Archive #8 --The Big Lie is College. All of It.
My yearlong epiphany on higher education’s role in modern hustle culture, which is now just living in America (from June 16, 2021)
“The first step of the yuppie strategy, according to [Barbara] Ehrenreich, was a sort of ‘premature pragmatism’: choosing a major based on which one that would land them in a position to make a lot of money very quickly. Between the early 1970s and the early 1980s, the number of English majors declined by nearly 50 percent, as did those majoring in social sciences. During the same period, business majors doubled.”
— Anne Helen Petersen, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
Can’t Even kept tricking me into thinking I was reading a transcription of my own thoughts. Anne Helen Petersen’s book — based on a popular article from 2019 — held and neatly organized all of my anger and frustration at modern America. I discovered it at a time when I and many other soon-to-be college graduates find ourselves desperately questioning their future as COVID exacerbates and exposes more and more symptoms of rapidly collapsing late-stage American capitalism; Petersen’s certainly aware of this and her book’s timeliness, and you need not look any further than the short preface she and her editor included before going to press: Can’t Even hit shelves on September 22, and the brief author’s note emphasizes how the reaction to the pandemic, especially in America, has accelerated many people’s disillusionment with the American Dream.
Millennials and now Zoomers have been, for reasons eternally unexplained, told that their lives are easier than ever before, that we’ve had everything handed to us, that it’s because we have everything at our fingertips. There was no apparent consideration that being connected to everyone else all the time — to always being “on” — is tied directly to the drive for infinite productivity. Or that this was anything other than good. There’s this impression that living in an endless economy of things makes life easier. That the fruits borne of previous generations’ persistent consumerism and a wave of free-market fetishism, which made eroding corporations from our everyday lives impossible, were certain to improve the lives of those inhabiting the future. The difficulties didn’t disappear, they only evolved. The pandemic elucidated this — the failure of the American Dream and the forces killing the middle class — to those who failed to see it earlier. For a while, there was a certain algebra to achieving middle-class existence in America. Get the grades, go to school, get the diploma and then the job. A plus B plus C plus D always added up to E.
And then it didn’t.
The propagation of that type of exactitude did more harm than good, largely because it crafted a myth that the only way to guarantee an adequate life in America was to get a bachelor’s degree and find a job that would not have otherwise been available to those with lesser credentials. Trade or vocational schools (or even community colleges!) grew into a second-rate choice for the kids who couldn’t grasp “traditional” education. There are plenty of reasonable arguments for attending universities compared to community college or trade schools, but the majority of students going to large, nationally-recognized institutions with the expectation that they know exactly what they want to do might be looking in the wrong place: less than thirty percent of undergrads end up working in the same field as their major while twice as many apprentices or certified trade school grads followed through on their training and went into the profession they’ve learned.
The things we were told were necessary growing up — get good grades so we could get into a good college so we could get a good job — were built on shakier foundations than anyone thought to tell us, and this was even before a pandemic came along, changing everything we thought we knew about college and working life. Working (or studying) from home had at first a superficial appeal, but it quickly clarified that it’s still in fact difficult to shit where you eat: every obligation starts to furiously amalgamate into a homogenous, anxiety-inducing blob where you’re never sure what the next task is, or what needs to get done when. Turning off the brain and trying to relax became a thing of the past in 2020. Hence the push for always being on, always being productive. Might as well.
Early in Can’t Even, Petersen describes how the risk of attaining higher professional skills shifted from a collective responsibility to that of the individual. A success of the collectivist crusades of the FDR administration — and then again in post-WWII — was that employers would train new hires on the job for whatever role they hired them for. These employees had each other’s backs thanks to unions, and for a few decades the people had a way to combat unrestrained corporate greed. Several massive transformations were borne from the synergy of Reagan’s presidency and Margaret Thatcher’s administration in London, chief among them being the idea of personal responsibility’s return to the fore. Training oneself for a myriad of potential jobs, rather than being trained to do the job you were hired for, became the norm. Been that way ever since. I have to be honest: I didn’t even know companies of yonder were ever so generous to new hires before I read Can’t Even.
We made college such a vital step in this journey of auto-training to the point that certain degrees were more coveted, because we consider them to be a gateway into the highest-paying professions. The notion that this country despises and minimizes the arts is nothing new, but the war on humanities degrees that are theoretically applicable to a wide range of professional fields made clear that the goal is to continue to feed one of two pipelines: one from universities to white-collar offices, and the other — for those who dare study the humanities — a lifelong mountain of indelible student debt and a tenuous path to a future teaching position. No room to explore, or experiment; college is now the time when students supposedly find their lifelong passion. So what guarantees that?
We designated STEM and business degrees as desirable, as known quantities. Not that there’s anything wrong with STEM or business degrees, but it’s unreasonable to put those on a pedestal so far above courses that encourage students to love literature or history or understand human nature, courses that teach young people how to think. We present these “practical” degrees, ones with “real-world value”, as the ones on the fast track to a mortgage and a management position. When did the degree itself begin to fail to offer that?
The American Dream is the gathering of wealth through the sheer power of hard work; the idea that anybody can theoretically do it. I think there’s a general tendency to confuse ‘anybody’ with ‘everybody’. Upward class mobility lies at the heart of our nation’s soul. Building a country around the pursuit of riches inevitably leads to a situation where people who might greatly benefit from social safety nets reject them because our culture teaches people to reject all help in their thinking that they can go it alone, not to mention the myth of American exceptionalism that gets people to say, “If Bezos did it, so can I!” At all levels, Americans identify with the rich because it’s spoon-fed to us from birth that anyone can join their ranks if they work hard enough; the key is to give a shit about no one but yourself. That nationwide mentality has been successful enough to create intergenerational hustle culture; it’s tricked working-class people into opposing tax increases on high-wealth tax brackets and capital gains over certain amounts because these people think they’ll someday achieve that level of wealth; and it’s created a blind obedience that’s allowed neoliberal policymakers in Washington to create an economic environment, in broad daylight, that has enabled the top one percent of Americans to absorb $50 trillion from working-class people and families over a period of forty-five years.
That’s right. Fifty. Trillion. $50,000,000,000,000. (That was obscene to even have to type.)
A Time article by Nick Hanauer — a Seattle-based venture capitalist and progressive activist — and David Rolf explores the consequences of a study by the RAND Corporation think tank that calculated the changes in wealth distribution in the thirty years after World War II, which were defined by several economic booms that created (for white people) the greatest economy in modern history. The study concluded that the wealth distribution from that three-decade period held steady to the present, every American in the bottom ninety percent of wealth would be over $1,100 richer…per month. That would translate in 2018 to the bottom ninety percent theoretically owning $2.5 trillion more in wealth now than they actually do. That doesn’t even include some of the richest people on the planet in the group between the ninetieth and ninety-ninth percentiles.
While the richest of the rich continue to see their worth skyrocket (through mostly passive income), just about every working American is making less than they should. Even people in the ninety-fifth percentile, wealthier than 94% of the population of the richest country in the world, make ten thousand dollars less per year than the RAND study indicates they should. These sorts of economic phenomena don’t just happen. They are orchestrated, and part of that orchestration is telling eager, intelligent students they should train for the high-paying jobs, the same ones that accelerate the process of growing unequal levels of capital. As a result, students eschew the classes that would teach them about why and how wealth distribution levels are losing balance.
Even inequality is itself unequal. Women and people of color can testify to that. It always humors me that it’s broadly accepted that the golden age of American capitalism — the post-WWII boom the boomers grew up in, one of the the least precarious periods in the country’s history — worked for everybody, because it’s clear now that the “college degree = middle-class steadiness” sequence worked overwhelmingly for white males, and less so for everyone else.
I have a hunch that the uneven racial distribution will even out, slowly, as a greater diversity of candidates graduate into the job force and occupy a variety of high-paying jobs (because they opted into the majors they were told were the only worthy ones). Still, there’s a gaping hole at the center of the logic that STEM and business majors are “the only ones worth taking” when none of them actually lead to the lucrative paychecks we think they should. It doesn’t feel greedy to ask for everyone to be paid enough to be able to live where they work, whether it’s Seattle or anywhere else. Yet our demonization of humane, community-focused economics, thanks to inaccurate usage of terms like socialism and communism, has worked remarkably well in a country where a significant percentage of the populace doesn’t actually know what those terms mean, nor what they really entail. (This is as good a case as any for why there needs to be greater influence on soft sciences, which would more accurately inform people about the origins of and truth regarding socialism, communism, and plenty more.)
We’ve been conditioned to believe that the only jobs worth having are the ones that require a undergrad education or more, in a handful of “practical” majors, and that the burden of attaining that education falls entirely on the individual despite the skyrocketing costs of student loans with no guarantee that all this time and money will result in a job that pays enough to help escape this debt. (Petersen wrote about that, too.) We’re now doing all of this job training through computer screens, and if you talk to almost any student they’ll tell you that college classes are far more difficult now than they already were in person. I find them excruciating. Zoom work, as we’ve covered, is inextricable from home life. This is what Petersen means when she writes about the ways COVID has accelerated and exacerbated burnout — it’s not like it wasn’t already there, but the tectonic cultural shifts of this pandemic are making things worse, faster.
My dad always insisted (but never demanded) that I would go to a good college, get an education, and find a job that paid well. In hindsight, it’s kind of amazing that he almost always specifically used the word “education”, because the dirty little secret is that college is anything but. A college degree is not an indication of intelligence or cerebral achievement — it’s a value proposition. It reflects your ability to memorize information and your test-taking skills, and business and STEM classes certainly emphasize this over more abstract or subjective critical thinking skills. Petersen dedicates an early chapter of Can’t Even to the notion that college has become a training exercise instead of higher education; the kind of hard work America rewards, she argues, now becomes valuable only when it’s accompanied by LinkedIn connections or a resume stuffed with (sometimes unpaid) internships. Resume-building is an internalized skill for most grade-schoolers nowadays; every activity represents some opportunity to stand out and broaden one’s “future horizons”. Doing things for fun, just for the inherent enjoyment of something, becomes laughable. It’s impossible not to look back and see this when you remember the stress you and your classmates went through in high school for every class, worrying about what one grade would mean for college.
Consequently, actual learning — as in, learning about subjects you were previously unfamiliar with, and being taught the tools to break subjects down into digestible knowledge and learning processes — is tossed aside in favor of cramming knowledge in for a short period of time, only to forget it completely after the test. “In one ear, out the other,” is a common refrain among high-schoolers and undergrads. One of the many interviewees Petersen spoke to lamented about how he never felt like he learned anything valuable in high school: School emphasized and rewarded memory and superficial knowledge; if the student in question ever came across material he genuinely enjoyed, he felt that he was wasting time diving deeper into a book to understand where the enjoyment was coming from. Quantity beat quality, hand over fist. Once again, spending time learning something out of sheer enjoyment puts you behind the rest of the rat racers, and now you’re sacrificing other learning in an effort to catch up.
Paying attention in school when we can’t be in the classroom makes learning even trickier. Plenty of students struggle to learn on Zoom, and plenty of teachers struggle to teach while looking at a camera. It’s as much of a genetic predisposition as a learned skill, and not having it flat-out sucks. Realistically, though, doesn’t it make more sense for a professor to set a class up on a mostly asynchronous week-to-week basis and let the students work whenever’s best for them? Anecdotally speaking, classes styled as such have been the most successful for both myself and people who similarly struggle with attention deficits (which, in the age of social media, is, to some extent, pretty much everyone in college). Forcing students to cooperate with school schedules when they’re stuck at home and are thus subject to the inescapable obligations of home life, sets a dangerous precedent for the work-from-home future, when people will be unable to separate work and leisure if everything they do occurs in the same place — it is, like Petersen says in her author’s note, a pre-existing problem which COVID has merely exaggerated. No one has any doubt that it will only get worse in the years to come.
Speaking of internalization, I refuse to believe Petersen’s frequent use of that word throughout Can’t Even is coincidental. The whole concept of marketing ourselves to colleges, and then later to graduate schools and corporate recruiters, is drilled into American minds from, for all intents and purposes, birth. We internalize it all and are then shocked when a fifteen-year investment doesn’t pay off like we were told it would. Hell, I remember being one of many who freaked out about seventh-grade advanced algebra affecting my odds of getting into my dream school or wherever else. In hindsight, I can say with some degree of confidence that seventh-grade algebra wasn’t the reason I didn’t get in.
Another millennial that Petersen interviewed for the book revealed that her father repeatedly spoke disdainfully of community college, using scare tactics based around the stigmatized shame of community college to prevent his daughter from going to high school parties. So many millennials and Gen Z have been willing to put themselves under a mountain of debt we don’t think a community college degree is worthwhile. If you’re going to go to college, it better be a state school from the start. That’s the only way you’ll get a good job, after all. After that, you’ll have the good job that will pay enough to pay off the debt. Whether or not parents were aware of the mounting student debt crisis and wanted to subject their children to it is another story. Perhaps they genuinely believed the only degree that was worthwhile was one you spent four years on the same campus for; to each their own. I’ve spoken for others enough here.
A labor crisis is staring America in the face. Its gaze is only going to get stronger the longer the pandemic continues (and just because we’re getting shots in arms does not mean the pandemic is fully over), the more we pretend to half-heartedly fight it off. College students’ confusion and disillusionment will only grow as more and more students come to see that college is not about the education. That was the expendable part. Everyone wants to go back because they can’t do without the bells and whistles universities use to distinguish themselves to applicants.
Which explains the phenomenon Ian Bogost described in The Atlantic: Americans will sacrifice anything for college life. The modern college experience in America is the quickest route to fulfilling basic human needs for sex and vibrant social interaction; the education takes a backseat to tailgates, Greek life, and plenty of late nights at the library or student union. That’s fine! College thrives on dangerous behavior! I relish my memories of nights like that!
But Americans wanted only those parts of college back; we didn’t care about in-person classes because that’s not really why we’re there.
My tumultuous college experience has taken me from Boulder, Colorado, then back home to Bellevue College for one quarter, and finally to the University of Washington, the school I idolized as a child and longed to attend. UW remained so mysterious to me growing up, this serene, tree-lined campus that is so important to Seattle’s identity and its history. Despite its physical location, it never felt like Seattle. I don’t remember the day I realized UW wasn’t different from other state schools across the nation, but I was cognizant of that well before I realized that cultivating as unique an identity as possible is crucial for a school to attract students. UW’s identity had to be necessarily different from Colorado’s, which had to be different from Bellevue College’s. Just like degrees are value propositions to future employers, colleges offer prospective students with certain perks to differentiate themselves from all the other schools they are interested in.
As the pandemic wears along and at least appears to be slowing down here in the US, I’ve found myself turning to increasingly pessimistic internet wormholes. The topics are not themselves so dark, but rather the ways in which my tune has changed regarding American systemic interaction: the labor-centric nature of America; our obsession with side hustles and productivity culture and child-rearing and The Success Sequence (school → job → marriage → children → retirement → death); how COVID has exposed these as deliberate features of a capitalist state that strives for rugged individualism and eschews a safety net. When people succeed in America, it’s because they had the great fortune of growing up in the best place in the world to make something of themselves. But when they find themselves in a vicious and endless cycle of poverty despite their best efforts, it’s their fault and theirs alone.
The latest topic I’ve taken to is the country’s treatment of public schools, and how the pandemic is and will continue to be a mask-off moment (pardon the pun) for how this country treats teachers. Petersen presented perspectives from several teachers from across the country in a recent article posted to her Substack page, and in that same post quoted a piece by Doris A. Santoro in EdWeek:
“One reason people are not attracted to teaching, and why some are leaving teaching, is that they do not see it as a place where they can enact their values. By this I do not mean that they are seeking to indoctrinate students in their belief systems, but that they do not see teaching as a way to do what psychologist Howard Gardner and his colleagues call “good work.” Good work serves a social purpose (for example, supporting students to be critical thinkers in their community or enabling students to recognize the elegant logic of the periodic table) and upholds the highest ethical standards of the profession (for example, ensuring that all students are treated with respect and dignity or designing assessments that are the best possible representation of what students know and are able to do).”
To anyone who reads this, ask yourself: when, at any point in your secondary education, did you feel like a teacher was really trying to help you shape how you think as opposed to just reciting facts back to you? I remember the teachers who successfully helped me think critically about my community, my country, and the world, and I specifically remember those who taught me how not to think (any of my former classmates at Redmond High School should know who I’m talking about when I say that.)
In any case, most teachers try to do the best they can. Especially right now. It’s completely ridiculous to me that parents or anyone else think they had the right to call teachers lazy or greedy for not feeling safe going back into schools when school buildings across the US are old, poorly ventilated, and not at all conducive to holding groups of people without putting them in close quarters. The push to re-open schools is certainly a push to reignite social interaction among students, whose brains are still developing and thus need variety and interaction in their lives. This I can understand. But it’s also a push to re-establish the dominant status quo that existed prior to 2020, with no introspection or thought towards the idea of revamping a system that has failed both teachers and students.
The trend public education is taking is only a meager fraction of the worrying trend America’s been on and will continue to take, likewise without any consideration to the fact that the pandemic exposed that our institutions beyond just schools — our workplaces, our bureaucracy, our concept of a social safety net — require massive, lasting overhauls. A common frustration among the teachers Petersen interviewed was the rise of standardized testing, and the fear that it’s going to turn students and teachers into single data points at the expense of their humanity, their mental health, or their own definition of success.
The thing about the wormholes I’ve fallen down is that once you start to see how everything — school, work, reproduction, consumption — connects under the neoliberal strain of capitalism which came about in the 1980s, it’s hard to stop seeing how everything falls into place. I was already aware of UW’s hypercompetitiveness, but I didn’t know how draining it truly was or that I’d find some sort of salvation from it in writing this.
UW embodies the rugged individualism that constitutes the only way to become anybody in America. I don’t know if that’s going to change when people return to campus, hopefully this fall. Collectivism surrounds college campuses in spades — providing students with association, in the form of Greek systems or any number of clubs, has never been college culture’s issue. The academic structure is a dogfighting ring, but it’s one where the dogs are somehow expected to help one another while they fight. Everything at UW is about beating somebody else to the punch, but you still have to make friends. Applicants must look better than their high school compatriots; they then have to score higher grades in pre-major lectures than the people to their right and left and everyone in their study group; class after class instills that mindset until it’s time to apply for jobs and internships, where, suddenly, you’ll be working with a team to accomplish the tasks you train yourself to be hired to do. Nothing’s wrong with businesses having teams work on projects rather than individuals, but shouldn’t elite schools like UW, who have now transparently become job-training factories, inculcate students in that same team mindset — rather than its antithesis?
I am so tired, so exceedingly tired. Tired of fielding questions about what my plan for work is. Tired of Zoom, tired of dealing with virtual graduation nonsense. Tired of others demanding I treat things normally when that is so clearly not the case.
I used to think the grass was always greener when I came to UW. I’d have been happier with whichever option I didn’t choose. That’s how goddamn regret works! And yet among the many lessons I learned in a year of lockdowns and quarantines and mishmash and who-knows-what (I learned most of what’s informing my writing here completely independently of school), I realized there isn’t a right way to do college. There isn’t a right way to live either. And that’s the rub about these things. We’ve built higher education to be restrictive when they should make our lives more expansive. Open our eyes to the millions of opportunities and possibilities. But instead, we make it work. And just like work, we got ourselves hooked on college; now our star-spangled freedom demands that we get the college lifestyle back. I’ve tried to write out an understanding of how we got to this point. But like so many other quagmires of the American pandemic experience and beyond, trying to understand it is the wrong approach. You’re better off just ignoring it, and to live how you’re told.
Recommended Reading:
Work Sucks: On Anne Helen Petersen’s Can’t Even (LA Review of Books)
The Great College Rip-Off Project at The Atlantic
Jill Lepore at The New Yorker — “What’s Wrong With The Way We Work?”
Doris A. Santoro at EducationWeek — “Teacher Demoralization Isn’t The Same as Teacher Burnout”