"I would argue that young people were relentlessly told in their youths that education is the only path to prosperity, and I would further argue that a changing economy left them with few stable ways to secure a middle-class existence other than college."
this is exactly what happened, and all the hippie-punching revisionism people do these days, as if the student debt crisis were some entirely frivolous ordeal limited to rich, neurotic gender studies grads who only went to college to irritate centrists and conservatives, and not desperate teens signing six-figure contracts at economic/political gunpoint, is deranged.
I really enjoyed Trade Wars are Class Wars by Michael Pettis and Matthew Klein. They argue persuasively that there are 2 more causes of the decline in manufacturing.
1. The post-Bretton Woods trade system forces every country to hold dollar denominated assets. This creates a trade balance where the US sells financial services to other countries in exchange for physical goods. This is extremely good for US finance, and really bad for blue collar workers, who face the double whammy of fewer manufacturing jobs and all the money in finance bidding up the price of assets like housing. They have a really provocative theory that the "Bancor" system proposed by Keynes could rebalance international trade.
2. China and Germany suppress domestic consumption, which allows those countries to run huge trade surpluses, which further throws the trade balance out of whack. Trade policy for the American working class is often presented in an pseudo-xenophobic terms, but "support workers in Germany and China fighting for a higher share of their firms' profits" is a great win-win policy, although it is bad for Chinese and German capitalists :).
I don't think anyone's blaming young people for signing up for (often pointless) college degrees. The shame - if that is the right word - is that so many signed up with seemingly not a jot of thought to the expense. And, in many cases, they made no attempt to reduce costs by eg starting in community college, attending a state rather than private college, working while studying or taking a gap year to save money.
I feel like there is one important piece missing from this analysis. The invention of the programmable logic controller (PLC), in 1968. Here is a link talking about this history and what it changed in detail - https://library.automationdirect.com/history-of-the-plc/ Prior the invention and mass marketing of the PLC, industrial control was done entirely through logic circuits, where engineers and electricians would have to create networks of relays, hard wired PID loops for analog control, physical timers, and other devices instead of simply programming them. After 1968, the technology to automate most parts of the industrial process became much more efficient in almost every way (time, money, and physical space) - this is the point where automation became cheaper than skilled laborers. I know Reagan had something to do with this, but none of the policy matters if we don’t have the technological base to support deindustrialization and automation in place beforehand.
For my boomer parents, they grew up in a world where a degree was a golden ticket. This they conveyed to me: the expectation was simply that I would go to university. To study what? didn't matter. Just graduate.
Of course, by the time my generation were graduating, it was no longer a ticket because so many people now have degrees. There's the basic market economics of something dropping in value as it is produced in surplus.
There's also the fact that just as factory jobs are diminished, a lot of white collar jobs have been removed too. The admin support jobs that used to make up many offices (secretarial pool, mail rooms, etc) have vanished. Executives type their own emails.
And the middle management jobs that once existed - many of them at the factories - have also gone.
1. Because debt is discipline. It's hard to leave the cubicle farm and set out on your own, much less challenge the system, if you have student loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy hanging over your head. (Pace health insurance).
2. Because college takes young people, people at the wildest, most ambitious and most questioning time of their lives, and shunts those young peoples' energy and ambition into goalseeking behavior and socially harmless diversions.
"It’s common for defenders of automation (when not simply repeating the word “Luddite” over and over again) to say that automation creates jobs as well as destroys them. This may be true in aggregate, but when automation creates jobs it doesn’t usually create jobs for the same people."
This also applies exactly to offshoring and I cannot help but wonder to what degree political conflict today has its roots in class conflict between the winners and losers of globalization. When looking at the rise of Trump I would argue that the die was cast when NAFTA was approved in addition to MFN trade status for China and I'm constantly mystified when some argue that the deciding factor was Twitter.
Hard to overstate the anger and resentment of those that graduated college during the GFC with minimal job prospects. Countless conversations of "WTF-- I borrowed money for a college degree so I could compete for $35K/year sales job that has nothing to do with anything I learned. What was the point??" Many folks I know went into the trades AFTER taking out $50K to get their bachelors degree. It also led to a hardened outlook 10+ years later for those that made it, found a way to higher earnings and have paid off the debt. "If I could figure it out during that shitstorm, why should we give handouts out now." I don't know the answer, but I don't see the problem going away anytime soon.
It's frustrating that the encouragement for taking on student debt is based in economics, while student debt itself is not allowed to operate by any basic economic principles.
In the debt trading world we were always on the lookout for scenarios like this. It usually meant there was an arbitrage opportunity and money to be made. I don't feel bad when corporations and sophisticated investors are involved. But it's terrible that we made young students the sucker in this situation.
Good article, but I think we need another article on what policies might have helped the problem, or would help it now, and why.
I can imagine a world in the Reagan-Thatcher era where a combination of powerful unions and nationalist trade litigation maintained relatively high levels of non-college employment for a while. Maybe that works for something like British Telecom, where there was no right to competition, so phone service in Britain would just stay more expensive and less good than other countries but would maintain employment.
But manufacturing would have been under a lot of pressure as a result of imports from high-automation countries like some of the East Asian countries, or relatively low wage countries like some of the South Asian nations. Is the idea that in the alternate universe, we would have maintained trade walls against any country that didn't have similar wages and anti-automation policies as the US and Britain, indefinitely?
There's also a neoliberal alternative - tax some of the gains that college educated workers are enjoying from free trade, etc., and use it to subsidize wages. It might be that Freddie doesn't have a specific policy in mind, but just thinks we should have done *something* other than more dakka on education to try to help displaced workers.
I honestly think the seeds of pushing everyone into college happened much, much earlier - though it kicked into high gear around ten years prior to the era you highlighted, in the late 1960s, with rise in mass attendance of college by baby boomers resulting in the increasing "professionalization" of wide tiers of employment.
If you look at college in the early 19th century in the U.S., it was an institution in crisis. Many professionals like doctors, lawyers, and engineers would earn their certifications immediately after high school, through either mail-order degrees, clerking/apprenticeship, or some mixture of the two. College was basically just a finishing school for the upper classes, and really irrelevant if you were an upwardly mobile person of middle-class background, or even a wealthy businessman who didn't care one whit if your son had a classic education in Greek and Latin.
The "saving" of higher education is classically associated with Charles William Eliot, who was president of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909, and transformed the school in his 40 years into the first American modern research institution. Most notably, the entire structure of modern educational coursework - standardized testing for admission, undergraduate education as a prerequisite for graduate study, general education requirements, electives, etc. - was more or less created under his watch.
The most important aspect for us however is the idea that a college degree was a "requirement" for certain fields of study began under Eliot's watch. It didn't exist at all during earlier periods, with many leading polymaths entirely self-taught. This only expanded over time.
Take for example a field you have experience in - journalism. Through the early to mid 20th century, journalism was a working-class job that required little other than basic literacy. You graduated from high school, got a job at a local paper as an apprentice/copy editor, and worked your way up over the decades. Woodward and Bernstein were still quite a novelty within journalism at that time because they were part of the first generation of young journalists where a college background was becoming the norm. The educational requirements of journalism rose, the amount of skill required remained the same, and eventually the actual economic standard collapsed. But around the same time all sorts of jobs historically known as "clerks" - random office jobs - also shifted to requiring college degrees, arguably because they were always looking for young people from say the 70th to 95th percentile of aptitude, and now those people almost always went to college.
It's only gotten worse in the decades since of course. Now students fork out cash on degrees for things like being a chef, an x-ray technician, or a CNA. There was a for-profit college in Downtown Pittsburgh for becoming a vet-tech! Capitalism has now outsourced nearly all "job training" onto the job applicant, who also needs to somehow anticipate what sort of jobs will be available decades into the future.
The crucial shift though in the modern era is basically that the low-hanging fruit in terms of college readiness have already been plucked. People in the top third of aptitude didn't really need to go to college in order to get a job - that was a great swindle. But they were plenty capable of going to college. Many of the first-generation college attendees in the 1960s had parents who worked in manufacturing after all. But there was an assumption that we could just keep pushing more and more of the workforce through the great swindle, but that was really unworkable, even after for-profit trade schools created an entirely new second-class level of education even more transparently based upon swindling/empty credentialing.
I’ve been trying to explain to my fellow professionals exactly why we are missing the boat in the “college for all” approach, but I couldn’t quite spit it out. Now I have a post I can link to.
I’ll have to emphasize the status part more than you did here, but that’s cool.
It’s just a shame. My daughter is a perfectly bright person who is going to do something in the sciences in a few years. But she would have also been fantastic with a job where she could simply use er hands to make awesome things, and in a more egalitarian world where it wasn’t pushed into her head that the only way to be of worth was a college degree, she might be happier in that world. (And I did my share of pushing before I got radicalized on the idea, tbh.) But with the world the way it is now, and also the resources to make sure she wasn’t graduating with a crapload of debt, how could I recommend that approach to her?
As a career high school teacher and Californian, I can attest to the overall truth of your sketch of the last five decades. Most of my teaching spots have been in inner-city schools in Los Angeles. My current gig, from which I’ll retire soon, is in a blue-collar ‘burb served by LAUSD. Having also graduated from HS in a nearby town in ‘78, the year Prop. 13 was voted-in, I could offer a tale or two in support of the story of de-industrialization supporting your case. But you’ve missed a facet of the story. A strong contributor to the college-going push, particularly for African-American and Hispanic students, was the desire among educators to compensate for the years of tracking as a standard practice that shunted many into voc. ed oriented courses of study in high school. It was never hard to discern racist intent in that, though it afflicted working class whites to a great extent as well. Hence the devotion by many well-intentioned teachers, counselors and admin. to the ‘college-going culture’. That this dove-tailed w/de-industrialization and the broad demise of voc. ed. is undeniable. But, for many years college costs remained reasonably affordable. I got an MA from a Cal St. U in ‘99. By then I was a father (and FT teacher) and so it took me a while. But I was able to pay tuition with a credit card and was debt-free when, after stretching the process out over extra years, I finally got the degree. So CSU was still relatively affordable then, though not as dirt-cheap as it had been 20 years earlier. (I paid $125 for a full course load at one for the spr. sem. in 1981; 3 years later at a Univ. of Cali campus I finally got my BA having paid about $1200 a year for a full 3 trimesters.) So I was part of a generation that benefited from and was used to thinking of a college education as affordable. The big bump in tuition has come since 2000. My eldest son graduated from a CSU in 2013 owing $15K. FWIW, Reagan had already been dead for awhile by then.
Yeah, Ilived it. My dad was a high-skilled machinist for Caterpiller. Just before he retired in1980theydid some stats and found his production was extremely higher than anyone else and he got an extra $400 a month on his pension. Yes, those still existed for. A lot of people with. union jobs. I went to college in 1964 at the U of Ill.I was the only one of my siblings to do so. I had the really. good federal loan of the time - 3% with a year forgiven for every year teaching. None of this. happens now, and by the 90s they were all gone. I grew upon a village in central Illinois. Only one of my siblings had a well paying job. He was a high- skilled. pipe fitter until COVID when his union jobs stopped. He got his training on the job until the company was bought out. All this is not really possible now.
College did not give me a high paying. job. I was a civil servant working fora state university, and retired with a decent pension, but below our state average. I feel sorry for working class people trying. to make their way in a world structured against them.
"I would argue that young people were relentlessly told in their youths that education is the only path to prosperity, and I would further argue that a changing economy left them with few stable ways to secure a middle-class existence other than college."
this is exactly what happened, and all the hippie-punching revisionism people do these days, as if the student debt crisis were some entirely frivolous ordeal limited to rich, neurotic gender studies grads who only went to college to irritate centrists and conservatives, and not desperate teens signing six-figure contracts at economic/political gunpoint, is deranged.
I really enjoyed Trade Wars are Class Wars by Michael Pettis and Matthew Klein. They argue persuasively that there are 2 more causes of the decline in manufacturing.
1. The post-Bretton Woods trade system forces every country to hold dollar denominated assets. This creates a trade balance where the US sells financial services to other countries in exchange for physical goods. This is extremely good for US finance, and really bad for blue collar workers, who face the double whammy of fewer manufacturing jobs and all the money in finance bidding up the price of assets like housing. They have a really provocative theory that the "Bancor" system proposed by Keynes could rebalance international trade.
2. China and Germany suppress domestic consumption, which allows those countries to run huge trade surpluses, which further throws the trade balance out of whack. Trade policy for the American working class is often presented in an pseudo-xenophobic terms, but "support workers in Germany and China fighting for a higher share of their firms' profits" is a great win-win policy, although it is bad for Chinese and German capitalists :).
I don't think anyone's blaming young people for signing up for (often pointless) college degrees. The shame - if that is the right word - is that so many signed up with seemingly not a jot of thought to the expense. And, in many cases, they made no attempt to reduce costs by eg starting in community college, attending a state rather than private college, working while studying or taking a gap year to save money.
I feel like there is one important piece missing from this analysis. The invention of the programmable logic controller (PLC), in 1968. Here is a link talking about this history and what it changed in detail - https://library.automationdirect.com/history-of-the-plc/ Prior the invention and mass marketing of the PLC, industrial control was done entirely through logic circuits, where engineers and electricians would have to create networks of relays, hard wired PID loops for analog control, physical timers, and other devices instead of simply programming them. After 1968, the technology to automate most parts of the industrial process became much more efficient in almost every way (time, money, and physical space) - this is the point where automation became cheaper than skilled laborers. I know Reagan had something to do with this, but none of the policy matters if we don’t have the technological base to support deindustrialization and automation in place beforehand.
For my boomer parents, they grew up in a world where a degree was a golden ticket. This they conveyed to me: the expectation was simply that I would go to university. To study what? didn't matter. Just graduate.
Of course, by the time my generation were graduating, it was no longer a ticket because so many people now have degrees. There's the basic market economics of something dropping in value as it is produced in surplus.
There's also the fact that just as factory jobs are diminished, a lot of white collar jobs have been removed too. The admin support jobs that used to make up many offices (secretarial pool, mail rooms, etc) have vanished. Executives type their own emails.
And the middle management jobs that once existed - many of them at the factories - have also gone.
1. Because debt is discipline. It's hard to leave the cubicle farm and set out on your own, much less challenge the system, if you have student loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy hanging over your head. (Pace health insurance).
2. Because college takes young people, people at the wildest, most ambitious and most questioning time of their lives, and shunts those young peoples' energy and ambition into goalseeking behavior and socially harmless diversions.
"It’s common for defenders of automation (when not simply repeating the word “Luddite” over and over again) to say that automation creates jobs as well as destroys them. This may be true in aggregate, but when automation creates jobs it doesn’t usually create jobs for the same people."
This also applies exactly to offshoring and I cannot help but wonder to what degree political conflict today has its roots in class conflict between the winners and losers of globalization. When looking at the rise of Trump I would argue that the die was cast when NAFTA was approved in addition to MFN trade status for China and I'm constantly mystified when some argue that the deciding factor was Twitter.
Hard to overstate the anger and resentment of those that graduated college during the GFC with minimal job prospects. Countless conversations of "WTF-- I borrowed money for a college degree so I could compete for $35K/year sales job that has nothing to do with anything I learned. What was the point??" Many folks I know went into the trades AFTER taking out $50K to get their bachelors degree. It also led to a hardened outlook 10+ years later for those that made it, found a way to higher earnings and have paid off the debt. "If I could figure it out during that shitstorm, why should we give handouts out now." I don't know the answer, but I don't see the problem going away anytime soon.
"In the span of 30 or 40 years, from the late 1970s to the turn of the century, a way of life more or less ended"
From the late 1970s to the turn of the century was just over 20 years, not 30 or 40. That's not a nitpick, your timeline seems important here.
It's frustrating that the encouragement for taking on student debt is based in economics, while student debt itself is not allowed to operate by any basic economic principles.
In the debt trading world we were always on the lookout for scenarios like this. It usually meant there was an arbitrage opportunity and money to be made. I don't feel bad when corporations and sophisticated investors are involved. But it's terrible that we made young students the sucker in this situation.
Good article, but I think we need another article on what policies might have helped the problem, or would help it now, and why.
I can imagine a world in the Reagan-Thatcher era where a combination of powerful unions and nationalist trade litigation maintained relatively high levels of non-college employment for a while. Maybe that works for something like British Telecom, where there was no right to competition, so phone service in Britain would just stay more expensive and less good than other countries but would maintain employment.
But manufacturing would have been under a lot of pressure as a result of imports from high-automation countries like some of the East Asian countries, or relatively low wage countries like some of the South Asian nations. Is the idea that in the alternate universe, we would have maintained trade walls against any country that didn't have similar wages and anti-automation policies as the US and Britain, indefinitely?
There's also a neoliberal alternative - tax some of the gains that college educated workers are enjoying from free trade, etc., and use it to subsidize wages. It might be that Freddie doesn't have a specific policy in mind, but just thinks we should have done *something* other than more dakka on education to try to help displaced workers.
I honestly think the seeds of pushing everyone into college happened much, much earlier - though it kicked into high gear around ten years prior to the era you highlighted, in the late 1960s, with rise in mass attendance of college by baby boomers resulting in the increasing "professionalization" of wide tiers of employment.
If you look at college in the early 19th century in the U.S., it was an institution in crisis. Many professionals like doctors, lawyers, and engineers would earn their certifications immediately after high school, through either mail-order degrees, clerking/apprenticeship, or some mixture of the two. College was basically just a finishing school for the upper classes, and really irrelevant if you were an upwardly mobile person of middle-class background, or even a wealthy businessman who didn't care one whit if your son had a classic education in Greek and Latin.
The "saving" of higher education is classically associated with Charles William Eliot, who was president of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909, and transformed the school in his 40 years into the first American modern research institution. Most notably, the entire structure of modern educational coursework - standardized testing for admission, undergraduate education as a prerequisite for graduate study, general education requirements, electives, etc. - was more or less created under his watch.
The most important aspect for us however is the idea that a college degree was a "requirement" for certain fields of study began under Eliot's watch. It didn't exist at all during earlier periods, with many leading polymaths entirely self-taught. This only expanded over time.
Take for example a field you have experience in - journalism. Through the early to mid 20th century, journalism was a working-class job that required little other than basic literacy. You graduated from high school, got a job at a local paper as an apprentice/copy editor, and worked your way up over the decades. Woodward and Bernstein were still quite a novelty within journalism at that time because they were part of the first generation of young journalists where a college background was becoming the norm. The educational requirements of journalism rose, the amount of skill required remained the same, and eventually the actual economic standard collapsed. But around the same time all sorts of jobs historically known as "clerks" - random office jobs - also shifted to requiring college degrees, arguably because they were always looking for young people from say the 70th to 95th percentile of aptitude, and now those people almost always went to college.
It's only gotten worse in the decades since of course. Now students fork out cash on degrees for things like being a chef, an x-ray technician, or a CNA. There was a for-profit college in Downtown Pittsburgh for becoming a vet-tech! Capitalism has now outsourced nearly all "job training" onto the job applicant, who also needs to somehow anticipate what sort of jobs will be available decades into the future.
The crucial shift though in the modern era is basically that the low-hanging fruit in terms of college readiness have already been plucked. People in the top third of aptitude didn't really need to go to college in order to get a job - that was a great swindle. But they were plenty capable of going to college. Many of the first-generation college attendees in the 1960s had parents who worked in manufacturing after all. But there was an assumption that we could just keep pushing more and more of the workforce through the great swindle, but that was really unworkable, even after for-profit trade schools created an entirely new second-class level of education even more transparently based upon swindling/empty credentialing.
THANK YOU for writing this.
I’ve been trying to explain to my fellow professionals exactly why we are missing the boat in the “college for all” approach, but I couldn’t quite spit it out. Now I have a post I can link to.
I’ll have to emphasize the status part more than you did here, but that’s cool.
It’s just a shame. My daughter is a perfectly bright person who is going to do something in the sciences in a few years. But she would have also been fantastic with a job where she could simply use er hands to make awesome things, and in a more egalitarian world where it wasn’t pushed into her head that the only way to be of worth was a college degree, she might be happier in that world. (And I did my share of pushing before I got radicalized on the idea, tbh.) But with the world the way it is now, and also the resources to make sure she wasn’t graduating with a crapload of debt, how could I recommend that approach to her?
As a career high school teacher and Californian, I can attest to the overall truth of your sketch of the last five decades. Most of my teaching spots have been in inner-city schools in Los Angeles. My current gig, from which I’ll retire soon, is in a blue-collar ‘burb served by LAUSD. Having also graduated from HS in a nearby town in ‘78, the year Prop. 13 was voted-in, I could offer a tale or two in support of the story of de-industrialization supporting your case. But you’ve missed a facet of the story. A strong contributor to the college-going push, particularly for African-American and Hispanic students, was the desire among educators to compensate for the years of tracking as a standard practice that shunted many into voc. ed oriented courses of study in high school. It was never hard to discern racist intent in that, though it afflicted working class whites to a great extent as well. Hence the devotion by many well-intentioned teachers, counselors and admin. to the ‘college-going culture’. That this dove-tailed w/de-industrialization and the broad demise of voc. ed. is undeniable. But, for many years college costs remained reasonably affordable. I got an MA from a Cal St. U in ‘99. By then I was a father (and FT teacher) and so it took me a while. But I was able to pay tuition with a credit card and was debt-free when, after stretching the process out over extra years, I finally got the degree. So CSU was still relatively affordable then, though not as dirt-cheap as it had been 20 years earlier. (I paid $125 for a full course load at one for the spr. sem. in 1981; 3 years later at a Univ. of Cali campus I finally got my BA having paid about $1200 a year for a full 3 trimesters.) So I was part of a generation that benefited from and was used to thinking of a college education as affordable. The big bump in tuition has come since 2000. My eldest son graduated from a CSU in 2013 owing $15K. FWIW, Reagan had already been dead for awhile by then.
Yeah, Ilived it. My dad was a high-skilled machinist for Caterpiller. Just before he retired in1980theydid some stats and found his production was extremely higher than anyone else and he got an extra $400 a month on his pension. Yes, those still existed for. A lot of people with. union jobs. I went to college in 1964 at the U of Ill.I was the only one of my siblings to do so. I had the really. good federal loan of the time - 3% with a year forgiven for every year teaching. None of this. happens now, and by the 90s they were all gone. I grew upon a village in central Illinois. Only one of my siblings had a well paying job. He was a high- skilled. pipe fitter until COVID when his union jobs stopped. He got his training on the job until the company was bought out. All this is not really possible now.
College did not give me a high paying. job. I was a civil servant working fora state university, and retired with a decent pension, but below our state average. I feel sorry for working class people trying. to make their way in a world structured against them.