So deindustrialization is one facet of the story I’m telling, the educational crisis narrative is another, and the notion that college is the one noble path is another. Still another is the assumption that college’s purpose is straightforwardly to provide people with jobs. It was Ronald Reagan, more than anyone, who reformulated the purpose of college education away from liberal values or the training of an enlightened citizenry and towards job creation. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Dan Barrett argued that, as governor of California and thus overseer of the University of California and California State systems, Reagan did more than anyone to make college a vocational enterprise first. “What I argue is that I see much more discussion in the public sphere about colleges needing to be job creation tools and less about developing abilities that might not have an immediate apparent payoff,” wrote Barrett. Reagan would then go on as president to use the crisis narrative to further define college as a jobs creator first. He presided over the neoliberalization of one of our country’s great university system, then over the decline of the uneducated labor market. No one in American history did more to create the current American condition, where students feel forced into a college pipeline that then saddles them with backbreaking amounts of student loan debt.
What I want to argue today is that the decline of the employment market for people who only had high school diplomas and the rise of the education crisis narrative are intertwined. I’m not an economist, but the evidence that offshoring and neoliberal economics contributed to job losses (in America and the United Kingdom) seems compelling to me. The Reagan-Thatcherite consensus on eliminating protectionist parties, dismantling regulation, and attacking unions led to a worsening labor market for those without college educations. Once you’ve made such a concerted assault on the Fordist model, with its unionized workforce and low socioeconomic inequality built on domestic manufacturing, you’ve got to have some other labor force model to sell to the public. Well, college-educated workers have traditionally enjoyed an employment and wage premium, and conveniently pushing for greater participation in college education could be done with egalitarian rhetoric. Drastic declines in per-pupil funding in public colleges could be papered over with easy access to federally-guaranteed loans - loans that would be, eventually, ineligible for discharge through the bankruptcy process. As a bonus, any failures with this model could be ascribed to public school teachers and their unions, which happen to be stalwart allies of the Democratic party.
When people ask how so many young people could be so reckless in taking on so much student loan debt, I wonder if they’ve spent any time in this culture in the past 40 years. For decades, we’ve insisted to young people that education is the key, that the way to get ahead professionally or personally is to go out and get a college degree. Our K-12 schools (public or private or charter) are absolutely steeped in this rhetoric; it’s all-encompassing. The young people who have followed the advice they were given for a decade and a half of formal schooling can hardly be blamed for following it. We might make more headway by asking what society-altering policies were made that pushed them in that direction.