"Sending Everyone to College," Hard Reality, and the Aspirational Mentality

It has long been conventional wisdom among a significant portion of the country's policymakers and commentariat that a plausible response to problems like industrial difficulties and poverty and inequality is "Send more people to college," all while never entertaining any thought of making college more affordable.

No reasonable person would deny that society derives enough benefit from having a system of higher education that one can consider it a modern necessity, and that in an industrialized country (or any country endeavoring to be industrialized) there is a need for a significant portion of the work force to get at least some post-secondary education.

Still, the "Send more people to college"--at its most extreme, the "Send everyone to college" mentality--has worked out to their, rather than arguing for a living wage, encouraging the young to . . . take on student debt as they train for jobs the market does not provide (as with the extreme disproportion between those who pursue arts degrees and those who find jobs requiring them, and even an arguable overproduction of STEM graduates), or if they do find jobs in them, work in them for only a short time, such that one can question the value of the degree to them as individuals who have to make a living (as with many of those STEM graduates who do land jobs in their fields, but soon find themselves replaced by fresher graduates as they are compelled to go and do something else).

One can take the "Send more people to college" mentality for well-intentioned muddle-headedness--or a cynical dodge. However, in either case it contributed to an avoidance of more meaningful efforts to deal with the country's economic difficulties and help the disadvantaged, while greatly benefiting assorted interests (like those collecting all those student loan payments). Alas, that aspirationalism triumphs so completely over egalitarianism in American political culture, and the way in which it has made a sort of respect for "education" a hollow piety but a piety nonetheless, has made it very difficult for those who are neither muddle-headed nor cynical to call it out.