On The Economics of Higher Education

I would like to ask you a question I've been thinking of for a while, if you have the time. I have just started my PhD in Anthropology in University of Helsinki, and I have been involved in quite a few student campaigns against university reforms (of neoliberal kind). Yet still all our universities are public institutions, there are no tuition fees and all students receive student allowance, so our situation is quite different than in, say, UK and US. I've been able to study two majors without acquiring any debt, which is quite common here. My question is: Do you think university system that is publicly funded and free for all students (and adjunct staff is payed comparatively well) still has some of the irredeemable qualities that you describe in your critique of US elite universities? Best wishes, Viljami Kankaanpää-Kukkonen

Hi, I appreciate the question, thanks for letting me respond publicly so I don’t have to answer it more than once.  

Before I answer your question let me say what perspective I’m speaking from.  I’ve been in the US for 10 years.  My involvement in American academia was mostly at private institutions on the East Coast, though I took a few seminars and spent time at Rutgers and CUNY, as well. Before that, I did my undergraduate education in Berlin at the Free University.  I was in the last generation of students at the FU who graduated with a traditional German Magister degree; even before I graduated, the FU began to implement the accords of the Bologna Process, which aimed to unify educational standards across the EU and which led to a splitting of the Magister degree into American-style BA and MA programs.  I haven’t been involved in European academia in the past 10 years.  My “data” consists in 10-year-old experience with the German system; extensive 10-year-old familiarity with the British and French systems; and passing 10-year-old acquaintance with the Italian and Dutch systems.  I’m sure that higher education in Europe has changed a great deal in the past 10 years in response to the pressures and forces you describe as “neoliberal,” so take everything I say in light of these ongoing developments.  

Very simply put:  the more “Americanized” an educational system becomes, the more its structure and consequences will resemble the structure and consequences of the American education system.  The most distinctive feature of the American university system is its exorbitant cost, and its relation to debt and hence to the labor market.  So the shortest answer I can give you is No, a free or cheap university system does not share all the dangerous implications of the American system.  That said, the disciplinary and organizational nature of the European system is very similar to the American system and growing more so.  I don’t think humans are “rational actors,” but I do think we constantly perform conscious or unconscious cost/benefit analysis, and I think it’s easy to see why the cost of an American higher education is much greater than the cost of a European higher education, not only in dollars but also in anxiety, in preparation, and in non-academic lifestyle commitments required to access and survive the university. The higher the cost of attending a European university becomes, the more that system will resemble the American one 

That’s the short answer, and anyone who’s reading this can feel free to stop reading here; the rest of this post is just an elaboration.  

Your e-mail mentions “other countries” generally, but I’m not comfortable speaking about countries I don’t know enough about. I’ve met and studied with and read papers by academics from all over the world, and I know some vague stories, but that’s not the same thing as having concrete knowledge of economic relations, so I’m going to localize the rest of my response and frame it as a comparison between the American and the European systems with which I’m familiar.  

* 

A free university system cannot engage the same socio-economic relation to the labor market and to personal debt that the American university system currently engages.  The difference has to do with a different relation of the institution to the state and to private capital, as well as to the job market and to relations of labor and production more generally.  For these reasons, I consider the European university less irredeemable and pernicious than the American one.  

It shares many of the same features and problems, especially on the inside of the institution and in the production of knowledge, but I think the social role of the university is less compromised and dangerous and I think European universities could be improved more easily than American ones – for now. As we’ve already noted, the twin ideologies of privatization and austerity are pushing hard to “Americanize” higher education in Europe and elsewhere.  The more successful these efforts are, the more irredeemable the university becomes.

Before I continue, please note that while I’m less critical of the European university system, I’m not holding it up as an ideal or a model or ignoring its very real problems.  For example, I discuss the non-academic (vocational/professional) higher education system in many European countries as opening up more paths to financial stability than are available in the US.  I stand behind that claim, but I’m also very aware that the parallel higher education systems in Europe have a classist function and a classist history, serving mostly to route upper and upper-middle class students to universities and poorer students to vocational schools.  I’m also keenly aware that I went to university in a city (Berlin) that has more Turkish residents than Ankara, but I can count on one hand the number of Turkish students that sat in seminar rooms with me at that university. Etc., etc.  This is not an encomium to the European higher ed system, it’s just a description of some crucial differences.  

There are at least three major differences between the American and the European higher education systems:   

·      Debt

·      Non-academic higher education

·      Public system only vs. public/private dual system

I’ll expand on all these, but first we can observe that despite a profound difference in the economic relations in which the university is embedded, a fascinating aspect of the question is that there is fairly little difference between higher education systems in terms of content and style.  You find the same plodding, obfuscatory writing; the same laborious processes of peer review; the same behind-the-scenes politicking and reputation-based privilege; the same interests and questions, though often with different approaches or angles; and most importantly, the same canon of concepts and thinkers and disciplines.  This fact reinforces my belief that the discourse of the university performs a similar organizing social function (what Gramsci describes as “traditional” intellectual activity) everywhere, regardless of the specific hegemonic structure it’s serving or upholding.  In this context, it’s worth distinguishing a critique of the university as an institution embedded in a specific economy from a critique of the discourses produced in the institution.  These aren’t separate questions:  there’s only one economy.  But these questions operate in different registers, because the critique of the production of knowledge goes all the way back to Plato and beyond while the critique of the university’s current economic entanglements can’t go beyond the material history of those entanglements while remaining in any way immanent.  

Back to the three big differences I listed.

Debt is the biggest one, by far.  

I graduated from a European university debt-free. I paid registration fees every semester and I had to house and feed myself, but I didn’t have to pay exorbitant tuition fees.  I certainly didn’t have to take out a loan at the age of 18 that would follow me the rest of my life.  This difference is the single most important difference, because it doesn’t just change other relations, it changes the weight of other relations.  A damaging situation is bad; a damaging situation is 100 times worse if you have no way of getting out of it or putting it behind you.  

If you’re German and you get into a university and you find it utterly unbearable and traumatizing, you can just leave. You’ve spent some time, you might disappoint yourself or other people, but you’re not in debt, your parents didn’t spend $80,000.  If you’re 20 years old and you’ve already signed the loan papers and you’re $80,000 in debt already after just 4 semesters, you’re going to think really fucking hard about starting over in a different program, or leaving school to do something non-academic.  You’re much more likely to stay on a path you’re not happy with.  And even if you do make the choice to leave, that debt can still follow you around the rest of your life unless you manage to adjust very effectively to a highly profitable new career path.  If you spent $160,000 on a law degree from Yale then start practicing law and discover you absolutely hate it, you’re probably going to practice law for a few years anyway because otherwise you’re changing careers $160,000 in debt (that’s one hundred and sixty THOUSAND dollars).  Minimum wage in Connecticut is currently $10.10 dollars an hour 

Maybe this isn’t the case any more, but 15 years ago in much of Europe, you could decide academia wasn’t for you, leave the university, and get a job in a restaurant that would pay all your bills. In other words, you could shift gears to a much lower-pressure lifestyle without serious consequences.  But imagine if you have serious student debt and you have $500 deducted from your salary each month?  Suddenly you have earn more, even if you want a low-key lifestyle; you take on another job, or you find a job that’s higher-pressure even though you want to shift gears or whatever.  

The costs of debt – in labor, in health, in anxiety – are enormous.  In this way, there is a much tighter and more vicious link between higher education and the labor market in American than in Europe.  There’s no other way to put it – the structure and pressures of the American system mean that Americans have to work, constantly, grindingly, in a way that many (not all) Europeans just don’t have to and honestly can’t understand.  The American system presents a double bind:  either you are bound to the labor market by debt because you did go to school, or you’re bound to the labor market by necessity because you didn’t go to school and are locked out of higher-paying jobs.  The American university system is locked into the economy in a way that presents three options only:  serve the system at the top; serve the system at the bottom; or succeed against all odds by being truly exceptional and carving out a space for yourself alongside the system or breaking into it in an unexpected way. There are very few paths to genuine economic prosperity that don’t run through the university system somehow.  

The situation in the US hasn’t always been so dire; it got bad under Reagan and has been getting worse ever since.  For a couple of decades after World War II, the G.I. Bill and a flood of money to universities made public higher education really affordable in the U.S. for many people.  In the ‘60s or ‘70s in the U.S. (so I’m told, I wasn’t here), you could flip burgers for three months during the summer and save up enough money for a year’s tuition at a good state school if you were an in-state student; I doubt that’s still the case anywhere in the U.S., and certainly not at the more prestigious state schools.    

Now that the American “middle class” has effectively vanished, we can see what role the university had in making that class disappear.  An absolutely crucial element in that process was the defunding of public universities at the state and federal level, which led to massive tuition hikes that have made tuition at the most prestigious public universities almost as high as those at prestigious private ones.  Capitalism played a major role in that process, because university pass their costs on to students by framing the rising costs as the availability of additional features, from trendy new disciplines to massive, ridiculous sports facilities.  This is a “client-centered” approach to education that directly prioritizes students who can afford to pay.  Basically, America no longer has a state-sponsored, debt-free path to prosperity, which Europe still does…for now.  Defunding of universities and tuition hikes are the changes that will most quickly introduce debt as a decisive factor and bring the European system in line with the American one, with massive implications for the entire economy, not just for academia in some isolated, abstract way.  Keeping the European university system free or at least cheap is unspeakably important and probably impossible at this point.  

The relation between the education system and the labor market is also different in that many European countries have vocational or professional higher education that isn’t academic.  That’s the second big difference.  Craft and trade apprenticeships represent an important bloc that has no equivalent in the US, where most internships are professional position you get after you do a BA, and not instead of doing a BA (not always, but often).  There are often but not always alternatives to university-style education in Europe.  German interns (Auszubildende, or Azubis) are usually paid and can access no-interest government loans to support themselves when they aren’t.  Many people I knew in Germany in the 2000s finished an academic Magister degree and then went on to do an Ausbildung in a completely different area (sound design, lighting tech, theater management) which then became their actual career.  Here again the major difference is debt – you don’t need to take on massive debt to study nursing or hotel management in much of Europe – but there is also a difference in the need for critique of the institution.  Simply put, if there are effective non-academic paths to prosperity, academics have less of an ethical obligation to critique and correct their institutions, and the institution has less of an exclusive onus to fight against inequality.  If we consider “university students” as a socio-political bloc, that bloc is much more massive, diverse, and complex in the United States than it would be in much of Europe.  

Third – and this too is linked closely to the question of debt rather than separate from it – a major difference between the US and Europe is the long-standing existence in America of extremely wealthy private universities.  In Europe until recently there weren’t many private institutions of higher education. This was changing rapidly even while I was still there, and I’m sure it’s gotten worse.  However, it will take a long time before new institutions acquire the prestige and surplus capital which American private universities already have.  

The brilliant scheme of the American private university is that it took up the model and the rhetoric of the European, post-Enlightenment liberal university, but without sharing or adopting its economic model, which is that of a state-operated and –funded institution. The American private university is a European liberal shell over a fundamentally different economic motor, which is basically a massive private endowment of religious origin.  The biggest American universities weren’t started to train scholars, they were started to train preachers; in this, they had more to do with the medieval canon school than with the post-Enlightenment liberal university. These universities acquired private wealth and land in the manner of traditional Catholic institutions, not in the manner of liberal European universities; now, centuries later, these institutions are basically giant pools of privately-held capital which have an enormous impact on the education, labor, leadership, scholarship, and values of the United States and, indeed, the world, but without any of the regulations that state-funded and –controlled institutions have to endure.  These institutions are first and foremost corporate brands and wealth managers; they only teach students incidentally, as a kind of favor to the rich whose money they manage, but despite this they exert an enormous and unhealthy influence on higher education all over the world.  For decades, the public university system in the US has worked extremely vigorously to imitate the private model, where instead the American public should have demanded the divestment of property from private universities, or at least an end to their tax-exempt status.  

The impact of these institutions can scarcely be overestimated, but they are only the keystone of a vast system that all works together to produce and enforce inequality in the United States.  Because the university is an instrument of hegemony and because capitalist hegemony always depends on inequality, the university under capitalism will always be in some ways an instrument and an enforcer of inequality.  This statement is always true, but for that reason also fairly banal, because it doesn’t engage with any actual, specific material relations.  The difference – as of now – is in the degree to which the entire system interlocks to trap and control the individual.  Simply put, because in Europe there is less systemic inequality, less poverty, and more options for non-academic upward mobility (not many, but more than in the U.S.), the effect of the European university can’t be considered as pernicious and total as the effect of the American university. That doesn’t mean there isn’t much to correct and improve, it just means that capitalism has long tended to workshop its oppressions in the Americas first and then exported them elsewhere.   

European systems, which have traditionally been national or nationalized, tended to have a single centralized application system and held rigidly to unitary standards of admission and education across the national system, even if certain schools had a better “name” or were more popular. But even before I left Germany, there were already efforts to declare certain universities in the national system “centers of excellence” and to pump money into those places.  A major symptom of Americanization is the establishment of a corporate institutional hierarchy, often based equally on actual funding and on institutional PR, between universities in the public system.  This idealistic appeal to merit and excellence justifies budgetary inequalities which in turn serve both to defund “less excellent” disciplines and to center education on the interests of funders and not students.  Here too a “client-centered” corporate approach claims to serve students but is actually a pretense for increasing inequalities between them, and here too the same conclusion follows as above:  the more tiered and hierarchical the national European systems become, the more inequalities will emerge that resemble those of the American system.  

 Another big difference between the US and Europe traditionally has been a much higher European emphasis on the humanities and “human sciences.”  Scientists have always looked down on poets, but until fairly recently in Europe, it was equally the case the poets had the opportunity to publicly and emphatically look down on scientists.  When I first lived in Germany as a teenager, I remember regularly seeing literary critics, poets, screenwriters, and other kinds of art and humanities people on TV, in panel discussions (broadcast on daytime network television!) and in newspapers. This too had begun to change by the time I left Germany, and I’m sure it has gotten worse.  There’s a reciprocal pressure between intellectuals and institutions devaluing the humanities and the general public devaluing the humanities; as humanities programs disappear from the university humanities programming disappears from mass media.  A primary ideological function of the university in modern society is to tell people what’s important and what counts as real knowledge.  There are direct and significant consequences to the logic of quantification and its Four Horsemen, S, T, E, and M.  Global warming would be easier to fight if so many people weren’t convinced life is impossible without tech, for example.  These societal ideological formations don’t begin or end with the university, but they are upheld by it, promoted by it, and routed through it.  Consider for example the ways in which STEM professions are dependent on corporations in a way that many humanities jobs aren’t.  You can be a high school teacher pretty much anywhere if you speak the language; good luck being a freelance molecular biologist and crowdsourcing a lab. There are material and economic and personal consequences to ideological formations, that’s the whole point of enforcing an ideology, whether consciously or not.  Here too it’s a question of degree; we already see the process happening. How far will you let it go?  You often hear administrators tell you that the emphasis on STEM comes from students, who just don’t care about literature the way they used to.  In my experience, this is nonsense.  The proportion of humanities-oriented students and science-oriented students in the average classroom doesn’t change; what changes is the number of students who feel pressured or obligated to try and be science people when they’d rather be studying literature.  That is my experience only, I haven’t done any studies.  

The importance of fighting to keep European higher education free and accessible doesn’t rest on some liberal ideals of education and equality, but on the very real functions that higher education plays in the general economy, and in the relations of labor and production that express that economy.  The European university often serves the interests of industry and private capital, but it is an arm of the state and transmits the values of the state and is susceptible to the pressures of private capital roughly to the same degree that the state itself is.  But in America, the leading universities are expressions and instruments of private capital.  They are inseparable from it, and they serve as instruments with which private capital applies pressure to the state, rather than as an apparatus of the state on which private capital applies pressure. 

At the moment, the differing economic and social relations within which it is embedded make the European university less broken and less harmful than the American university, and with more potential for reparative change.  But even as American global hegemony collapses, economic “Americanization” is on the rise everywhere.  How far it will go, and what traditional institutions are destroyed or altered in the process, remains to be seen.  

Today. You should come.

...And Here My Troubles Began

History and the History of Philosophy

Zak had a follow-up question to this question that I answered earlier this week.  

We accept generally that philosophies’ characteristics are determined somewhat by the social/historical context they emerge during, but are there certain historical moments which demand a philosophy emerge.  Like:  did something about...WW2 (or the birth of TV or the founding of Athens) make philosophy more likely...Is it simply that disruptive ideas or events tend to produce post-Those Events philosophies in richer countries or is there a subtler force at work?

To answer this question we have to start with a distinction between two senses of “philosophy.”  There is philosophy as an activity, and philosophy as an institutional-social form of collectively organized value.  Just as there’s “I sucked another guy’s dick one time” on one side and “Being a lawyer for the HRC” on the other, so too there’s “Thinking [as activity] in response to an event” on the one hand and “Publishing a book about an event that other philosophers read.”  Or maybe a better analogy is dancing.  If you read a history of dance as a form, certain decades (the ‘10s, the ‘40s, the ‘70s) will be discussed as being particularly intense times of innovation and diversification.  But what’s meant here is “dance as an institutionally and financially recognized art form”; that doesn’t mean that if you went to a wedding in the ‘50s fewer people would be shaking their butts than if you went to a wedding in the ‘40s.  

The interesting thing about your question is that the answer to it is inverse in each case.

To the extent that “philosophy” is simply a conscious reflection about the world through the medium of concepts, I would be inclined to say that yes, dramatic events and socio-political upheaval increase wide-spread interest in philosophy, and more broadly in conceptual approaches to understand the world and reducing anxiety.  If you think back to, say, the late ‘90s, most people would have described themselves as fairly moderate.  Not a lot of people would have been comfortable declaring themselves fundamentalist Christians or libertarians, even if they had fundamentalist or libertarian tendencies, just as few people would have been comfortable announcing they were “radical queers,” even if their politics aligned somewhat with radical queer interests.  I think socio-political upheaval, economic hardship, and other circumstantial historical difficulties send people running for fixes to their anxiety and along with religion, quack medicine, meditation, and militancy, interest in philosophy tends to soar during and after Hard Times as people struggle to come to terms with the world around them.  

In the previous questions, I pointed out that because philosophy as a discipline is largely incarnated in the form of institutions, “great” or “successful” philosophies tend to be those which pass through the gatekeeping-filters of those same institutions.  However, the socio-political conditions that spur “ordinary people” to grope after philosophical answers also tend to destabilize institutions, interrupt their chains of transmission, and make texts harder to find, publish, and preserve.  So that the periods in which “grassroots philosophy” tends to peak are usually opposite to the eras in which the world’s best-known philosophers worked and wrote.  I know that my on-line schtick is rapid-fire philosophy and I do think Thought can be an immediate, strategic response to the world, but the real truth is that good philosophy requires stability.  Learning to think requires calm and patience and resources.  I can do what I do because I had the massive privilege of having multiple years of fellowship to literally do nothing but sit at home and absorb the history of philosophy and train my mind.  It’s a lot like building muscles:  if you don’t have the time to spend 3-4 hours a day at the gym, only serious drugs will make you huge, and the muscles will shrink as soon as you stop taking those drugs.  We can think of an historical crisis as a kind of conceptual “steroids” to boost your mind’s performance, but that effect will disappear once your anxiety does.  Good philosophy - the kind of philosophy that lands you in the canon of History’s Great Thinkers - is a long, slow game.  The West’s best known-philosophers have tended to live in times and places where they were able to think of major global developments - but from a distance.  Aristotle built his school on the edge of the city so he could walk around in the first all day.  Spinoza lived alone in a little cottage in the Hague.  Kant’s habits were so regular people used to set their watches by his 4 PM walks.  In medieval Europe, philosophy was largely the province of monks.  Regularity and free time are the base elements that combine to form good philosophy, not stress.  This, by the way, is why I am so, so dubious of rapid-fire “theory” responses to contemporary problems.  

One thing worth noting in this context is that as with academic scholarship, and painting, and, for that matter, dance, only a tiny proportion of what is produced as and by “philosophy” will ever end up published, or read by anyone, much less remembered or RE-published or taught.  And only a tiny proportion of that will be canonized and translated and transformed into elaborate critical editions.  These minuscule proportions tend to stay the same even when more is being produced. 

So what historical contexts do produce great philosophy?  Well, as in the answer to the previous question, there are really two historically consistent factors.  

The first and far more consistent one is this:  philosophy tends to emerge under conditions where cultural, linguistic, and conceptual exchange is not only possible but encouraged, but that exchange happens under conditions of relative stability.  So that in the history of Europe and the Middle East, at least, philosophy has tended to emerge not where there is upheaval but where there is both socio-economic stability and wide-spread cultural exchange.  Ancient Athens; Alexandria in the first two centuries after Christ; Baghdad in the early medieval era; Toledo and Paris around 1000-1200 AD; Paris again in the 1960s; the Clinton ‘90s, where new domains of cultural exploration (queer culture, leather culture, Latino culture) became available to theorization during a period of economic prosperity.  Trade, rather than war, tends to correlate with philosophical developments, though often that trade is preceded by imperial or colonial conquest, as in the example of Islamic philosophy in the medieval era or the philosophy of the later Enlightenment which corresponded to the rise of mercantile colonialism.  In other words, the kind of exchange that promotes philosophical development is an exchange where you meet a foreign stranger who has something to teach you, but the two of you have to not try to kill each other long enough for that exchange to take place, or else you have to not both be running away from something together.  Pretty straight-forward when you think about it.  Put yet another way, trade without war can spur philosophy, but war without subsequent exchange rarely does.  It wasn’t the conquest of Greece that led to the Roman fascination with Greek philosophy; it was the whole-sale importation of Greek intellectuals to serve as tutors and slaves in wealthy Roman households after the conquest of Greece.  It wasn’t the expulsion of the Moors from Spain that led to the reinvigorated, multicultural Aristotelianism that emerged from Toledo in the later medieval era; it was the fact that, having expelled the Moors and taken their money and homes, the Christians now had time and space to read and translate all the books the Moors left behind.  Cities at the center of inter-cultural trade (Baghdad, Amsterdam, New York) tend to produce philosophies, rather than cities at the center of monolithic, homogenous cultural spheres (St. Petersburg, Los Angeles, Madrid).  The massacre and expulsion of the ethnic Greeks from Turkey after World War II, for example, produced some of the most painful poetry you will ever read but no great philosophy.  

So that’s the first fact, and it more or less corresponds to the first factor in the previous question, which was “What is being taught?”  When you meet new people from new cultures with new ideas, you find new things to think about and teach.  The second factor in the previous question was “How easily available are the texts?”  To that factor corresponds the second factor in this question, which is that in addition to cultural exchange under stable conditions, the other thing that facilitates new developments in philosophy are new developments in communication technology.  The advent of the medieval scriptorium, the arrival of paper, the invention of the printing press, and electronic communication have all spurred new developments in thought, which makes sense:  because communication technology affects how and where people can access texts, and access to texts is a major factor in the development or stagnation of a philosophical tradition.  

In short, here, as in the previous question, there are two major identifiable consistent factors:  exchange under stable conditions, and developments in communication technology.