The new academic year is almost upon us, which brings with it a lot of reflections on the new academic year by procrastinating academics. Like, um, me… And also fellow small-college professor Timothy Burke, who’s had two posts recently that play into my annual noodling-instead-of-syllabus-writing.
One of these, “Academia: Brain Surgery Versus the Filter” has two specific bits that I wanted to respond to, and a bit of a larger theme that I need to chew over more. The first specific bit was an analysis of the class distribution of going to college:
A few years back a colleague of mine and I did an exercise with a group of students where we used a chart developed by the New York Times that was focused on this data. The chart represented the relationship between household wealth and the probability of attending college; the gimmick was that the reader had to complete the chart themselves and then see it compared to the real data. Essentially it was asking what your intuition was about the relationship between attending college and wealth. What our students predicted was that there would be a drop-off around the upper 5% of the wealth distribution, that the extremely wealthy would have no need to attend college because they already had their trust funds in hand and plenty of social connections that would let them walk in the door into all sorts of interesting work without any specific educational credential.
It was a reasonable prediction! If college really is just about the jobs, then people who have no need to acquire a particular educational training in order to make a decent living should just skip it. But in fact, when you unveil the real chart, at the absolute upper limits of the household income distribution, you come pretty damn close to 100% enrollment in university. Why? Because universities today provide social capital, they provide reputation, they set the culture of economically privileged cultural worlds and highly trained professional workplaces alike. The child of an extremely wealthy family doesn’t want to feel out of place in the company of many wealth-adjacent upper middle-class professionals.
I actually think this is overthinking things a bit, in a sort of classically academic manner, where everything reduces to power relationships between defined groups. I suspect that the actual reason is much more banal: the sons and daughters of the ultra-rich go to college not for any particular benefit that it confers, but for the same reason that rich people vacation in St. Bart’s or Tahiti or wherever it is that the private-jet-set is hanging out these days. They go to college because being in college is pretty awesome.
For traditional-age students of any class background, attending an elite-tier college or university in the US is a period of both freedom from both parental authority and (to overstate things slightly) freedom from personal responsibility. You get to live together with a set of like-minded peers, with considerably less adult supervision than has been the norm to that point, in an environment that is designed to be maximally supportive in terms of providing food and shelter and ample entertainment opportunities. You’re free to indulge more or less whatever respectable interests you may have— intellectual, artistic, athletic— with very little risk or cost of failure, and the pursuit of less respectable interests— sex, drugs, and the music of your choice— is tolerated to a greater degree than it would be in many other settings.
Given the opportunity, why wouldn’t you opt in to that?
Please note that this is not in any way incompatible with the idea of college as an intellectual experience (defined somewhat broadly). “Here for the learning” and “Here for the social scene” are largely orthogonal axes, across a vast range of socioeconomic strata. There are rich kids at elite schools who are impressively dedicated to their studies, and poor ones who are squandering their opportunities on hedonism. And there are kids across the economic spectrum who take the “Work hard, play hard” approach, and likewise those who exert minimal effort on both classwork and socialization. Having the freedom to make those choices is part of the package.
I think it’s a mistake to see college attendance as a grimly transactional relationship, where people swap cash for “social capital.” There’s a bit of that, but it’s sort of ancillary, particularly for the ultra-rich— people at the highest level of wealth already have social capital, and don’t gain all that much more from having a degree from any particular school. What they’re buying is a very particular kind of shared experience with other folks of similar age and interests, one that is genuinely attractive in its own right.
(The college environment is attractive enough that it pulls in a fair number of less-than-young adults, who enjoy being a part of a college community enough to accept well-below-market wages to be career academics…)
The second specific point from that post comes a bit later on, in the context of discussing the difference between jobs that demand specific skills and those that don’t. Burke correctly notes a sort of contrast between the espoused values of many institutions of higher education and their strict hiring practices:
On the second, if there is any subject that drives me out of my gourd more in the context of liberal education it is watching universities and colleges that extol themselves as devoted to the liberal arts then turn around and privilege highly specific professional training in making most of their staff hires. There are jobs within a contemporary university that require specific prior educational credentials to be done right, and some that require really specific enumerated skills and knowledge to be done right. I don’t want the person who is in charge of the energy infrastructure on a large, complex university campus to be an affable theater major who totes knows how to look up DIY stuff on YouTube; I want the comptroller to be a CPA or CMA. But there are lots of middle-ranking jobs in almost any large organization where you’d be better off looking for someone with common sense, diligence, and a quick uptake who has a strong base of generalist knowledge than looking for a person with a pertinent credential. (In the context of higher education, I’m going to say that at least some credentialing programs in higher ed management actually undercut common sense and adaptability of their students.) This is where the use of educational attainment as a filter is doing bad work as an accelerant of inequality and an attack on social mobility.
This ties into the other post, Academia: Myths and Mysteries in Histories, which has a discussion of a closely related trend:
I’m not imagining that faculty were once seen as stewards of the whole institution and were trusted in that role, that once upon a time leadership thought “Hey, a bunch of people with Ph.Ds, they’ll have some good ideas about this new thing we want to do and they’ll add some important data or information to it”. Somehow stewardship became partnership became participation became stakeholding became human capital became talent retention became something to manage and nudge and constrain became something to keep away from most decisions.
I can trace how it happened and when it happened but I’m not sure I have any understanding of why. I don’t think it’s austerity and I don’t think it’s some kind of naturalized will-to-power. I can’t rationalize it easily in terms of money or authority. I don’t know if this is about solving a problem in someone’s eyes because I’m not clear what the problem is or was in the minds of people introducing changes. A lot of things used to work pretty damn well when they were informal and implicit, and work less well in various ways when they’re not. (More labor time, less optimal outcomes, less clarity despite the formality, and anything outside the procedure becomes illicit and indescribable despite still determining most outcomes.)
Maybe it’s thought that consistency and formality were the road to equity and diversity? If so, that’s not how it turned out, for the most part, but I also don’t think of some of the moments in this shift as coming from people who seemed to have that goal in mind.
The credentialism he laments in the first post is very much of a piece with the process of formalization described in the second. And I think that connecting it to DEI is not too far off the mark— certainly many of the more-formal processes are sold in that way. But I would agree that their ultimate origin is not always in a sincere desire to make academia more diverse or equitable— sometimes it is, but more often it springs from a sincere desire to not lose a lawsuit over equity-related issues.
It’s absolutely true that there are a great many jobs, in academia and outside of academia, that do not require anything more than “common sense, diligence, and a quick uptake who has a strong base of generalist knowledge.” Hiring people on that basis, though, requires giving individual managers considerable discretion to make decisions that look beyond formal qualifications to assess the character of individual applicants in a holistic way.
But that’s exactly the situation that enables the existence of “old-boy networks” and other forms of institutional bias. Or, perhaps worse from an institutional perspective, it creates the appearance of enabling institutional bias, whether or not the people making the decisions are actually acting in a problematic manner. And that opens the door to lawsuits.
The solution to this is exactly the kind of proceduralization that Burke talks about: rather than an informal process where you try to suss out whether a person without formal training has the generalist skills to do the job, you create a checklist of readily verifiable credentials. This complicates everything and closes out some people who might be very good, but insulates individuals and the institution from various kinds of legal action. Clearly defined hiring criteria and evaluation rubrics are not a lot of fun, nor are they a clear path to improving diversity or equity. They are, however, powerful lawyer repellent.
Unfortunately, identifying the cause in this way also points out the general intractability of the problem. Short of a wholesale societal transformation that makes Americans less litigious, I don’t know that there’s any way out of the trap of formalization-as-legal-protection. And I doubt that’s any more likely than the achievement of True Socialism in my lifetime.
The third thing floating around this is a kind of generalized angst about what the whole college thing is, y’know, for. That sort of hangs over both of these more specific points, and rolls into one of my pet concerns, namely that I worry about pushing kids toward attending college who, for reasons of personal development and tastes and inclination, don’t find higher education especially congenial. But that’s a Very Big Issue and one that refuses to resolve into a clear picture with a plausible solution even more stubbornly than the lawyer thing does. So I’ll keep kicking it around, and maybe come back to it another time.
For now, I have successfully avoided doing actual class prep for another couple of hours, so I’m going to hit “send” and go see about lunch and maybe doing some actual work…
So there’s your end-of-summer dose of academic angst. Classes start next week, so between that and Labor Day, I doubt I’ll post much, but if you want to see whether my procrastinatory impulses take over, here’s a button:
And if you want to take issue with any of the above, the comments will be open (though I will note in advance that I’m probably going to be stepping away from the computer for a chunk of the afternoon, and likely won’t respond quickly):
You're right of course that credentialism is what's moving between the two pieces, and it's right to say that just wanting people with common sense, good judgment and generalist knowledge is very close to the way that old-boy networks understood themselves to operate--"our kind of man", "a good fit", and all that.
The problem with credentialism and its accompanying formalisms is in a sense the same problem with any attempt to use formal regulatory power to change (or outright ban) culture rather than, well, changing culture via getting people to think differently, not because they've been ordered to but because they've been convinced somehow to think differently. Nobody's heart or mind was ever changed by a two-hour DEI self-guided training course that is primarily aimed at protecting an institution from legal liability, and when formalisms and credentialism lead to bypassing a plainly excellent person in favor of someone who has the degree but not the capacity, it undercuts the entire transformative project. The ideological insistence by some DEI advocates that this by definition *never happens* is just wrong.
Moreover, this shift is yet another of the many changes that no one ever bothers to imagine in terms of trade-offs. Even if credentialism and formalization prevent insidious kinds of favoritism, they also impose high costs on job-seekers that knock many potentially excellent people who can't afford the pursuit of the credential, they lead to administrative bloat (because now suddenly you've defined jobs so that no one is carrying three or four different portfolios or responsibilities in a generalist way), they impede the institution's responsiveness to changing circumstances, and they intensify hierarchy.
Looking for jack-of-all-trades generalists who can adapt to changing conditions and matching them to the kinds of jobs that require that sort of mindset doesn't *have* to be old-boyism; old-boyism is a subset of the larger set of that approach. I'm really convinced there are ways to welcome people with implicit or unexplored talents and perspectives into institutional work and train them into the jobs rather than privilege people with intensely specialized degrees which do not intensify older kinds of elitism but are in fact better at recruiting diversity and accomplishing inclusion.