Fabian Lange demonstrates that:

The earnings premium for skilled labour has increased dramatically in recent decades. Yet, as this column shows, Americans are not acquiring significantly greater skills in response to this change. The resulting gap will increase US income inequality in the coming decades.

The study goes on to demonstrate that despite the increased premium value of developing labor skills through higher education, the population in general has not sought these skills in relative proportion.  In other words, we aren’t seeing many gains in people improving their financial prospects by investing in their own education.

Economist Brad DeLong says that the study’s authors don’t know why this is happening (which is a fair complaint), but goes on to suggest that

This raises the possibility that the only easy way to reduce market inequality is to greatly increase the supply of the skilled and educated in the long run by making higher education free

This seems unlikely to be effective to me on two levels.  First of all, an economist ought to understand (and DeLong does) that there is no such thing as “free”; someone will have to pay for higher education to be free to its consumers.  Indeed, as he points out, “which is a very dubious policy on the inequality front, because it starts with a honking huge transfer from the average taxpayer today to the relatively rich well-educated of tomorrow.”

But the more important rebuttal to his point (more effective than his own) is that brought up by Tyler Cowen: that the skills required to succeed at even a low level in college are poorly taught to the population at large.

One of my close friends is completing her first year as a public school teacher in New York City (her third year as a professional teacher).  Her class is a fourth grade class at a public school in Grand Concourse in the Bronx.  She has 28 students, only one of which reads at a fourth grade level.  For a wide variety of reasons, despite her significant efforts, it is unlikely that more than a couple of her students will be at a fifth grade level when the school year ends this month.  And no, this is not the most remedial class of fourth graders her school has.

It seems to me that DeLong obscures the real problem, that of students being unprepared and unlikely to succeed in higher education, with that of students being unable to afford higher education.  Many, if not most, college and graduate students debt finance their education; a rational choice considering the economic benefits that education will offer them.  However, rational actors will not pay for a premium education if they consider themselves unlikely to succeed at it and therefore unlikely to reap the future economic benefit.

I read this study as evidence of the continued failure of our primary and secondary education systems, not as a study of the failure of our society to make higher education affordable or making the information about the benefits of higher education widely available.  What say you?

The News & Observer has a good report on the returning OIF and OEF Veterans as some transition to Students in Colleges and Universities around the country, reporting on some of the problems they face in that transition from combat soldier to student.

This could have been expanded, as many already have found out as others before you went through the same, to the transition from In-Theater Soldiers to Civilian life not just as Students

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As tens of thousands of veterans of the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq try to collect on their promised college benefits, McKinnon and others are finding that their combat experience complicates the transition from soldier to student.