For the last decade and a half, I’ve been teaching ethics to undergraduates. Now — admittedly, a little late to the party — I’ve started seriously questioning my own ethics. I’ve begun to wonder just what it means to be a participant, however minor, in the pyramid scheme that higher education has become in the years since I went to college.
Airplane Games
Sometime in the late 1980s, the Airplane
Game roared through the San Francisco Bay Area lesbian community. It was a
classic pyramid scheme, even if
cleverly dressed up in language about women’s natural ability to generate
abundance, just as we gestate children in our miraculous wombs. If the
connection between feminism and airplanes was a little murky — well, we
could always think of ourselves as modern-day Amelia
Earharts. (As long as we didn’t think too hard about how she ended
up.)
A few
women made a lot of money from it — enough, in the case of one friend of mine,
for a down payment on a house. Inevitably, a lot more of us lost money, even as
some like me stood on the sidelines sadly shaking our heads.
There
were four tiers on that “airplane”: a captain, two co-pilots, four crew, and 8
passengers — 15 in all to start. You paid $3,000 to get on at the back of the
plane as a passenger, so the first captain (the original scammer), got out with
$24,000 — $3,000 from each passenger. The co-pilots and crew, who were in on
the fix, paid nothing to join. When the first captain “parachuted out,” the
game split in two, and each co-pilot became the captain of a new plane. They
then pressured their four remaining passengers to recruit enough new women to
fill each plane, so they could get their payday, and the two new co-pilots
could each captain their own planes.
Unless
new people continued to get on at the back of each plane, there would be no
payday for the earlier passengers, so the pressure to recruit ever more women
into the game only grew. The original scammers ran through the game a couple of
times, but inevitably the supply of gullible women willing to invest their
savings ran out. By the time the game collapsed, hundreds of women had lost
significant amounts of money.
No
one seemed to know the women who’d brought the game and all those “planes” to
the Bay Area, but they had spun a winning story about endless abundance and the
glories of women’s energy. After the game collapsed, they took off for another
women’s community with their “earnings,” leaving behind a lot of sadder,
poorer, and perhaps wiser San Francisco lesbians.
Feasting at the Tenure Trough or Starving in
the Ivory Tower?
So,
you may be wondering, what could that long-ago scam have to do with my ethical
qualms about working as a college instructor? More than you might think.
Let’s start with PhD programs. In 2019, the most recent year for
which statistics are available, U.S. colleges and universities churned out
about 55,700 doctorates —
and such numbers continue to increase by about 1% a year. The average number of
doctorates earned over the last decade is almost 53,000 annually. In other
words, we’re talking about nearly 530,000 PhDs produced by American higher
education in those 10 years alone. Many of them have ended up competing for a
far smaller number of jobs in the academic world.
It’s
true that most PhDs in science or engineering end up with post-doctoral
positions (earning roughly $40,000 a year) or with tenure-track or tenured jobs
in colleges and universities (averaging $60,000 annually to start). Better yet,
most of them leave their graduate programs with little or no debt.
The
situation is far different if your degree wasn’t in STEM (science, technology,
engineering, or mathematics) but, for example, in education or the humanities.
As a start, far more of those degree-holders graduate owing money, often
significant sums, and ever fewer end up teaching in tenure-track positions — in
jobs, that is, with security, decent pay, and benefits.
Many
of the non-STEM PhDs who stay in academia end up joining an exploited,
contingent workforce of part-time, or “adjunct,” professors. That reserve army
of the underemployed is higher education’s dirty little secret. After all, we —
and yes, I’m one of them — actually teach the majority of the classes in many
schools, while earning as little as $1,500 a semester for each of them.
I hate to bring up transportation again, but there’s a reason
teachers like us are called “freeway flyers.” A 2014 Congressional report revealed that 89%
of us work at more than one institution and 27% at three different schools,
just to cobble together the most meager of livings.
Many of us, in fact, rely on public antipoverty programs to keep
going. Inside Higher Ed,
reflecting on a 2020 report from the American Federation of Teachers, describes our situation
this way:
“Nearly
25% of adjunct faculty members rely on public assistance, and 40% struggle to
cover basic household expenses, according to a new report from the American
Federation of Teachers. Nearly a third of the 3,000 adjuncts surveyed for the
report earn less than $25,000 a year. That puts them below the federal poverty
guideline for a family of four.”
I’m
luckier than most adjuncts. I have a union, and over the years we’ve fought for
better pay, healthcare, a pension plan, and a pathway (however limited) to
advancement. Now, however, my school’s administration is using the pandemic as
an excuse to try to claw back the tiny cost-of-living adjustments we won in
2019.
The Oxford
Dictionary of English defines an adjunct as “a thing added to
something else as a supplementary rather than an essential part.” Once upon a
time, in the middle of the previous century, that’s just what adjunct faculty
were — occasional additions to the full-time faculty. Often, they were retired
professionals who supplemented a department’s offerings by teaching a single
course in their area of expertise, while their salaries were more honoraria
than true payments for work performed. Later, as more women entered academia,
it became common for a
male professor’s wife to teach a course or two, often as part of his employment
arrangement with the university. Since her salary was a mere adjunct to his,
she was paid accordingly.
Now,
the situation has changed radically. In many colleges and universities, adjunct
faculty are no longer supplements, but the most “essential part” of the
teaching staff. Classes simply couldn’t go on without us; nor, if you believe
college administrations, could their budgets be balanced without us. After all,
why pay a full-time professor $10,000 to teach a class (since he or she will be
earning, on average, $60,000 a year and covering three classes a semester) when
you can give a part-timer like me $1,500 for the very same work?
And
adjuncts have little choice. The competition for full-time positions is fierce,
since every year another 53,000 or more new PhDs climb into the back row of the
academic airplane, hoping to make it to the pilot’s seat and secure a
tenure-track position.
And here’s another problem with that. These days the people in
the pilots’ seats often aren’t parachuting out. They’re staying right where
they are. That, in turn, means new PhDs find themselves competing for an
ever-shrinking prize, as Laura McKenna has written in
the Atlantic, “not only
with their own cohort but also with the unemployed PhDs who graduated in
previous years.” Many of those now clinging to pilots’ seats are members of my
own boomer generation, who still benefit from a 1986 law (signed by
then-75-year-old President Ronald Reagan) that outlawed mandatory retirements.
Grade Inflation v. Degree Inflation?
People in the world of education often bemoan the problem of
“grade inflation” — the tendency of average grades to creep up over time.
Ironically, this problem is exacerbated by the adjunctification of teaching,
since adjuncts tend to award higher grades than professors with secure
positions. The reason is simple enough: colleges use student evaluations as a
major metric for rehiring adjuncts and higher grades translate directly into
better evaluations. Grade inflation at the college level is, in my view, a
non-issue, at least for students. Employers don’t look at your transcript when
they’re hiring you and even graduate schools care more about recommendations
and GRE scores.
The real problem faced by today’s young people isn’t grade
inflation. It’s degree inflation.
Once
upon a time in another America, a high-school diploma was enough to snag you a
good job, with a chance to move up as time went on (especially if you were
white and male, as the majority of workers were in those days). And you paid no
tuition whatsoever for that diploma. In fact, public education through 12th
grade is still free, though its quality varies profoundly depending on who you
are and where you live.
But all that changed as increasing numbers of employers began
requiring a college degree for jobs that don’t by any stretch of the
imagination require a college education to perform. The Washington Post reports:
“Among
the positions never requiring a college degree in the past that are quickly
adding that to the list of desired requirements: dental hygienists,
photographers, claims adjusters, freight agents, and chemical equipment
operators.”
In 2017, Manjari Raman of the Harvard Business School wrote that
“the
degree gap — the discrepancy between the demand for a college degree in job
postings and the employees who are currently in that job who have a college
degree — is significant. For example, in 2015, 67% of production supervisor job
postings asked for a college degree, while only 16% of employed production supervisors
had one.”
In other words, even though most people already doing such jobs
don’t have a bachelor’s degree, companies are only hiring new people who do.
Part of the reason: that requirement automatically eliminates a lot of
applicants, reducing the time and effort involved in making hiring decisions.
Rather than sifting through résumés for
specific skills (like the ability to use certain computer programs or write
fluently), employers let a college degree serve as a proxy. The result is not
only that they’ll hire people who don’t have the skills they actually need, but
that they’re eliminating people who do have the skills but not the degree. You
won’t be surprised to learn that those rejected applicants are more likely to
be people of color, who are underrepresented among the holders of college
degrees.
Similarly, some fields that used to accept a BA now require a
graduate degree to perform the same work. For example, the Bureau of Labor
Statistics reports that “in
2015–16, about 39% of all occupational therapists ages 25 and older had a
bachelor’s degree as their highest level of educational attainment.” Now,
however, employers are commonly insisting that new applicants hold at least a
master’s degree — and so up the pyramid we continually go (at ever greater cost
to those students).
The Biggest Pyramid of All
In a
sense, you could say that the whole capitalist economy is the biggest pyramid
of them all. For every one of the fascinating, fulfilling, autonomous, and
well-paying jobs out there, there are thousands of boring, mind- and
body-crushing ones like pulling items for shipment in an Amazon warehouse or
folding clothes at Forever 21.
We
know, in other words, that there are only a relatively small number of spaces
in the cockpit of today’s economic plane. Nonetheless, we tell our young people
that the guaranteed way to get one of those rare gigs at the top of the pyramid
is a college education.
Now, just stop for a second and consider what it costs to join
the 2021 all-American Airplane Game of education. In 1970, when I went to Reed,
a small, private, liberal arts college, tuition was $3,000 a year. I was lucky.
I had a scholarship (known in modern university jargon as a “tuition discount”)
that covered most of my costs. This year, annual tuition at that same school is
a mind-boggling $62,420, more than 20 times as high. If college
costs had simply risen with inflation, the price would be about $21,000 a year,
or just under triple the price.
If
I’d attended Federal City College (now the University of D.C.), my equivalent
of a state school then, tuition would have been free. Now, even state schools
cost too much for many students. Annually, tuition at the University of
California at Berkeley, the flagship school of that state’s system, is $14,253
for in-state students, and $44,007 for out-of-staters.
I left school owing $800, or about $4,400 in today’s dollars.
These days, most financial “aid” resembles foreign “aid” to developing
countries — that is, it generally takes the form of loans whose interest piles
up so fast that it’s hard to keep up with it, let alone begin to pay off the
principal in your post-college life. Some numbers to contemplate: 62% of those
graduating with a BA in 2019 did so owing money —
owing, in fact, an average of almost $29,000. The average debt of those earning
a graduate degree was an even more staggering $71,000. That, of course, is on
top of whatever the former students had already shelled out while in school.
And that, in turn, is before the “miracle” of compound interest takes hold and
that debt starts to grow like a rogue zucchini.
It’s
enough to make me wonder whether a seat in the Great American College and
University Airplane Game is worth the price, and whether it’s ethical for me to
continue serving as an adjunct flight attendant along the way. Whatever we tell
students about education being the path to a good job, the truth is that there
are remarkably few seats at the front of the plane.
Of
course, on the positive side, I do still believe that time spent at college
offers students something beyond any price — the opportunity to learn to think
deeply and critically, while encountering people very different from
themselves. The luckiest students graduate with a lifelong curiosity about the
world and some tools to help them satisfy it. That is truly a ticket to a good
life — and no one should have to buy a seat in an Airplane Game to get one.
Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.
Copyright
2021 Rebecca Gordon
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/08/no_author/debt-and-disillusionment/
