Paying the Poorly Educated (Jack Metzger)

Joe Biden was right to propose free Pre-K education for 3- and 4-year-olds and free community college in his initial legislative package, rather than pushing for free public university education and the cancellation of college debt. All four progressive education initiatives would serve the public good by making education more available to millions. However, policies that promote university education do little to help the working class. They also feed into the false and damaging narrative that college is the right path to upward mobility for most people.

While free public universities could be transformative in the very long term, most of the benefits of this policy would go to higher-income families. They are more likely to live in areas with high-quality K-12 schools, and their children also are more likely to have the kinds of social and cultural capital that are especially advantageous for getting into and succeeding in college.

Similarly, while forgiving all or some portion of existing student loan debt would likely benefit low- and middle-income young people, who are more likely to have higher levels of debt than their more affluent contemporaries, this too has limited benefit for the working class, because it only helps those who have gone to college. That’s a large group, but forgiving their debts does nothing for the many others who aren’t in debt because they didn’t go to college at all or for very long.

Free public Pre-K and free community college, on the other hand, disproportionately benefit working-class children and adults. Free Pre-K will not only improve the educational prospects of children, but it also saves families money. For those currently using the cheapest day care, this would save some $10,000 to $15,000 a year – a significant increase in spending power for all income classes, but transformative for low- and middle-income family budgets. What’s more, for low-income parents who currently can’t afford day care and thus can’t work full time or at all, free Pre-K would allow them to work and earn more in the paid workforce.

Likewise, free community college would disproportionately benefit low-income adults and young people who cannot go to college full time because they need to work. Community college education includes apprenticeships and other pre-training that is needed for entry into many middle-wage jobs, including in the soon-to-be-expanding building trades. Free public university would mostly benefit those young people who have more time to take the long road, while free community college is more valuable for working adults who already have work and family responsibilities.

The class-skewed benefits of these initiatives are relatively complicated, but we should also pay attention to the messages they reinforce. Prioritizing free college and student debt forgiveness plays into a toxic narrative that has deep roots in our public discourse: that college-educated people are more valuable, more worthy of public subsidy, than the so-called “poorly educated.” This narrative accepts that college graduates deserve to be paid more, but it also offers a false promise: that the primary way to increase wages and living standards – or more grandly, to restore the American Dream of upward mobility — is for more and more people to get college degrees. Both these messages are false. The first reflects a nearly impregnable professional-middle-class prejudice, but the second is an intellectual error that, if corrected, could burst a professional-class bubble.

College education cannot be a path for widespread upward mobility because a large majority of jobs in our economy do not require a college education or anything like it. 61% require high school or less and another 11% require an associate’s degree, some college, or other postsecondary education – but not a bachelor’s degree. Only 28% of jobs in 2020 required a bachelor’s, a far lower percentage than the nearly 40% of workers over 25 who had that degree.

That is why we find so many men and women with bachelor’s degrees as fast food workers; retail salespersons or cashiers; waiters, waitresses or cooks; freight, stock and material movers; janitors and cleaners; and home health care or child care workers. These occupations are among those with the largest annual job openings , and all of them have median annual wages ranging from $22,740 to $29,510 (that is, less than $15 an hour).

This is a tragedy for college graduates who were told that becoming part of the exam-passing classes would lead to better lives. But for most people doing those jobs, it probably never crossed their minds that they could go to college. Still, that work needs to be done, no matter the educational attainment of the people who do it. The work they do is socially valuable, some of it even “essential,” and those jobs need to be paid a living wage. To be told that the only way to improve your life conditions is through more (and more) education is demoralizing and, especially for those who work alongside college graduates doing the same work, palpably false.

Higher education is a circuitous route to improving one’s economic prospects, a route that will not work for at least a third of those who can afford to take it, and a route that is not realistically available for the majority of our population. If we want to improve wages and conditions, we need to improve them directly, not by producing more college grads.

President Biden’s initial transformative legislative package that got whittled down to Build Back Better (BBB) embodied the understanding that education was neither the answer nor even an important part of the answer for achieving upward mobility. That initial package included a $15-an-hour minimum wage and the union-empowering Pro-Act that were quickly jettisoned because they could not avoid a Republican filibuster the way budget bills can. But, equally or even more important, many elements of Build Back Better provided for a series of enhanced social wages that together would have dramatically improved life prospects across the board – none more important than the package of child care subsidies that included universal free Pre-K.

Social wages explicitly recognize that even with better minimum wages and stronger unions, most wages will not come close to reflecting the collective social value workers provide. Nor are wages going to be sufficient to provide decent incomes for most people most of the time. Reducing the cost of health care, housing, transportation, and child care (all of which BBB would have addressed) increases the real incomes of all workers, and it has the most dramatic effect on low-wage workers.

By prioritizing those workers, most of whom do not have college degrees, the Biden package had the potential to pierce the professional-class prejudice that has dominated public policy. Both Presidents Bush and Obama proclaimed that more and better education was the only way to address our savage inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity. Biden, by contrast, is the first president in memory to actually brag about creating well-paying jobs that do not require any college.

Alas, Build Back Better – let alone the initial, larger version of itself – is dead for now, and the possibility of a truly transformational package becoming law is probably gone for the immediate future. But a healthy majority of the public and more than 90% of Congressional Democrats supported the core idea of increasing taxes on corporations and the rich in order to transfer money to workers and citizens in ways that could dramatically increase working-class people’s chances for creating better lives. Hopefully, that support shows a shift away from the idea that education is the only path to improved life prospects. A public consensus may be developing that even the poorly educated deserve to earn a good living.

Jack Metzgar

Jack Metzgar is author of the recent Cornell ILR Press book, Bridging the Divide: Working-Class Culture in a Middle-Class Society.

*This article first appeared in Working Class Perspectives.

Related link: The College Dream is Over (Gary Roth)

Related link: The Power of Recognizing Higher Ed Faculty as Working-Class (Helena Worthen)

The Power of Recognizing Higher Ed Faculty as Working-Class (Helena Worthen)

Just over 20 years ago, Michael Zweig published The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret. At that year’s How Class Works conference at SUNY Stony Brook, academics from history, political science, labor and industrial relations, and other fields debated Zweig’s use of the term “working class.” Some thought it was a throwback to the 1930s or a tip-off that someone was a Marxist. But even at a conference attended by many academics from working-class backgrounds, no one pointed out that academics are working class. Twenty years ago, academia still seemed like a middle-class or even an upper-class job, even though that had started to change in the mid 1970s.Young academics expected that if they did “all the right things,” they would get tenure and live happily ever after.

That expectation was wrong in 2002, and it’s even worse now, as this grim report shows. Nearly 75% of faculty in higher education are precarious workers, more like restaurant and hospitality workers, gig performers, contract healthcare workers, and delivery drivers than the tenured professor. They are hired on a per-class, per-semester basis. They do not control the conditions of their work. They often lack access to offices, professional development, research funds, and opportunities to collaborate with peers or vote in faculty meetings. They may be asked to take on a new course with a week or less warning. Many are told what textbooks to use and what tests to give. They are likely to have to apply for a new campus parking permit or library card every semester. But they also don’t get personal respect. They are vulnerable to management whim, favoritism, harassment, and simple forgetfulness, not to mention a complaint from a single disgruntled student who wanted a better grade.

Many contingent faculty are shocked to realize that college teaching is a working-class job. But recognizing that can be liberating. Thinking about ourselves as “working class” clarifies our understanding of our contingency by helping us identify with the 99% instead of the 1%. It can also inspire us to build alliances to improve our conditions and our industry.

First of all, it helps us appreciate and identify with our students, who are increasingly working class, and like us, probably working more than one job to make ends meet. We see their problems as our problems and become open to talking about common solutions. In turn they can see more accurately what it takes to be an academic and live the paradox of “love the work, hate the job.”

Second, it helps us understand and appreciate graduate student’s efforts to win the right to be recognized as employees (not “apprentices” on a stipend) who rely on their jobs for living. Graduate student organizing is one of the hottest areas in the campus labor movement – and possibly in the labor movement overall — these days, with wins coming in from unions like USW at the University of Pittsburgh, UE at University of Iowa, UAW at Harvard and the University of California and SEIU at Duke, Northwestern, Saint Louis University, and American University, just to name a few.

Third, thinking of ourselves as workers can help us understand the value of building campus labor coalitions, organizations that include not just academics but also clerical workers, the trades, transportation, custodial, food service, and technical workers. Such coalitions create power through the interdependency of all the workforces in a college or university.

Fourth, concerns about the working conditions of contingents can form a basis for solidarity with the privileged 25% who are tenured and tenure-line faculty. They usually resist this idea, but the reality of how their work has changed provides a strong argument. Over the worklives of senior faculty, colleges and universities tightened their belts, drained resources from the classroom, built arenas instead of libraries, created freestanding “foundations” that were outside faculty control, and engaged in a series of internet-based shocks like contracting out administrative functions like payroll to IT companies, putting journals on line, shifting classes to Blackboard and Moodle, experimenting with MOOCs, and much more. At the same time, requirements for tenure-track hiring and promotion were raised, contingent faculty became the majority, and administrative and advising work for tenure-line faculty increased. Some schools hired CEOs to run institutions like businesses. With all this, tenure-line faculty were progressively cut out of the full exercise of shared governance. All this degraded the institution of higher education, and not just for the contingent majority. These changes affect students, tenure line and contingent faculty, and staff alike.

The good news is that some are organizing for change. Higher Education Labor United (HELU), a new organization that came out of the organizing around College for All, has been endorsed by 117 locals from eight national unions and organizations. HELU uses the term “labor” broadly: its membership includes unions representing clerical, staff, and other workforces as well as faculty. The leadership team comes from colleges and universities in 29 states. HELU aims to establish a national strategy for higher education, something that the traditional faculty unions, AAUP, NEA and AFT, were never able to cooperate to achieve.

To get this rolling, HELU is convening a free Winter Summit, February 23-27, on Zoom. The conference will feature four afternoons of workshops and several keynote presentations, all focused on three goals: coordinate the surge of higher education worker organizing across the country, develop federal policy proposals to reverse the trends that have damaged higher education over the last several decades, and support politicians who will advance a program of democratizing higher education. Members of endorsing organizations will have opportunities to participate in decision-making.

The vision guiding the young leaders of HELU is broad working-class mobilizing to address the crisis in higher education. To accomplish that, it’s time for faculty see themselves as members of the working class and stand together to fight for change.

Helena Worthen, University of Illinois

This essay first appeared in Working-Class Perspectives. Thank you Helena Worthen, Sherry Linkon, and John Russo for permitting us to reprint this important article. 

Helena Worthen is the co-author, with Joe Berry of Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Majority in Higher Education (Pluto, 2021). She has worked and taught as a labor educator and teacher unionist in California, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Illinois.

 

Related link: Working-Class Perspectives  

Community Colleges at the Heart of College Meltdown

Community college enrollment has dropped by 1.6 million students (23%) in the last six years.  Even worse, full-time enrollment at community colleges has dropped by 36% over the last 6 years. Source for Data: National Student Clearinghouse.

US college enrollment has dropped by about 2.5 million students over the last six years, but this College Meltdown has not been spread evenly.

For-profit colleges have been hardest hit in their percentage decline of students and campus closings. But community colleges, which may be the best educational value for working families, have been even harder hit in the sheer numbers who are not attending.

While the for-profit college crash has been well documented in the media, the crisis in community colleges has been under-reported.

For-profit colleges have seen a decline of about 600,000 students since their peak, but community college enrollment has declined even more, by 1.6 million.

[Image below:  Most US community colleges have seen enrollment declines. Data from National Center for Education Statistics]

The reaction to the community college downturn has ranged from punitive to progressive: reduced state and local funding, higher tuition, reduced student and family services, fewer teachers, lower educational standards--and free college tuition:

• In Arizona, state funding has been eliminated and services have been cut. 
• In Louisiana, there have been large program cuts and teacher layoffs. 
• In Nebraska and Iowa, tuition is being raised.  
• In Virginia and Arkansas, tuition is also being raised. 
• In Florida, placement exams have been eliminated, and funding has been cut for developmental education.
• In New Jersey, Rowan University has partnered with two community colleges for seamless transfers. 
• In Texas, community colleges are offering dual enrollment for high school students in order to fill seats. 
• In Tennessee and Oregon, community college tuition is free.
• In New York, community college tuition will be free for families making less than $125,000 per year, starting in June 2017.

In 2003, 53% of all community colleges offered campus child care. In 2015, only 44% had it.

At the national level, the dearth of reporting on the community college downturn begs more questions:

1. What community colleges have been hardest hit?
2. What has happened to all the people who have decided not to go to a community college?
3. Why do you think the enrollment crisis in US community colleges has been under-reported?

When college choice is a fraud

Students are targeted and lied to by subprime colleges and they are often treated with indifference by public education.

In 2014, USC graduate student Constance Iloh and her advisor Dr. William Tierney examined the "rational choices" behind college choice. Their subjects were more than 130 students who had chosen either a community college or for-profit college for a vocational nursing or surgical technician associate’s degree.

Rational choice, a common theory in mainstream economics, refers to the theory that individuals make decisions to maximize their benefits and minimize their costs. By talking to focus groups, the researchers hoped to find out why students chose a $30,000 for-profit education lasting 13 months or a $5,000 public program taking two years to finish. Both schools had graduation rates of about 30%.

In the Iloh and Tierney study, students who chose for-profit colleges said that community colleges presented too many barriers and that their schools offered more convenience and accessibility in scheduling and location. With accelerated schedules, for-profit students thought they could graduate earlier than if they attended a community college--which was important as they weighed important family obligations.

Some for-profit college students also believed their education was superior to a community college because it offered more "hands on" opportunities. The researchers did not dig deeper though, to investigate how the students came up with their ideas.

Although most of the students were probably women, and many were working-class people and people of color, the researchers did not discuss important race, class, and gender issues. The researchers also ignored examining cross-culturally: what other nations have done to make higher education more effective, socially just, and democratic, or even how various states in the United States have made college free or low cost to its citizens.

"Rational choice" in US education, however, must be examined in a society affected by deindustrialization and deskilling of work, government austerity and the defunding of public education, neoliberalism, structural racism, increasing economic inequality and reduced intergenerational social mobility, social myths perpetuated by predatory marketing, and ultimately--difficult choices caused by "the injuries of class."

The truth is, millions of hard working low-wage workers (including single mothers, disabled military veterans, struggling immigrants, people with learning challenges or those who have had fewer educational opportunities) may be looking for the most obvious way to achieve the American Dream, whether it's from a message in their email inbox or a friendly voice at the other end of the telephone.

But that's the essence of the for-profit con--something that Iloh and Tierney downplay.  There are subprime schools regularly trolling for the most vulnerable people.

The researchers also fail to recognize that some for-profit students continue along the more financially expensive route, even after realizing they've made a bad choice, believing they have sunk too much into their investment to quit--and knowing that their credits won't transfer.

Theories of Sunken Investment, Time Discounting, and Asymmetric Information may be useful in understanding the difficult personal choices that working class people face--but theories of justice must also be utilized.

Sadly, this study really shows the dysfunctional nature of US education in general. Whether a working class student chooses a for-profit college, community college, or public or private university, he or she is taking on significant risks of either not graduating, taking on enormous debt, subjecting family members to debt obligations, or being taken away from important family interests.

Dr. Tierney is not an objective researcher (no researcher is). He is a tenured professor at an elite university who believes for-profit colleges have a role in American neoliberal society. And he has colleagues who have profited from this line of thinking. Tierney believes for-profit schools have problems, but that they can be reformed. With the poor state of many subprime for-profit colleges and community colleges, it's difficult to imagine how educational reform is possible.

To make better informed choices, working-class people surely need to learn about the myths of college and the sales pitches that are used to hook unsuspecting prospects. But even that is not enough. Without social justice, fairness, and access in society, people will be compelled to pray and make the best of unjust and limited "rational" choices.

"If we expect to increase the rate of degree completion, we must invest in early childhood education and enhance the quality of precollegiate education, especially for students who are African American, Hispanic, and low income" --Diane Ravitch

An earlier version of this article is available at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/college-choice-rational-dahn-shaulis?trk=mp-author-card