Thomas Frank has the guaranteed best headline of a week which is just beginning: “Congratulations, class of 2014: You’re totally screwed.” As I’ve done in the past at TD, he’s written, unasked and uninvited, his own commencement speech for the class of 2014 – and it’s on why those students have just paid so much more money for, and gone so into debt for, a college education that isn’t better, but worse than the one their parents got. They have, among other things, been taught ever more not by tenured professors but by anxious adjuncts (being screwed themselves), or as he writes, “part-time workers without any kind of job security who are the majority of the instructors on campus, and in general these adjuncts are paid poorly and receive few benefits. That is who does the work of knowledge-transmission at the ever-so costly, ever-so excellent American university: Freelancers. Contract laborers.” Education at the highest levels is increasingly a kind of thievery. Tom “Welcome to the wide world, Class of 2014. You have by now noticed the tremendous consignment of debt that the authorities at your college have spent the last four years loading on your shoulders. It may interest you to know that the average student-loan borrower among you is now $33,000 in debt, the largest of any graduating class ever. According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, carrying that kind of debt will have certain predictable effects. It will impede your ability to accumulate wealth, for example. You will also borrow more for other things than people without debt, and naturally you will find your debt level growing, not shrinking, as the years pass. “As you probably know, neither your parents nor your grandparents were required to take on this kind of burden in order to go to college. Neither are the people of your own generation in France and Germany and Argentina and Mexico. “But in our country, as your commencement speaker will no doubt tell you, the universities are “excellent.” They are “world-class.” Indeed, they are all that stands between us and economic defeat by the savagely competitive peoples of Europe and Asia. So a word of thanks is in order, Class of 2014: By borrowing those colossal amounts and turning the proceeds over to the people who run our higher ed system, you have done your part to maintain American exceptionalism, to keep our competitive advantage alive.” salon/2014/05/18/congratulations_class_of_2014_youre_totally_screwed/
Posted on: Mon, 19 May 2014 11:53:29 +0000
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