“It’s dogma that’s always the problem.”
-Iain McGilchrist
May 13th, 2023 - Anchorage, AK - Issue 23
College is cruel, ask any college student who must work full time (or even part time) while studying, or any student who must take care of family members. The college admission process is also cruel, ask any person without the privilege of preparatory resources (to include time/bandwidth to apply for scholarships) or the benefit of rich/well connected parents. The classist, sometimes fully unjustifiable college degree hierarchy can also be cruel, ask any person who who works with someone more educationally qualified and yet less practically or socially qualified than them or any pre-tenure professor.
This is not to argue that college is a hopeless or worthless institution. Sure, college (at least the U.S. version) is the morbidly expensive continuation of long disproven teach-to-test methods used in public education beginning in childhood, but college education is crucial to maintenance of modern infrastructure and research progress and, arguably, the human development of individual students. This is not to make the claim that all academic achievement manifests in unjustified hierarchy, this is instead to point out that in some instances (which are quite widespread) the result of college education is unjustified hierarchy.
The merits of college are in many way obvious, for instance the very subject at hand here, essentially the harmful implications of the myth of meritocracy, is an argument one is likely to encounter in a university setting. The thing about college as it currently exists, is that its intellectual precepts are often gatekept, taught to test, and wielded in an arguably anti-intellectual bid for high ground (be it moral or credential).
There is no justification for a hierarchy that structures itself almost solely based on inherited wealth, and some combination of inherited wealth and a different form of luck is not only needed in order to access secondary education institutions, it is also required to afford to survive both while studying and post graduation. (When work in a related field requires unpaid internship or experience exactly of the type that is precluded by the demands of college studies.) Here also it should be mentioned that the implementation of affirmative action into admission decisions can make some claims to effective diversification of college student demographics, but it structurally does not account for the experiential diversity of the type that poverty and trauma affects, irrespective of a person’s identity. This institution is not the meritocracy it purports to be, this institution is, in many ways, an aristocratic hierarchy.
Best case scenario, if the stars of good fortune all do align, college students graduate with a degree in hand (and often a boatload of debt) that is meant to be proof of their educational qualification and heightened aptitude to succeed in the work force. While it is appreciable that a higher number of these graduates than ever before embody intersections of identity that were previously excluded from such achievements (people of color, immigrants, disabled folks, etc.), the cost prohibitive nature of college does churn out highly (by virtue of their college degree) qualified, intellectually incurious folks, right alongside authentically intellectually curious ones. Regressive mentalities towards learning and human flourishing result in uncritical perpetuation of hegemony, political complacency, and structural oppression.
This is not an exhaustive telling of the harmful impacts of college level education. College institutions shape the workforce they are intended to credential. Scientific research is not incentivized to solve for reality, the hierarchical, academic status incentive structure instead solves for corporate, federal, state, municipal, and personal profit. Though pathways to improvement exist (and have in some instances been laudably approached), the incompatible aims of an intellectual curiosity-stimulation and profit maximization have made a harmful pseudoscience of college degrees.
How important is it to maintain an expensive hoop jumping model of higher education?
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