Washington Monthly - September/October 2021 - 19

at risk if one party sees college as antithetical to its voters and
beliefs. Democrats doing electoral math should be mindful
that there are 60 million more voting-age white people without
bachelor's degrees than with them, and they are concentrated
in states with disproportionate political power.
Most diagnoses of this shift are oddly indifferent to the
structure of higher education itself. That's a mistake. Many of
the failures that led to our fractured political climate are rooted
in biases set deep in the foundations of higher learning,
which systematically discriminates against people who are
most vulnerable to falling behind in the modern economy. We
can build something better-but only if we're honest about
who benefits now, and what it will take to change.
I
n the past five years, the political left has galvanized to
make college free and forgive outstanding student loans.
These are worthy goals. Twentieth-century middle-class
prosperity was created, in part, with public colleges and universities
that were once affordable but are no longer. It makes
sense to restore that promise and help people who were financially
injured by surging college prices.
But free college and debt forgiveness by themselves leave
much of the structural inequality of American higher education
firmly intact. Take, for example, California's widely emulated
three-level higher education system. It gives $13,000
in state funding per undergraduate to students in the elite
University of California system, which is disproportionately
attended by children of the wealthy-kids who have been
tracked since birth into prestigious programs. It gives out
$8,000 to the less selective California State University campuses.
It only gives $2,500 for undergrads at open-access community
colleges, where most of the attendees are lower- and
working-class students. Free college, then, could ultimately
shell out far more money for rich kids than for the poor.
(Many low-income community college students already pay
no tuition at all.) It is like giving the people eating at Le Bernardin
and Burger King the same voucher for a gratis meal.
Private colleges don't get direct state subsidies, so they
make up for it with high prices. Sticker price tuition at the
University of Southern California is more than $60,000. But
that doesn't mean no public money is involved. Endowment
earnings are untaxed, and alumni get lucrative tax deductions
for donations. Research universities often rake 60 percent or
more off the top of federal grants for " overhead. " Add public
funding and tuition together and you get a system that devotes
vastly more resources to upper-class students pursuing
bachelor's and graduate degrees at selective four-year universities,
public or private, than to students anywhere else.
It's not because elite four-year university courses inherently
cost more. A technical film production course at Los Angeles
City College requires expensive audio, video, and lighting
equipment. A history class at UCLA requires a classroom
and a historian. We give more money to privileged students
because we think they deserve it more and the underprivileged
deserve it less, and because the people who decide where
the money goes are almost always themselves scions of the
upper tier and want their children to be the same. We apply
a veneer of so-called meritocracy to a system that is designed
from the ground up to replicate power.
Even within the elevated reaches of four-year colleges
and universities, there are really two systems operating
in parallel. One prepares people for jobs in fields like health
care, teaching, accounting, engineering, and computer systems.
While many of these students go on to master's degrees
and continue to learn on the job, they share the experience of
having majored in subjects that match their careers. We'll call
these " Actual Job Majors. "
Then there are the other people, the ones who take few if
any courses that are designed to prepare them for a job, unless
you define the job as " tenured professor in teaching this subject, "
which, if you've been paying any attention to the state of
the academic labor market, is pretty much the same as preparing
for no job at all. We'll call these " Not a Job Majors. "
There are many examples, but the big four categories of
Not a Job Majors are psychology, business, social science, and
communications, which collectively grant more than 700,000
bachelor's degrees per year. The math is pretty straightforward-there
are more than three million people in the
workforce with BAs in psychology, and only 192,000 psychologists.
This category also includes the kinds of esoteric majors
that politicians like to claim are wasting taxpayer dollars.
But to a first order of approximation, these students don't exist.
They are hallucinations of anti-intellectual resentment. In
2019, more people graduated with a BA in business administration
from Cal State Fullerton alone than got a BA in women's
studies, French literature, or linguistics from every college
and university in America combined.
While we're all familiar with the guy carrying $120,000
in loans for a liberal arts degree from NYU who struggles to
make rent while freelancing in a Brooklyn co-op-mostly
because he tweets a lot-the Not a Job Majors are, on average,
doing fine. Often, more than fine! They're the heart of
the suburban upper-middle-class to lower-upper-class workforce,
the car-buying single-family homeowners with 401(k)s,
the people who rode out the pandemic from their converted
home office.
At American University, a wealthy private institution in
Washington, D.C., more than 65 percent of undergraduates
enroll in one of the big four Not a Job Majors. Many borrow
significant sums to do so. They and their mostly well-off parents
aren't being irrational or self-destructive. They understand
that American isn't a job training place. Rather, it's a
means of class replication, a way station on the path to a certain
kind of stability and prosperity. American degrees signify
that bearers have been pre-sorted and selected, that they
come from certain backgrounds and have been acculturated
in certain ways.
What jobs do they eventually get? The most common occupation
of people with degrees in psychology, social science,
communications, and business isn't counselor, economist,
Washington Monthly 19
Washington Monthly - September/October 2021

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