Yesterday, the story of Baylor University’s Parent Plus exploitation broke and I wrote how this was part of the modern economy’s class structure. While universities promote an ideology of liberal arts education allowing students to discover and develop their human potential, in economic reality the function of universities in the capitalist system is:
reproducing class inequality.
legitimating class inequality.
working in the interests of capitalist employers
American colleges enroll 19 million students, spend north of $600 billion annually on their student operations, and award nearly four million credentials each year, occupying an enormous amount of time ‘studying.’ While supposedly a meal ticket to class advancement, in economic reality universities are tax-advantaged hedge funds that teach a few courses, and for the petite bourgeoisie reproduce those that fit their characteristics: hard working, certifying intelligence, and submissiveness to authority. Just as in capitalism, there is a tendency toward monopoly as the ‘best’ emerge and strive to maintain their position. How did this come to be in the US?
As enrollments exploded in the 1960s, Clark Kerr, then president of the University of California system, wanted a better way to define colleges. Describing them as public or private, two-year or four-year, religious or nonsectarian, Kerr believed, was insufficient because it grouped together institutions that had little in common.
In the 1970s, Kerr developed a classification system to better define the thousands of colleges and universities across the country. It was an attempt to take into account what he saw as the key point: All colleges are not the same.
His goal was to distinguish between the missions of different institutions by using descriptors such as “research university” or “master’s level institution,” and the further designations of “I” and “II” based on scale and scope — for instance, how much federal research money a college received. Originally the tool was intended to aid researchers and policy makers, but in 1973 the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching issued a public version that many educators saw as establishing a hierarchy, from small special-purpose institutions to what insiders called “R1” universities.
Since 1983, the now largely defunct US News and World Report captured the imagination of the petite bourgeois public by replicating this hierarchy so that members of their class would know which schools were the ‘best.’ Meanwhile, college administrators strive to copy R1 in their structure and their policies in order to maneuver into that category and be seen by their peers in that light—the circular ingredient US News uses to rank, i.e. other petite bourgeois administrators’ opinions. The result is a never-ending drive for status—and money, even as the rankings never change too much. This is because while more and more money is poured into the system, every college may grow richer on an absolute basis with, say, multi-course dinners and super duper athletic facilities—on a relative basis to each other there is little movement.
The ‘best’ colleges under capitalism are largely private ones and the costliest, as might be predicted. For many of the petite bourgeois, they become a site of replicating their status, or attaining their status. For the haute bourgeoisie, they are finishing schools, at best, not very relevant. For the working class, they are largely irrelevant except insofar as credentialism, the hallmark of the petite bourgeoisie, has required more of the working class to acquire a credential—and debt.
Notes
https://www.usnews.com/rankings
https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-should-we-classify-colleges?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_3030574_nl_Academe-Today_date_20211015&cid=at&source=&sourceid=&cid2=gen_login_refresh
https://www.wsj.com/articles/2022-best-colleges-us-rankings-11632245235?mod=djemedu