Professor X (18 page)

But I can't accuse the schools of villainy.

Oh, it is sometimes tempting. Sometimes one looks askance. The colleges at which I teach sometimes seem like busy factories, mounting second and third shifts of learning when the daytime students are busy with such regular extracurricular pursuits as tapping kegs. Why leave a blackboard unused?

This story actually got me thinking about my own schedule. A 4:00-to-6:15-A.M. Fundamentals of Poetry would suit me to a tee.

Colleges are blessed with a magical business model. They market a product that American consumers do not need to be sold on, and I don't suppose we can blame the colleges for that. From top to bottom, from coast to coast, our society views college not as a consumer product at all, but as both a surefire, can't-lose financial investment and, even more crucial than that, a moral imperative.

USA Today
ran a story in 2009 that wondered if, in a recession, the cost of college was really worth the economic benefits.
¹³
The story led with an account of a young woman who came out of college with a double major in journalism and anthropology and $80,000 in debt; her difficulties began when she got laid off from her job as an information technology recruiter—a profession, I note, not even in her major field of study, leading me to wonder exactly how crucial her degree was. The thrust of the story was that although college is necessary to maximize income, the amount of the college “earnings premium” has been greatly inflated, encouraging students to take out loans that are imprudent. College graduates will not earn an additional $1 million over the course of their work life, as has been reported. (That's an old saw, like others I have heard: remember “If you're choosing between taking vacations and having a nice house, buy the house, because having a great house is like being on perpetual vacation”?) The figure is closer to $450,000, and that must be reduced by the amount of college debt incurred.

After the story appeared, readers who wrote letters to the editors found themselves displeased by the reductivist argument. “The educated person is more likely to contribute ideas and values necessary to sustaining a democratic society,” said one correspondent. “To look at education in economic terms alone is cynical and shortsighted; it does a disservice to your readers.” Another wrote that “in our increasingly global, knowledge-based economy, no one can expect to thrive—or even maintain a middle-class lifestyle—without some form of high-quality postsecondary degree or credential.”
¹⁴
But is this really true?

Colleges benefit from many Americans' refusal to worry about who is going to pick up the tab. But that may be changing. In the professional literature and the popular media, there is a growing urgency to the warnings about the economic quicksand of higher education. Our recent recession has transformed the rather routine warnings of years past about how expensive college is into clarion calls about how really, truly, crazily expensive college is. Tamara Draut, vice president of policy and programs at Demos, a national public policy and research organization, posits that since federal student aid has shifted from grants to loans, we have moved to what she calls a “debt-for-diploma system.” She characterizes growing student debt as a “drag” preventing an entire generation of young people from getting ahead.
¹⁵

In the
New York Times,
the chairman of the Religion Department at Columbia University laments the way university admissions officers have for years marketed their product using the lifetime-income-earnings saw. “But with the cost of an undergraduate degree well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, this argument is no longer persuasive,” he says. “The collapse of our public education system and the skyrocketing cost of private education threaten to make college unaffordable for millions of young people. If recent trends continue, four years at a top-tier school will cost $330,000 in 2020, $525,000 in 2028 and $785,000 in 2035.”
¹⁶

It is currently all but impossible to wipe away federal or private student loans. Congress, fearing that newly minted graduates would immediately file for bankruptcy, saw to that. According to the three-pronged “undo hardship” test established by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in
Brunner v. New York State Higher Education Services Corporation
back in 1987, a debtor wishing to discharge student loans must show

That second prong of the test, the one concerned with “additional circumstances,” is the tricky one. As Charles Booker writes in the
Journal of Law & Education,
debtors “have to prove not only that they are currently overwhelmed and unable to pay, but that they have honestly tried and that such conditions will last long into the future. In particular, there must be unique or exceptional conditions that can sufficiently be shown to last for a significant portion of the loan. This presents a tremendous roadblock, as student loans can last upwards of 30 years.” Debtors must “substantiate the position that their financial struggles will continue over any possibility of obtaining future resources.”
¹⁸

High-profile bankruptcy expert Elizabeth Warren has been warning of the dangers of student debt for years. “We tend to talk about student loans in the abstract, ‘ten or twenty thousand dollars—it's not that much,' ” she told the
New York Times
in 2006. “But I think it's really about what it means to be 28 and try to make loan payments and health insurance premiums and still put something aside for a down payment for a house. Think about how much extra room you have to have in your budget to cover those three things. Most can't do it.”
¹⁹

The mortgage meltdown has served as a grim reminder that, even in carefree America, the good times don't necessarily just keep rolling on. Narratives all have endings, and those endings can be cataclysmic. I don't advocate bankruptcy as a simple solution to excessive debt, but at least it is a solution. Notwithstanding the recent Supreme Court decision in the Espinosa case—which could conceivably crack the door to the discharging of academic debt through bankruptcy—there is at the moment no solution to student loan debt. It doesn't go away. It is a catarrh that will not dissipate, a strangulating blockage that cannot be cleared. It can squeeze the very life out of a debtor, and we seem rather cavalierly to be encouraging more and more students to take it on for fewer and fewer rewards.

Americans believe in college. A poll conducted several years ago by the
Chronicle of Higher Education
found that “the public's trust in colleges ranks near the top among all kinds of institutions, right along with its faith in the U.S. military and in churches and religious organizations. . . . Nearly 93 percent of respondents agreed that higher-education institutions are one of the most valuable resources to the United States.”
²⁰

That was back in 2004, but, if anything, the American public is more college-crazed than ever. Nearly 70 percent of all those who graduated from high school from October 2007 to October 2008 went on to enroll in some manner of college program.
²¹
All this pushing for college has worked. College enrollment increased from 17.5 million students in the year 2000 to 20.5 million in 2006, an increase of about 17 percent.
²²

The American college juggernaut is in full swing, and unless someone finds himself imbued with the entrepreneurial spirit, there are few other options. “The evidence for the individual economic benefits of college is overwhelming,” says Sandy Baum, professor emerita of economics at Skidmore College and senior analyst for the College Board. “While the wage premium for a college education is not at its highest level ever, it is larger than it was five years ago, and typical four-year-college graduates earn more than 50 percent above typical high-school graduates.”
²³

My students believe this; that is why they are there. But some of them, I think—particularly when they are asked, as prospective medical technologists, to turn in a paper comparing Nathaniel Hawthorne's “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Minister's Black Veil”—may have an inkling that we all have been caught in a trap of our own making. They may think of all the second-tier colleges of the United States, after sitting through three classes of
Hamlet
with me, as “springes to catch woodcocks,” as Shakespeare would say.

The requirements for higher education in many occupations are self-imposed, and probably not really necessary. As Stephen J. McNamee and Robert K. Miller Jr. point out in
The Meritocracy Myth
:

And why wouldn't employers want their workers to have at least a couple of years of college under their belts? What's the harm? Doesn't college broaden the mind, expand the spirit, make for a measured and reasoning workforce? Isn't an expansion of college enrollment a societal good? I think that most Americans sincerely believe this is so, though the aspirations of their prospective employers may be more pedestrian. Here are McNamee and Miller again:

Of course the biggest winners in the game of credential inflation are the colleges themselves. We think of colleges as entities that wouldn't dirty their hands even thinking about money. We forget that each individual employee—from the janitors and security force, through the adjuncts and the full-time professors, up to the directors, vice presidents, and even the college president—has an economic interest in growing enrollments. In an industrial society, according to McNamee and Miller, not only do the educational requirements of jobs increase with technological change, but jobs not necessarily touched by technology are “continuously upgraded” in their skill requirements. The end result, as they tell us, is “educational expansion: educational requirements for employment continually rise and more and more people are required to spend longer and longer periods in school.”

But Americans, in their naïveté, do not think much about college expansion. Higher education is an unalloyed good. Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, speaking about college access at a meeting of the White House Task Force on Middle-Class Families, is right on point there talking about the college premium. He and Sandy Baum are singing off the same page of the hymnal. Geithner notes that a “college education is one of the best investments a family can make. Beyond the many intangible rewards, economists estimate that college graduates earn 50 percent more than otherwise similar high school graduates over the course of their lifetimes.”
²⁵

How pleasing that must be to his boss, for Barack Obama is the number-one college booster in America today. He has a special place in his heart for community colleges. What better news in a recession, I thought, when I first heard the rumors, still dim and indistinct, that community colleges would have a large role to play in America's continuing economic recovery. Here I was worried that class enrollments would shrink, and I as an adjunct, low man on the totem pole, would be taking cuts in pay and hours.