College has become a barrier for smart poor kids
by Jennifer Kesler
ETA: This post is US-centric, and I should have made that clear. How much or little it applies to other countries, I can’t say.
As soon as employers made college a necessity for jobs of any significant income (and even some of shockingly low income, such as “receptionist”) back in the 80s or 90s, college started increasing tuition costs into the stratosphere. The cost for a four year degree at even a modest state school is now, in technical economic terms, fucking ridiculous.
How can I say that, knowing how much college increases (on average) a graduate’s lifelong earnings and so on? Because not every degree has that effect. Many degrees lead to an empty or low-paying job market. What can someone with a degree in history, English, or archeology do besides teach history, English or archeology? (And please don’t say “write books” – authors make well below minimum wage, unless they are among the very, very small minority who make it big.) There are a precious few degrees that actually pay for themselves in earnings: engineering, for one. Even degrees for doctors and lawyers – which can pay for themselves eventually – are getting tougher and tougher to justify, because the initial expense is horrendous, and the period of working for little or no money after school is harsher than it was for previous generations because the cost of living is increasing every year (forcing young graduates into even more debt than the degree did).
For kids whose parents couldn’t afford a college fund, who are completely on their own to pay their way through school, it just doesn’t make economic sense to become a doctor when you could become a nurse with far less expense. It may not even make sense at all to go to college, when you could become an administrative assistant or a carpenter and earn a modest but decent living without tens of thousands (or more) in debt from which you have to recover, and still have hope of promotion to something better. And don’t bring up scholarships – they’re increasingly hard to come by, the competition gets worse every year, and in some fields they’re not available at all.
Now, employer degree lust is not the only reason college costs have risen to the point where smart, poor kids are being left behind, but it is one that could be addressed very quickly without costing anyone a dime. Employers need to get over the idea that a college degree is necessary in every profession. It is not. Just a few decades ago, employers realized that people could pick up, for example, how to do an engineer’s job without having an engineering degree, and they recognized that a certain number of years of job experience were equivalent to a degree.
Employers need to stop thinking “degree=qualification” and instead establish qualifications that can be met in more than one way. For example, a poor smart kid can learn every skill needed to be an editor in a publishing house. Books and textbooks are readily available, and there’s information all over the internet, which can be accessed for free at most libraries, so self-education is very possible. Instead of requiring an English degree, a publishing house could instead require applicants to describe in an essay what they’ve done to train themselves for editing (whether that’s college or self-education). After weeding out the ones who don’t impress, the publishing house would interview applicants and give them an editing assignment to complete on the spot under supervision (to avoid the possibility of cheating). The publishing house would still get quality employees and poor smart people would have a fighting chance for good jobs.
For another example, certain types of engineering are far more complex – even if someone has a remarkable flair for constructing engines from crap they found at the junkyard, there are solid reasons why an employer might want them to learn the math skills and concepts involved in engineering. But is there any reason these skills can’t be learned on the job, if the person passes a math test which indicates the capacity to learn it?
The problem is that employers are too lazy to take on the work of apprenticeship. That duty has been passed onto colleges. And yet, the people who actually work with 23 year olds know apprenticeship still goes on. It has to – no college can anticipate precisely what your company wants its employees to do. Companies imagine they’re avoiding apprenticeship, when they’re not. And I suspect – based on personal observations – what most kids learn in 4 years of college could be compressed into 6 months of apprenticeship.
There are only two fair solutions: the Federal and state governments must find a way to make college degrees available to everyone at every income level, or we must create alternatives to college degrees that allow people to better themselves and have that reflected in their income. Not only does the second one not cost tax payers or anyone else a dime, it makes more sense.
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Posted in Class, Featured Articles on November 27, 2008
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The stratification in our society viz a viz the education ladder is one aspect of classism which our society refuses to acknowledge – never mind confront. Classism is the elephant in the room that everyone pretends doesn’t exist. After all, this is America, and we have a classless society, a meritocracy. Bullshit.
We have a job market rife with age/sex/disability/ and appearance/weight discrimination as well as employers who unabashedly engage in poverty-profiling of job applicants via background and credit report checks obtained through the mandatory disclosure of your social security numger on job applications which are linked to, and used in, the obtaining of your credit report.
We don’t have a “free market” society. We have a rigged market that has failed to include job seekrs over age 40, women, poor minorities and poor whites as well. When Don Imus referred to some university women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos”, he faced repercussions (and justly so!). But had Don Imus instead made a remark about “trailer trash” or “rednecks” or “poor white trash” women, nary a peep would have been uttered.
The almighty college education is one of many “gates” that the poor get shut out with, thus restricting their chances for good jobs in order to climb out of poverty.
The fact that the ratio of job applicants to number of available jobs is 100 to 1 according to recent reports from the US Labor Department, and the fact that the poor (who are mostly women) can’t even get minimum wage cashier jobs in our image-obsessed society if they have visibly decayed or missing teeth due to lack of access to dental care because of poverty (NOT because of being too stupid/uneducated to brush and floss properly!) – these are factors that the talking heads and self-proclaimed “experts” ignore.
I am one of those impoverished Gen-Xers who went into debt for a bachelors degree in math/comp sci w/ a minor in physics, graduating at the age of 34 in May of 2001 – only to find that no one would give me a chance for a job due to the gap in my work history from a disability, and due to the fact that I was no longer a 20-something yr old thin and pretty “Barbie doll.”
So now what are those in my situation who are entering their 40′s and who are jobless, poor, and on food stamps supposed to do? The government can find money to bail out wealthy corporate fat cats on Wall Street, but what about a bailout for poor middle-aged women who have student loan debt that we can’t repay – especially of we’re unemployable due to age/sex and appearance discrimination?
The “experts” ignore all of these factors because acknowledgement means they would have to admit that they might not deserve all the self-congratulatory pats on the back for their successes; that they may have benefited unfairly by unearned social class privilege. They want to think they got where they’re at totally on their own with no help or advantages as they tool around with trendy bumperstickers that read, “He who dies with the most toys wins.”
Guess they didn’t get the memo: He who dies with the most toys is still nonetheless dead.
Just one codicil: Don Imus didn’t face much in the way of consequences. He was showily fired, then re-hired within, I believe, a month.
I wondered if anyone would bring up the possibility that degrees are MEANT to screen out certain classes – people who don’t share Our Background and therefore Wouldn’t Be Comfortable Here. It boils down to “batten down the hatches, the poor are at the gate” but the real motives have been so carefully disguised that we all think (until you really start to question how it works) a degree is really helpful to employers. (And I’m not saying it NEVER is, but when people require a degree for a job like “receptionist”, you must call bullshit.)
I was unaware that Don Imus was rehired. That really takes the cake…someone bereft of any cerebral activity whatosever like Imus is “worthy” and “deserving” while so many of us are somehow not. Definitely proof that we don’t have a meritocracy.
The college degree requirement for even the most basic of office jobs is a deliberate, systemic, classist barrier designed to keep certain groups unemployable and keep the poor down while justifying unfair social and economic exclusion with the excuse “they’re undeserving because they failed to get educations because they were too lazy/stupid/made poor choices, etc”.
However, as evidenced by my own experience as a non-traditional aged student and college grad, even some of us marginal people who DID jump through all the hoops are still kept down and poor. In order to circumvent the civil rights laws that are supposed to protect disadvantaged people (the middle-aged, women, disabled people, etc) while still keeping the poor excluded, employers fall back on the “At Will” laws which allow them to get away with denying you a job (or firing you) for any reason at all without having to explain why. But that’s another form of social class privilege: getting to make up the rules of the game and then later change them in order to violate civil rights and Constitutional law.
I re-checked myself about Imus just to make sure I wasn’t mistaken and found this little gem:
http://news.aol.com/newsbloggers/2007/10/16/don-imus-might-make-30-million-for-getting-fired-and-rehired/
On my other website, The Hathor Legacy, I’ve talked about leaving the film industry because they said I had to make white, straight men the center of every story, and I found that appalling. But there’s another reason I left: the long period of unpaid or below-living-wage work you have to do that’s called “your dues.” Film is so competitive that they can get people who are willing to work for nothing. Unfortunately, these are mostly upper-middle and higher class kids whose exposure to people other than white men begins and ends with mom and the hispanic housekeeper in their Bel Air home. No wonder Hollywood is bigoted – its very hiring practices discourage diversity somethin’ fierce. (And ignore anyone who says this is bullshit because you just have to make sacrifices – they’re assuming you have the resources to get yourself fed WHILE literally working full-time for no money at all, which is a very privileged assumption coming from people who take for granted their own resources and don’t realize what having “nothing” actually means.)
What you’ve said about Hollywood and the corporate media moguls in this country hiring young people from privileged backgrounds who have their own economic resources (and thus, can afford to work for free in order to “pay their dues”) does not come as a surprise.
When I see that the fraudulent standard of beauty (thin, young, flawless female bodies) – which has disenfranchised all women unable to conform to it – I see white male upper-middle/upper class privilege. I also see a shallow selfishness rife with entitlement attitudes that makes me want to hurl.
Weight/appearance and age discrimination hurts women far more than it does men, and it disproportionately hurts poor women the most (left out of the dating/mating game and denied employment for being “too fat”, “too ugly”, etc). It was spoiled, coddled, over-privileged white males in positions of power who created this hell for us.
A recent survey in Minnesota revealed that 70% of all girls aged 9 – 12 had been on strict diets at least once. For every young girl who diets to the point of unhealthiness in fear of becoming fat (hence “unworthy”), I hold these superficial, shallow, rich white males responsible. For every new mom who suffers pregnancy and birth related PTSD out of extreme emotional angst over her changing body, I hold these superficial, shallow, rich white males responsible. For every middle-aged and/or overweight woman truggling in poverty because of being denied a job due to our culture of “body fascism”, I hold superficial shallow rich white males responsible.
The privileged take no responsibility for the social injustices left in their wake. Women who find themselves unemployable due to age and appearance discrimination are told that they must “do something about it” – that is to say, they must somehow find the money for abdominoplasty and liposuction and breast augmentation, personal fitness trainers, and buy over-priced “Frankenstein” diet foods loaded with more chemicals than DuPont.
Not having to risk death from anorexia or bulimia in an endeavor to conform to what is “attractive” and “desirable” as a wife, or as a middle class professional deserving of a job, and to maintain that status of what it means to be “worthy” and “deserving” in our society; is a social class privilege enjoyed by rich white males and to a lesser extent, thin, young, and pretty white females (“Barbies”).
The issue of “paying your dues” is one more systemic barrier of classism to keep the poor and lower-middle classes out, preserving opportunity for the “haves” and “have-mores”. The film and literary industry are not the only ones where this is customary.
After graduating from college in 2001 at the age of 34, I was hired as a stockbroker/financial planner by a brokerage firm in Philadelphia, PA. It was customary in that field for the broker (who is a commissions-only paid sales worker) to pay the up front costs connected with the NASD and state insurance licensing exams and all continuing ed requirements. I was also expected to not only feed and house myself while working for next to nothing in that racket, I was also expected to be able to afford the “right image” and country club memberships as part of the “cost of getting on the team”. I couldn’t afford that. I also couldn’t afford to work for nothing, either.
I was a poor (albeit well-educated) woman without resources. If I could have afforded to be able to work for free, I certainly would not have done so in a job where I had to kiss spoiled rich people’s asses to get their accounts in order to MAYBE earn a paltry 1% commission.
The insurance companies that hire agents as ‘in-house” employees and pay for their office rental, their office equipment, utilities, high-speed Internet, their C.E. requirements, and a base salary ALL require job candidates to take the LIMRA test. The LIMRA test is supposedly a personality test that determines whether or not you’re psychologically suited for work in the insurance and financial sales and services industry. Bullshit.
I took the LIMRA profile test. Every question asked had to do with what amount of liquid net resources I had: cash in savings, investment portfolios, IRA’s, and home equity versus the total debt I had (student loans, mortgage, etc). My guess is that the companies want workers who don’t need jobs because they need to be paid in order to be able to live – they want people who can afford to work for free, or even PAY TO WORK. Poor and lower-middle class people can’t afford to pay in order to work, or work for free.
The LIMRA test had everything to do with ferreting out the socio-economically disadvantaged job applicants and nothing to do with actual, bona fide job qualifications.
As an author making between $30 and $100 a month in royalties from book sales (supplemented by food stamps), I’ve seen the same thing in the literary fields. In order to get hired as a staff writer with a liveable salary at some mainstream news rag, I would have to be a thin, 20-something year old “Barbie doll” – not the chubby 41 year old that I am.
In order to gain recognition and credit (and renumeration) for my work writing for online newspapers, and eventually profit from being an author, I have to work for free as an unembedded journalist – risking threats to my health and life – until I get a big enough scoop to get recognition and get funded with grant money by organizatins such as DemocracyNOW.org or The Nation in order to continue writing about events that the mainstream news media will not.
I never had the opportunity to travel abroad like so many upper-middle class/rich people have. But I have been to, and witnessed first hand, the hellholes of the maquiladoras in Ciudad Juarez in Mexico (created by NAFTA, GATT and CAFTA – all which benefit rich white males at the helm of corporations).
I am going to Logan and Mingo Counties in West Virginia this week. I will see firsthand (and document) the devastation caused by strip mining and mountain top removal, and the poverty in which many locals must endure in a region ruled by “King Coal”, a petulant and sadistic monarchy that made its pile off of the debt peonage system they’ve forced on the poor and working classes there – people that the middle and upper-middle classes castigate for being “white trash”, “hillbillies”, and “uneducated rednecks”.
Companies that have cornered the fuel and energy market, companies that make everything from clothing to machinery; all want workers to work for nothing while sacrificing the global and domestic environment in the process.
Hey, I’m from Fayette County, WV, with miners on both sides of the family, so I already know most of what you’re going to learn in Logan County. It’s an appalling example of what human beings can do before sleeping comfortably every night.
Re: the LIMRA test – that’s mind-boggling. I’ll have to look into that a bit further… and yet I shouldn’t be surprised: the old IQ tests put “lower class” and non-whites at a disadvantage by asking questions that required middle class cultural knowledge.* I’ve even seen one really dismal example of a question that showed two roughly sketched faces and asked which was pretty. Both were female, of course. Both were pretty, in my opinion, so far as rough sketches can render. But one was clearly Caucasian and the other African-American. It’s really hard to fathom how that could have been a case of ignorant racism – it really had to have been a deliberate conditioning tactic. *I don’t know for sure that new IQ tests have improved, I just wanted to be specific about what I was talking about, which are old tests no longer (to my knowledge) administered.
Re: the beauty “standard” for women. Playing devil’s advocate, I’ve tried for years to see a “business” reason for encouraging women to look like Barbies. Sure, it might sell cosmetics and diet products and plastic surgeries… but a lot of women accomplish the look (or die trying) with cheap cosmetics and starvation, which profits no one. I really believe part of the motive – perhaps most of it – is to literally diminish women. After all, if we’re spending hours a week on our appearance that men aren’t spending on theirs, it reduces the “threat” of our talent in the job market overtaking theirs. (And no, I don’t remotely mean to imply that all men, or even all particularly privileged men, feel a need to oppress women – I’m saying it only takes a few crafty haters to set up a system and then create a rationalization for it, which perfectly nice people in their ignorance can find themselves perpetuating without any intent to do so.)
The LIMRA test isn’t the only “personality profile” many employers demand job applicants to take in the application process. But it has been the standard one used in the insurance and financial services industry.
Other variants of the LIMRA exist and are used, but they all have the common denominator of fleshing out a job applicant’s socio-economic status. These tests all ask about your net worth quite extensively. Needless to say, job candidates who are smart and ambitious but who happen to be from the bottom socio-economic rung are deliberately left out; labeled as “not a good fit.” (Barbara Ehrenreich also addressed that issue in her books)
As to your observation about the beauty standard we women are unfairly held to in order to be “worthy” and “deserving”, you’re absolutely right – it IS about diminishing women.
It’s a form of silencing us, of censorship. We’re to be trotted out only when we’re desired by men to be their mommies, nursemaids, and playthings; and expected to silently go away, unseen and unheard, when we do not fill that need. And I hold the media responsible for a significant part of this issue and how it has harmed women across the socio-economic strata.
A recent situation highlighting this was brought to my attention from a member of the local La Leche League. Breastfeeding moms have been illegaly harassed and ejected from places where women and babies normally have every right to be on the grounds that nursing in public is “indecent”, despite being very discreet and covering up with a nursing blanket. It was just the knowledge that the women were breastfeeding that resulted in violation of these mothers’ civil liberties.
I was dumbfounded because NO ONE ever complains about seeing half naked hot chicks (College Girls Gone Wild) frollicking on Daytona Beach during spring break week.
No one yells “Cover yourself up!” or “You’re going to have to leave!” at all the thin young “Barbies” sporting boob jobs and string bikinis that leave nothing to the imagination on any given beach or at any water park. They’re not the women who are routinely publicly humiliated and forcibly ejected unlawfully from various places.
Yet, nursing mothers are the ones targeted for this sort of harassment, even though they usually show less boob than what is seen on any given day at the beaches, swimming pools, restaurants (Hooters for example); or at the mall exhibited by the young “hotties” shopping at Abercombie & Fitch and Victoria Secret.
Apparently if women’s bodies are not fulfilling the role of entertaining men, we don’t deserve to be seen in public, on beaches, or in the workplace. And of course, we have no right to be “argumentative” and “complain” about it. I wonder who stands to benefit the most from that scenario.
So much I want to say… so much incoherancy – so I will sum up thus:
1) I am a high school student at a prestigious prep school after 11 years at a supposed prep school. College is on everyone’s mind.
2) The school I left was full of rich, privileged students, some of whom recognized what their money gave them, a few of whom recognized this and then still went beyond their money (<3!), and many of whom did not recognize this and did not want to.
3) I totally say yes about the college degrees. My mom has a fricking doctorate. It made her almost unemployable when she had to quit her job last year because of an awful administration. She had over 20 years’ experience, a top level degree, etc. etc., and no one wanted to pay the $200,000 (or whatever) expected if you follow the chart (she wasn’t, by the way. She just wanted to be able to feed us).
On the other hand, I have yet to meet a degreed secretary who can actually handle a copy machine with the ease and expertise I can. May I say again – high school student?
I’m currently attending a computer college in Japan in the hopes of entering the video game industry when I finish. One thing that struck me about your post is the difference between the way that the American job market views incoming workers versus the Japanese one.
In Japan, as in America, qualifications are very important and a degree certainly looks good on your CV. However it’s not nearly as important as the exam that the company gives you if you apply for a job there. The exams are tailored to the job you’re applying for (a computer programmer, for instance, has to display their programming skills, while someone looking for a game planner job has to create a game proposal in the alloted time).
On top of that, there’s your portfolio and what certification exams you’ve earned. Typically in the IT industry that at least means the Fundamental Information Technology exam, plus whatever other ones are relevant (there’s Software, CG, MIDI, etc). While going to a technical school like the one I attend certainly helps to prepare you for said tests, it’s entirely possible to study for them on your own and pass.
As much as I complain about having to take so many tests (I hate tests), it certainly seems like a better measure of one’s actual aptitude than whether or not one has a university degree.
In Australia – at least before they introduced the two-tiered HECS/full-fee paying system – the government basically subsides your degree by 2/3 and lets you pay the remaining third as what amounts to an interest-free loan that you only have to start paying back when your income hits a certain amount. And you get an additional 20% off if you pay the remaining third upfront instead of take it as a loan. And the debt dies with you, so say you’ve managed to accumulate a lot of stuff without ever having a high enough income, the government can’t claim it. The degrees are tiered based on prestige/earning capacity (at least, that’s the way I see it) so my media degree cost me $10K but my brother’s engineering/CS double-degee cost him $42 (prices went up a bit between us; in my time, his degree would have beeen $35K) and the most expensive, medicine, would be about $50K.
Despite this, my dad continually goes on about what a rip-off tuition fees are. He has all these figures – from where he got them, I have no idea – but the gist is, the government is ripping us off. No amount of explaining will convince him that $10K for a world-class degree is something of a bargain.
Just for information: your option number 1 does not work either. As an example take Austria. Everyone in the country can go to University and obtain a masters degree provided they meet the high school requirements. Yet statistically the number of children of non-academic (i.e. non college educated) parents is only a fraction of those whose parents did obtain a degree.
In other words, opening college to everyone is simply a feel good placebo without any real effect on class structures. I do think that your option 2 on the other hand has a good chance to actually make a difference. The reason is simple. It has a much tighter feedback loop. When you learn on the job, positive feedback will come your way right away. Which then motivates to continue self improvement.
Great article!
Phi Delta, I made it clear my post was addressing the issue in the US. I realize it’s quite different from one country to the next, and my solutions are only proposed to work in the US.
In any case, your example assumes everyone who can’t afford college comes from a non-college educated family, and that’s both untrue and classist.
The system for student-loans is disaster as well (which economically makes no sense- the number of people who are forced to default because their loans are too steep and the losses they generate must outweigh the losses of lessened rates). Universities, when they’re telling visitors about the aid they provide include loans in the money they’ll get for the students- leaving the students in debt they weren’t even aware of. Even leaving aside tuition students are obliged to buy hideously expensive textbooks for every class.
However, the problem starts earlier. I tutor middle-schoolers in Harlem and I see intelligent kids who lack basic skills. The awful schools many lower-income students go to leaves them in large part unprepared for college, unqualified for scholarships and often harboring a hatred of schools
There are several problems. I will only mention the single largest.
Schools are paid for by local governments and funded by property taxes. Thus higher income neighborhoods are able to afford better and more teachers. Better-off parents move to areas with good schools forcing up property taxes, which serve effectively as tuition. Poorer neighborhoods conversely get worse schools, continuing the poverty cycle.
The obvious answer to this is an income-based federal tax split evenly but that smacks of -horror!-
giving the poor our moneyentitlement, which all true meritocratic Americans have battled since at least the days of Lyndon Johnson. (It would also probably lessen the quality of education in certain middle-class neighborhoods until the system adjusted, which would bother many voters if they stopped to consider what they could do to fix the problem).The secondary problem with this system is that it was designed with the expectation that a family would live in the same house for most of a lifetime. Thus the property tax for 40 or so years is intended to pay for 12 years of education for just the children of that family. With families moving into areas with better schools only for their children’s education, then leaving, to be replaced by another family with children, a debt is left over and absorbed by the school district. Over time this will have to be corrected anyway.
For the sake of brevity, I won’t mention broken homes, community expectations, nearby violence or any of a host of other contributing problems. (Any of which I could wax lyrical about.)
The entire American education system is a disaster that could hardly discriminate more against the poor. Its college-fixation and ridiculous tuitions are only one example of a systemic problem.