Last time, I discussed the idea that Higher Education has become a division between “capital education” – education that gives the student a greater potential for profit directly in the field they studied, and “consumer education” – education that is enjoyed or consumed at the point of reception by the student and is not used in a directly applicable way to a career in that field.
Consumer education has become the dominant product in many universities – especially state-oriented ones which need to perpetuate this consumption in order to survive. State schools have less of an incentive to produce capital because a large part of their funding comes from non-voluntary sources – namely, the government itself which obtained its funds by force. They have less accountability to the “capital” world – which would demand applicable and marketable skills – and more accountability to the “consumption” world – that is the politicians, intellectuals, businesses and interest groups which provide the funding and regulations which allow the state-oriented schools to exist in their present form.
Examples of “Education Bubbles”
This is, in essence, the central planning of higher education and leads to gross mis-allocation of workers. It operates under the exact same principles as any other government intervetion – where the price system is abandoned in favour of planning. It is more problematic in some sectors than others.
For example, in the UK, the government is currently paying for the tuition of everyone who wants to be a doctor, dentist, nurse and many other healthcare specialities. This has led to massive amounts of qualified healthcare workers, but with an increasing healthcare shortages (due to the centrally planned NHS) many of these students wait months or years to get a job in their field (if they end up with a job).
This is the same with teaching. It is incredibly hard to get a teaching job in the UK – yet the government is not only paying for teacher training – they are actually paying a bursary to trainees on top of this!
Not only does reckless planning such as this lead to an increase in consumer education, but it diverts workers, technology research and students away from capital education. It creates “bubbles” (just like a housing or credit bubble) of workers with certain skills that are radically displaced compared to the number of jobs available.
For all of those medical and educational trainees, the burst probably looks something like this. They wait around for a job for a year (either working an unskilled job, maybe living off loans or money from family) and soon have to either get an unrelated unskilled job, or they have to go back to higher education and start all over, having wasted years of their life and possibly accumulated debt and bills in the meantime that must now be sunk.
The Big Picture
Even outside of these industry-specific bubbles, is the general “bubble” of higher education as a whole – where (again, politicians, interest groups and so on) are encouraging high school graduates to “go to college” even though many of these only have a vague idea about how an undergraduate degree might help them.
From my experience of going into college, it was a combination of several factors:
- a general idea that I would “make more money” just for having a bachelors – regardless of the field I entered
- status/vanity – it feels good and “superiour” for an educational institute to certify that you are a smart person
- consumption – I like education and I like learning in and of itself
- capital – I might like to go into the field some day, and a degree is a huge advantage
And when I graduated, nothing changed. I kept the same job, the same pay and nothing was different whatsoever. My friend Joe however, who got a degree in Computer Science, got a much better job after college and made about double what I did in my job. College gave him skills that he was able to harness and apply in the market. My education actually kept me out of marketable skills in my field (graphic design at the time) and if it weren’t for discipline at work and in my free time – I would have probably suffered for college, not benefited from it.
Obviously “consumer” undergraduate degrees can transfer into capital education later on, but this will require even more education, and most importantly, an acquisition of applicable writing, research and academic skills that will actually be used in the field. But even this is risky.
The fact of the matter is, a consumer education as an undergrad on its own may be enlightening and personally fulfilling (this is what consumption does by nature) but don’t expect it to add zeros to the pay check. In addition, the fact that “consumer” education exists is because profit-seeking, capital education is taking place, creating the surplus wealth which is where demand for consumer education comes from in the first place. Any movements to abolish, restrict or subvert capital education in favour of consumer education will actually take the arts, history, classics, philosophy and the like down with it.
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Tom Degan
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