I read this article at the weekend and have been wondering what to think of it ever since, it’s certainly made me think, which I suppose is all you can ask for from an opinion piece. I wonder what you make of it?
A university education has many benefits, yet it comes with huge downsides for society
www.theguardian.com
On quick peruse, I would say that the last line of the article is the best:
But to simply plough the money into an elitist system that shores up class privilege because we lack the imagination to design something different would be a missed opportunity.
I think that the reason that this is hotly debated is because college does give a person an economic advantage that nothing else can. Our system is currently designed this way. Colleges have stopped being learning institutions and have become businesses. They attract students with more amenities, bigger student dorms and apartments, and big sports teams. This largely started with this siphoning of government money into institutions--so that deserving people who want to do things like become doctors, lawyers and engineers could do so without financial burden--and quickly got perverted into a neoliberal cash cow for universities. The meritocracy that we used in the past to pick good students now had a price tag attached to it by the government. With the influence of a possible pay day, schools were eager to take government money and students were eager to compete for scholarships. As we know, however, this competition is uneven, usually due to the resources that middle class parents pour into their children. Only a kid that plays the flute is going to get a flute scholarship, and who has money for flute lessons? So is it fair that we spend this money on middle class kids? Short answer no. We should probably spend that money on early childhood education if we want to shore up our gaps.
But moreso, it's this neoliberal push for everything to be "run as a business" that I think is the really toxic idea that we need to get rid of. Until we address the obscene money making game that universities have become, we will always have problems. The first time I thought about the ridiculousness of running our societal institutions like businesses was when I read about cooperation research (i.e. people are more happy and productive in a cooperative environment than a competitive one). I thought about the neoliberal push for every family unit to be it's own "business". And from there I naturally connected the two--the reason that things feel so much worse in society is because when we shifted to thinking like businesses, we destroyed a lot of societal cooperation--not at first, but through time as children thought of this system as the norm. Why would you cooperate with your neighbor? You two are competing businesses--competing for resources that are drying up.
If our goal is to educate our society, is competition really the best way? People work best and are happiest in cooperative situations. Education is no different. So then how do we solve the problem of inequality when some jobs are paid so much higher than others? Well, I don't really think people should be paid all that differently and we shouldn't allow any one person to accumulate too much. There are countless studies that suggest that when one person gets too much power, it doesn't matter who they are, they become less generous and more emotionally removed from others. So wealth accumulation is also really bad, not only for the humans that don't have the wealth, but also for the human that does. There is no real short answer to fix this because we have allowed it to become too uneven. In the ancient past, rulers had debt jubilees when inequality was too great. That is something we need to consider today to avoid violence in Western society.
