Britain is racked by student demonstrations — in many cases riots — because Parliament tripled university tuition to $15,000 (in U.S. dollars). Americans would still probably consider 15k tuition for a first-class university a bargain. But until now, higher education has been a heavily subsidized good.
So why should libertarians care? Aren’t these just a bunch of spoiled brats, throwing a tantrum when they’re cut off from the taxpayer teat?
Not exactly.
British students, like those in America, are hit from two directions under the state capitalist model: First, by government interventions that inflate the amount of the “education” commodity they’re forced to consume in order to make a decent living. And second, by government interventions that inflate the cost of procuring it.
So government has placed students in a double bind in which relying on government tuition subsidies is the only way out.
On the one hand, we’ve had decades of subsidized education — which makes college-educated administrative and technical labor artificially cheap and plentiful to employers — coupled with a relentless upward creep of legally mandated credentialing. As a result the credentialing primarily serves a signaling function for the employer, and is inflated far beyond the functional requirements of the actual job.
As commentator Joe Bageant points out (“The masses have become lazy, fat and stupid,” December 11 2006), the liberal panacea of more and more “education” spending is a pipe dream, based on a fallacy of composition. The Empire needs about a quarter of its population in administrative-technical positions that require a college education. Educating a larger portion of the population only results in credential inflation for other jobs. And the more people with managerial-technical educations are competing for jobs, the more corporate bureaucracies are characterized by opportunism, shameless climbing and back-stabbing.
On the other hand, universities are dominated by the same high-overhead, cost-plus culture that Paul Goodman described in “People or Personnel”: Bureaucratized administration, prestige salaries, ossified Weberian work rules and job descriptions, mission statements, and all the rest of it. When an institution is self-organized and run from the bottom up, on the other hand (Goodman uses Black Mountain College as a comparison), its members are free to economize on means, and to use their own judgment and initiative in directly solving problems in the most common-sense way without running afoul of standard operating procedures. Because the members are working for themselves in pursuit of their own interests, they don’t have to work under the distrustful eye of an administrative bureaucracy.
The answer, first, is to eliminate all state-mandated licensing and credentialing, all college and technical school accreditation, and to dismantle higher education as a conveyor belt for processing human raw material for delivery to the appropriate HR department.
Educational offerings should be driven, on a demand-pull basis, by the desires of students, while all the state-created artificial scarcities that cause the wage labor market to be a buyer’s market should be eliminated.
Second, we should eliminate the high-overhead, cost-plus culture that predominates in the university (as in all other large institutions of state capitalist society). Higher education should be governed by the ad hoc, bottom-up, self-organized institutional culture Paul Goodman described in “People or Personnel”: Low overhead, no administrative bureaucracy, and making do on refurbished equipment. Whenever possible, the advantages of network culture should be taken advantage of for moving information around to the point of consumption, in preference to an industrial model of moving people to a central location for processing.
In the end, we need to move toward a society where work is organized — and the qualifications for it are set — mainly by the people doing it, and such judgments by working people are the main thing driving the way they organize education for themselves.
None of this should be taken to mean I’m anti-intellectual — far from it. We need a society where people are smart enough to question authority, to subject its claims to rigorous tests of logic, and check them against against their own independent knowledge. But such skills aren’t really a core competency of the “educational” apparatus, are they?
Colleges exist to cram people full of the skills employers demand, and to inculcate the cultural habit of taking orders from an authority figure behind a desk. Critical thinking, on the other hand, is a skill acquired through self-education, in cooperation with one’s equals, to pursue knowledge for one’s own self-determined purposes — the “Community of Scholars” Goodman described in a book of that name. Higher education is more often a hindrance than a help, in that regard.
I’m not usually a fan of General Wesley Clark, for obvious reasons. But in the 2004 Democratic primaries, he no doubt angered a lot of professional “educators” by saying: “Yes, I’m educated. I read books.” Exactly.
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste, Deming, New Mexico Headlight, 12/27/10
An interesting analysis – to be sure, because state interventions HAVE driven up the price of education AND prescribed the amount of education required to operate in a given field with official "blessing" in many areas. Even here, university endowments grow as tuition rises.
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Kevin – of course, you're right. But until there's an apparatus to equalize the economic success of the self-educated and the state-educated, it's never going to happen.
I agree with your analysis, but the protesters may have no clue that this is what’s happening and may in fact be made up of “a bunch of spoiled brats, throwing a tantrum.” I don’t know that that’s the case, but it clearly could be, despite all that you’ve said about the system. Are any of the protesters demanding that they “eliminate all state-mandated licensing and credentialling”?
Well said. One one point, I wish to quibble:
"Colleges exist to cram people full of the skills demanded by employers, and to inculcate the cultural habits of taking orders from an authority figure behind a desk. Critical thinking, on the other hand, is a skill acquired through self-education, in cooperation with one’s equals, to pursue knowledge for one’s own self-determined purposes"
This is not true for all college students. It is probably true for the majority, and is due to the combined effects of the state obsession with mass-produced college "education" and the perception among students that attending college is just "what middle-class people do". However, outside of that group, when you find competent teachers and motivated students, college education does live up to its promise. As one example, in biology there has been an immense focus on getting students into laboratories to conduct meaningful research. I've even heard of this in fields like history. Even in the classroom, teachers can facilitate critical evaluation of evidence, not just spoon-feed students the best theories to date. However, that typically requires smaller classes, which is not compatible with the rapid expansion of student populations that the US has seen over the past several decades (http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98)
What isn't going to happen…? And why should economic success be equalized? By whom? If those people have the power to equalize, don't they also have the power to keep success to themselves? And if they do, why should they seek to equalize, when it is not in their interests, and they can choose not to?
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I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to ask for 'education,' insofar as the credentialling and licensing system isn't going away anytime soon. It's important to point out though, and I'd rather people fight for affordable 'education' who can open their eyes and fight to shed the nonsense than the rich who are wallowing in the very BS that props up the system.
Look you can point out all you want how these riots are competely state contrived, but that doesn't change the fact that the students are spoiled brats who don't understand that in order for the next generation to be free from this state nightmare they must subject themselves to the higher cost of education they did not expect. In order for there to be a heaven there must be a hell.
"eliminate all state-mandated licensing and credentialling"
As in "give us an e, give us an l…"? It's a bit of a mouthful to get through between police cavalry charges!
Indeed, my university here in the UK did get some funding to build a project to get undergraduates doing more original research, and it has been embedded across many faculties and subject areas.
However when David Willetts, the HE minister, came to give a speech in June, he said that he estimated that more than 50% of students were now on what he called "licence to practice" courses, many of which, of course, would not have required a degree a generation or so ago.
So it is clearly troubling that so many young people are being forced, effectively, to pay whatever is demanded of them simply in order to get on the lowest rung of their chosen career ladder. But here again, the supply side will make it much harder for these courses to expand to meet that demand and so put downward pressure on costs.
If I were an entrepreneurial principle of a high end private secondary school indeed, I might begin to think that my next move ought to be to open a higher education department, focus on one or two of such "vocational" subjects and go hard at the professional bodies to recognise them. I reckon they could do that for half what many institutions will now be going to charge and still be financially viable. Or even charge the same as the top end university fees and cram everything into an 18 month or two year course.
I covered a lot of what Kevin has highlighted with more specific UK numbers and references in this post.
Oh nice. I just love all the down ratings. It's funny how anarchists love to bash the state, but when told how exactly to achieve freedom they get pissed off. "What? We anarchists need to have some responsibility? Give me a break!"
Then no stateless society for you then. How about just give up this whole idealistic charade, join the populistic riots and have a good time awhile you are at it. Cause you ain't ever going to see anarchy. Hail lifestyle anarchism!!!
Oooh! Ubersensitive much! Not that I either use or pay much attention to post ratings, but there are things in your post with which people may be genuinely disagreeing.
In what way have you "told [anyone] how to achieve freedom", for instance?
Also, your assertion that the students simply have to accept the higher fees as part of moving to some kind of freedom in the future I would certainly disagree with. My point, and that of Brad in another post last week, is that the government says these reforms create more of a market, whilst it is clear that they do not. If government were prepared to allow an expansion of the supply these massive fees hikes would not be inevitable.
Our one private university in the UK actually already costs less to attend, when you take fees and accommodation etc, than any of the state financed ones do under the current, lower, fees regime. So there is certainly hope that a genuinely free market would push down costs and fees rather than trebling them.
Fantastic!
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I care that a society values education, that this education be widely available, and that this education be substantially critical and humane rather than vocational and politicised.
It is abundantly clear that the neoliberal model pressures education to be narrow and vocational. It is also abundantly clear than education controlled by parents and local authorities quickly becomes illiberal. History as I read ir suggests that enormous institutional pressure is needed to make higher education either adequately funded or available to significant numbers of people. Its existence at all, in the liberal and humane sense, is rare enough.
I'm sympathetic to the anti-establishment critiques offered by someone like Paul Goodman or John Taylor Gatto. I certainly agree with the 60s radicals that most university administrations are skilled at little except selling out both teacher and student in favour of the priorities of the wealthy and prestigious. The internet has certainly vastly encouraged the feasability of self-teaching and decentralised education.
But I'm still very uncertain as regards skepticism of the university as an institution. Even in institutionalised forms, a serious community of scholars can produce a magical atmosphere which I've only elsewhere encountered at a small number of conferences and a very small number of social occasions. When enough people who truly care about understanding this world and themselves get together wonderful things can happen, and only the best videoconferences can provide an experience approximate to that of physical presence. The same thing is produced in a more diffused form in any city worthy of the name, and it's something essential to any complete notion of the good life and the human condition. An immense amount of my skepticism as regards mutualism is that I don't see a recognition of this, while most mainstream liberal groups have absorbed this recognition into their seat-at-the-table set of social standards.
I think that even the liberal wing of the current establishment is exploitive and inescapably hypocritical. It's also blown right off reality as regards the empire and its resource base and sooner or later it is doomed- whatever is to come will have to contain different structures of production adapted to different (likely tragically different) objective conditions. I don't know whether the successor system or systems will be better or worse- tho' my expectations are not optimistic.
Mutualism is certainly one of the few proposed alternatives which is potentially humanistic and economically practical. But at present it has little internal commitment or drive to maintain the standards and institutions of liberal civilisation, and I think that every responsible thinker should treat this issue as a basic life-or-death issue, one worth priority over any other issue except those critical to personal survival and the survival of loved friends.
The university is as close to anything as the beating heart of the open society, and while I would greatly welcome the proposal of superior institutions which might succeed it without its current classist and bureaucratic flaws (we're not living in a golden age of the university anyway), I become very scared when I read proposals to drop universities as we know them without carefully thought out and extensively tested alternatives in place.
Right now, the result of any scaling down of university systems would result in their replacement by the churches, whose ideals in most cases are such to inevitably lead to the building of madrassas within two generations. You can't run a free society on faith or pressured utility and most places outside the cities lack the human capital and community development to reproduce educational institutions founed on reason, science, and free inquiry. A society which preserves consciousness of intellectual freedom and its consequences- which start with civil secularism and the primacy of reason over tradition and continue to such recent developments as freedom of expression, sexual equality, or European denationalisation- that's worth everything. And currently the universities keep such things alive, usually in spite of their administrators.
Radical change of some kind is inevitable and I would prefer by temperament to subscribe to a radical philosophy. The current liberal class, while good on many essential philosophical and cultural issues, is utterly incapable of living up to its most ridiculously basic promises as regards imperial, environmental, and class issues. The state capitalist system shows every sign of driving right off the cliff despite unspeakably disastrous results for humanity and for itself. The bastards who run the show don't care in the few cases in which they're not too stupid to know what they're doing, while their liberal wing is busy jamming their eyes shut to avoid seeing what they've done or admitting how useless and impotent they've become.
Unfortunately, where's the alternative? The serious left is economically incompetent and shows no sign of creating viable institutions capable of taking over the weight of civilisation. The libertarian right is as committed to the ecological death-spiral as the oil executives and is at least as complicit in the system's exploitation as the liberal class, without even getting into their attitudes towards the problems of anyone who isn't a rich white guy. The various populist movements are the barbarians and I'd rather die than live in their world, considering what that means for women, queer people, or for freethinkers and outsiders generally. The liberals and the universities are at least here today, and they give a reasonable deal if not real equality to at least some of us who depend upon them for protection.
Where's mutualism's alternative? Everyone knows that artists and writers favour the Left (or0 the romantic/aristocratic Right) because any free market they've ever seen offers them a choice of starving homelessness and grinding work. A key difference between the political situation of 19th century Paris and 21st century America is that in France the bohemian and working classes helped each other while in today's America it's an ugly exchange of dehumanising contempt which works to neither's advantage. Where does the life of the mind find shelter under mutualism,- practically but most importantly spiritually? I'm happy with locally grown carrots and onions but no responsibly humane person can countenance an intellectual economy restricted to locally grown ideas. The happy accident of the invention of the internet eases the issue but it doesn't and can't replace the value of established communities of scholars.
It is possible that the collapse of the Empire will create conditions in which there are no good solutions. But if no solutions are offered a decline in the level of civilisation seems inevitable, and we may expect artists and intellectuals to cling to imperial institutions and politics as to life itself if no alternative is presented. This is probably not morally defensible, but God help the world if the dissolution of the Empire is purchased at the price of the values which Roderick Long likes to call "Austro-Athenian".
In the introductory pages of the College Board's 2011 CLEP (College-Level Examination Program) Official Study Guide I found the following sentence:
"Many people entering college, particularly adults returning to college after several years away from formal education, are uncertain about their ability to compete with other college students."
Now compare that to a few lines from Kevin Carson's piece:
"Colleges exist to cram people full of the skills employers demand, and to inculcate the cultural habit of taking orders from an authority figure behind a desk. Critical thinking, on the other hand, is a skill acquired through self-education, in cooperation with one’s equals, to pursue knowledge for one’s own self-determined purposes"
It seems that in institutional higher education we see individuals encouraged to be in competition with their fellows and harnessed to goals set for them by others. On the other hand (as Carson indicates), the individual's interest seems better served by “cooperation with one’s equals” and the pursuit of “knowledge for one’s own self-determined purposes". In light of the fact that getting a bachelor's degree is perhaps second only to the purchase of a home in terms of a family's, or student's, financial burdens, it seems like there is an opening here for libertarians to try to offer an alternative perspective, if not alternative learning resources and approaches. Isn't it time for a free "open-source" university? — Mit Spanner
Just as a follow up to this I found this fascinating statistic:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/the-great-…
…that roughly 60% of additional US college graduates since 1992 are working in what the Bureau for Labor Statistics would call "low skilled" occupations. Shocking but unsurprising.
Alice, as to whether universities are the "beating heart" you describe, one could just as easily claim that for several centuries universities have in fact been the gate-keepers preventing access to the wider dissemination of knowledge that Gutenberg's invention might have achieved in a free market. We must not allow them to become so for Mr Berners-Lee's invention!
No mention of "mutualization"?
Supply exceeds Demand ? There's too many college graduates ?
The linked article from the Chronicle of Higher Education was good; the discussion that followed it too. Institutional higher education is hotbed of economic rent seeking and thus a real parasitic drag on the society. The higher ed establishment creates benefits for itself at the expense of its customers. One wonders when the customers will wake up and demand alternatives.