Washington Monthly - September/October 2021 - 20

writer, or entrepreneur. It is, in each case, " manager. " Part of a
cadre of bosses 10 million strong.
S
o let's think about how all this looks to the very large
number of people who did not fly on high-speed rails
from the enclaves of college-educated wealth to a thriving
post-collegiate career.
Over the past several decades, these Americans have
been caught in a deeply unenviable position. First, whole sections
of the economy and labor market were hollowed out by a
combination of neglect and deliberate policy choices. Privatesector
unions disintegrated, wages stagnated, and stable jobs
eroded, all in exchange for lower prices on consumer goods
they still can't afford.
Then the vocational courses at the local high school started
to disappear. Sometimes this was done with good intentions,
to correct the notorious practice of keeping students of
color off the college track and to open the path to higher education
for all. But it had an effect: Federal funding for vocational
education shrank along with the number of job-focused
credits high schoolers took. There are now fewer clear pathways
to fewer good jobs.
They're told: It's okay! There's a solution! I mean, probably
not for you, to be honest, you're just going to have to get by
on $12.50 an hour until Social Security kicks in. But definitely
for your kids. Just send them to college!
Except the elite colleges only accept one student a year
from where you live (the valedictorian), so they can congratulate
themselves on " regional diversity. " Even if you manage to
be that student, you and your parents both have to borrow a
mind-boggling sum of money to pay tuition. And ultimately
succeeding in college means taking classes that your local high
school doesn't offer, because K-12 education in this country
is chopped up into 13,500 districts that are mostly funded by
a combination of state revenue and local property taxes, both
of which are in short supply in places that don't have many of
the good white-collar jobs.
If you can't get in, you instead enroll in a college that,
unlike the underfunded local community college, has a
bunch of warm, friendly people on staff who quickly return
your texts and phone calls and help you fill out all of the
complicated federal financial aid forms. There are no waiting
lists for enrollment and nobody hassles you about a missing
high school transcript or not-so-great scores on the SAT.
The program is starting up in just a few weeks, takes way less
than four years to finish, and leads to a good job in a fastpaced,
growing field.
Except it doesn't, because the " college " is a private equity-
backed for-profit corporation that was engineered to harvest
billions of federal financial aid dollars by defrauding students
while easily evading a set of essentially nonexistent consumer
protection regulations. Republican lawmakers don't want to
go after these schools because of generous campaign contributions,
and Democrats can't because new Department of Education
rules get tied up in endless litigation.
20 September/October 2021
And even if you manage to stumble through the for-profit
minefield unscathed and get all the way through to a real degree,
which likely means navigating the Kafkaesque process of
transferring credits from a community college to a four-year
university, and enroll in an income-based loan repayment program
that keeps debt payments affordable, and you're lucky to
not graduate into the teeth of recession caused by government
mismanagement of Wall Street derivatives and/or infectious
disease, and you emerge with an honest-to-goodness 40-houra-week
gig with health benefits and vacation and a 401(k)-
who's really in charge? Where do most of the fruits of your labor
go? Who's your manager? Some guy with a Not a Job Major
degree who was essentially promised the job at birth.
You know what that sounds like? A racket. A cheap,
knock-off version of opportunity. No one should be surprised
that voters aren't running into the arms of people who have
nothing better to offer.
Here's what they should offer instead.
E
ducation and training are a crucial part of most people's
path to stability and prosperity. The American economy
needs many highly skilled workers to compete internationally.
Colleges have a critical role to play in accomplishing
these goals. All of these things are true.
But education alone isn't enough-not even close.
Workers need power and leverage to demand better pay. In
Washington State, for example, home health care workers
who collectively bargain with the government make nearly
$20 an hour plus health and retirement benefits. In Arkansas,
people doing the same work make $9 an hour with no benefits.
They don't need a college-only agenda. They need strong
labor laws, affordable child care, health insurance, and a robust
minimum wage.
Other parts of the workforce would absolutely benefit
from better education and credentials-but only if the job
structure were changed to match. When my daughter turned
three, she enrolled as a full-time student in the neighborhood
public school. Her teacher had a bachelor's degree, as
all public school teachers do, with a specialization in early
childhood education. The next year, the children moved to a
classroom for four-year-olds, and then kindergarten a year
later, always taught by a credentialed teacher. Same building,
same profession.
But that's because Washington, D.C., chose to extend its
public school system to include three- and four-year-olds, a
policy President Biden has proposed expanding nationwide.
Despite her college degree, my daughter's pre-K-3 teacher
wouldn't have been able to get the same job in nearby Virginia
or Maryland, because in those states, the job " pre-K-3
public school teacher " doesn't exist. Instead, young children
are left to the vagaries of the under-subsidized and underregulated
private child care market, where training, credentials,
pay, safety, and learning are often in short supply. In the
early childhood sector, and many others, education and jobs
strategies only work if they work together.
Washington Monthly - September/October 2021

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