6. On The Shaky Prospects Of Meritocracy
11 April 2011
The most prestigious academic institutions issuing the most prestigious academic diplomas – institutions most generous in granting social privileges or recompensing social deprivations – are year by year, one step at a time yet consistently and relentlessly, drifting out of the ‘social’ market and distancing themselves ever further from the throngs of youngsters whose hopes for glittering prizes they kindled and inflamed. As William D. Cohan informs in the NYT of 16th March, the annual price of tuition and fees at Harvard rose annually by 5 per cent for the last 20 years. This year, it has reached $52.000. ‘Generally speaking, in order to pay just Harvard’s tuition, someone would have to earn more than $100,000 in annual pre-tax compensation. And there are all the other family expenses – among them, the gasoline, the mortgage, food and medical expenses… Very quickly the numbers get astronomical’.
And yet… of the 30,000 applicants to Harvard last year, only 7.2 per cent were admitted. Demand for places was – still is – high. There are still thousands of parental couples for whom the tuition fees, however exorbitant, are not an obstacle, and going to Harvard or another elite academic establishment is for their children just a routine matter: the exercise of inherited right and fulfilment of family duty – the last finishing touch before settling in one’s legitimate place inside the country’s elite of wealth. Though there are still thousands or more parental couples ready for whatever financial sacrifice is required to help their children in joining that elite, and making thereby their grandchildren’s place in the elite a legitimate expectation.
For the latter, whom the universities, turning away from their imputed/claimed role of social mobility promoters, wounded most painfully in their parental ambitions and their trust in the American Dream, Cohan has words of consolation: he suggests that perhaps ‘the best and brightest among us will always find a way to achieve their inevitable level of excellence, with or without the benefit of a traditional education’ (italics added). To make that promise sound plausible and believable, he adds an impressive and fast growing list of new billionaires, from Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, down to the Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey and the founder of Tumblr David Karp – all without exception education dropouts (with Karp beating the record by spending not a single day on campus since dropping out of a high school in his first year). Well, with secure industrial employment no longer on offer, the unemployed may always play lotto, can’t they?
Shattered Dreams
A high-class diploma from a high-class university was for many years the best investment which loving parents could make into their children’s and children of their children’s future. Or at least it was believed to be such. That belief, like so many other beliefs combining into the American (and not just American) Dream in the gates wide open to all hard working people determined to push them open and persisting in keeping them open, is now being shattered. The labour market for holders of high education credentials is currently shrinking – perhaps faster yet than the market for those lacking university certificates to enhance their market value. Nowadays, it is not just people failing to make the right kind of effort and the right kind of sacrifice who find the gates, expectedly, being shut in their face; those who did everything they believed to be necessary for success are finding themselves, though in their case unexpectedly, in much the same predicament, having been turned away from the gate empty-handed. This, to be sure, is an entirely new ball game, as the Americans use to say.
Social-promotion-through-education served for many years as a fig leaf for naked/indecent inequality of human conditions and prospects: as long as academic achievements correlated with handsome social rewards, people who failed to climb up the social ladder had only themselves to blame – and only themselves on whom to unload bitterness and wrath. After all (so the educational promise suggested), better places were reserved for people who worked better, and good fortune came to people who forced it to be good by diligent learning and a lot of sweat on the brow; if a bad fortune was your lot, your learning and your work were obviously not as good as they should have been. That apology for persistent and growing inequality is, however, sounding nowadays all but hollow. Yet more hollow than it otherwise could have sounded, were it not for the loud proclamations of the advent to the ‘knowledge society’, a kind of society in which knowledge becomes the prime source of national and personal wealth and in which, accordingly, the possessors and users of knowledge are entitled to that wealth’s lion’s share.
The shock of the new and rapidly rising phenomenon of graduate unemployment, or graduate employment much below graduate (proclaimed to be legitimate) expectations, hits painfully not just the minority of zealous climbers – but also the much wider category of people who suffered meekly their unappetising lot, numbed by the shame of missing the chances waiting in abundance for those less work-shy than themselves. It is difficult to say which of the two category-specific blows can and will cause more social damage, but together, appearing simultaneously, they make quite an explosive mixture… You can almost see quite a few people at the helm shuddering while reading Cohan’s sombre warning/premonition: ‘One lesson to be learned from the recent uprising in the Middle East, especially in Egypt, is that a long-suffering group of highly educated but underemployed people can be the catalyst for long overdue societal change’.
Gaining Knowledge
You think this is but one more American idiosyncrasy? You well may think so, as one of the most conspicuous features of the American Dream is the belief that in the US things can occur that elsewhere, in more mundane lands, are all but unimaginable. To preempt such misconception, let’s jump therefore a few thousand miles to the east of Eden: to Poland, a country that in the last two decades experienced an exorbitant rise in the number of higher education establishments, their students and graduates, but also in the costs of education – alongside a similarly spectacular rise in income polarisation and overall social inequality.
What follows is a handful of samples from an extraordinary amount of similar cases, as reported on 19th March by the Polish leading daily, Gazeta Wyborcza: Two years ago Agnieszka graduated with a degree in finance and banking. Her countless job applications remained unanswered. After more than a year of invariably vain efforts and deepening despair, a friend fixed her up with a receptionist job. Among her not especially exciting duties is to collect day in, day out, the CVs of other graduates bound to remain, like hers, unanswered. Tomek, graduate of another prestigious college, did not have Agnieszka’s luck and had to settle for the job of an estate guardsman for the equivalent of £280 monthly. His colleague from the same graduation ceremony is determined to take any job, if in a few more months nothing remotely related to his acquired and certified skills comes his way. All in all, more and more graduates are putting their university diplomas among the family memorabilia and settle for the not-much-skill-demanding jobs of couriers, shop assistants, taxi drivers, waiters (the latter, promising to fatten thin wages with customers’ tips, gaining most in popularity…)
From Hudson to Vistula, much similar sights and sounds; the same deafening clatter of gates being shut and locked, the same off-putting picture of rapidly rising heaps of frustrated hopes. In our societies of allegedly knowledge-powered and information-driven economies and of education-driven economic success, knowledge seems to be failing to guarantee success and education failing to deliver the success-guaranteeing knowledge.
The vision of the toxins of inequality neutralised, made liveable-with and rendered harmless by the education-driven upward mobility, and yet more disastrously, the vision of education able to keep upward social mobility in operation, begin to simultaneously evaporate. Their dissipation spells trouble to education as we know it. But it also spells trouble to the excuse favoured and commonly used in our society in the efforts to justify its injustices.