The purpose of [concern with access to higher education] is to change the current distribution of jobs and educational credentials, since that is what determines the distribution of status, leisure, medical care, retirement security, and most other social and individual goods. But why should the former determine the latter?

Nevertheless I still disagree and more or less from start to finish. I wonder where lawyers are supposed to fit into the GS utopia above. They often perform socially useful work that requires intelligence, education and hard work that is also very boring. Boring, I suspect, to the point that pleasure in exercising their mastery of the relevant skills would not be enough on its own to bring anyone to do it. However combined with the appropriate mix of first class air tickets etc. people can be found. OK, since when did Utopia have lawyers? The point is that I think the first class air tickets are more tightly entwined with higher education than Mr. Scialabba suggests.

To say “we should just find a way” is not saying anything more than “according to principle, this ought to be”—any imperative connotation is meaningless in the absence of guidance toward accomplishment. I was speaking in principle, but can extend this to concrete recommendations.

In principle, I would like for higher education to be socially comprehended as having societal value equivalent to the societal value of a public roads / transportation system. That is, I would like for most people in most communities to believe that Knowledge is just as valuable as Mobility, and that society should work together to provide both of these to all its members. (By “work together” I simply mean “contribute some of one’s resources.” I’ll leave Knowledge and Mobility loosely defined as “the kind of thing one may learn at university” and “the ability to get from point A to point B” respectively.)

Since I’m not being asked to defend this principle, I’ll take it for granted. How might we accomplish this ideal?

Well, I take inspiration, in a very general sense, from the public transportation sector, both in America and worldwide: highways, trains, buses, theory of congestion management, et cetera. “How might we accomplish the provision-of-knowledge ideal?” is, economically if not operationally, a very similar question to “how might we accomplish the provision-of-mobility ideal?”

What I mean by this is, the mechanisms for provision of the good are quite different, but the mechanisms for resource allocation which fund that provision are quite similar.

Whew, all that just to say that taxes should fund educational infrastructure, defraying the cost of usage, just as taxes fund transportation infrastructure to defray the cost of usage. Car drivers and bus riders still pay some cost to access the system (e.g. registration fees, gas, bus/train tickets). The lowest-cost services (e.g. bus/train) are not maximally convenient for the individual user, but (when appropriately designed) these services ensure reasonable access to nearly every member of the community. The cost may look intimidating, but has proven manageable. (I’m not sure that I agree that higher education “has gotten” pretty damn expensive: it always has been pretty damn expensive.) And public transportation would be pretty damn expensive to each user if we didn’t establish resource-allocation mechanisms which defray that cost.

My rather snarky concrete resource-allocation recommendation is that we ought to hire defense contractors to build and maintain educational infrastructure instead of defense infrastructure. Instead of a military-industrial complex, we ought to foster an educational-industrial complex. Profiteers are profiteers; they’d follow. It was a recent accident of history (WW2) that gave us the military-industrial complex we now take for granted, etc.

But still, I’ve only discussed the resource-allocation mechanism. Operationally, how to we ensure near-universal access? And going back to the original principle, what reason do we have to believe that people want, or ought to want, lifelong access to higher education?

These are good questions, but ones which I haven’t been asked to pose answers for, and I’d hate to try your patience going on about it unsolicited.

THE IDEAL OF THE UNIVERSITY

Sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy

Lancaster University

Monday 28th September
11am – 4pm, Institute for Advanced Studies Building, Meeting Room 2

This workshop is free and open to all but places are limited. Please
email r.v.cooper@lancaster.ac.uk to reserve a place.

11-12 Professor Anthony O’Hear
Education, Buckingham University
The Idea of a University

12-1 Dr Sam Clark
Philosophy, Lancaster University
‘No new sense was ever developed without pains’: Universities and the Cultivation of Pleasure

1-2 Lunch – own arrangements

2-3 Professor Michael Luntley
Philosophy, Warwick University
Apprentices in academia

3-4 Dr Bob Brecher
Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics. University of
Brighton
Is critical education still possible in UK universities today?

This is slightly cheeky self-promotion on my part, since I’m one of the speakers, but hopefully it’s sufficiently relevant.

• Establishing greater equality of access to education is important in our society, (in part) because the corresponding credentials are widely utilized as markers of how employable one is.

• The above is true, but that doesn’t mean it ought to be true, ideally speaking: educational attainment (or really, credentialization which is supposed to represent that attainment) is in our society inappropriately overvalued as a marker of how employable one is, and correspondingly undervalued for its own sake.

It’s hard for me to envision any of the persons involved in this discussion disagreeing with either of these points, including geo, though of course I anticipate he would characterize the idea more elegantly.

In such a world, my guess is, many of those who currently crowd out people who would get a lot out of elite higher ed would not be seeking it for themselves, so access would be more open.

Possibly, but affordability could become an issue—as public support for funding would dissipate—and I see no compelling reason why higher education wouldn’t just revert from an employability marker to a social-class marker. If attainment in higher ed becomes disassociated from employability, we might well end up with the world’s frontiers of knowledge again largely accessible only to the children of the wealthy, those with leisure years to spend attaining class-marker university credentials.

To avoid that kind of reversion, it seems necessary to establish a popular conception of higher education as a public good (and one that shouldn’t be tailored exclusively to degree-seeking pre-career young students).

I know, truly, my reply didn’t make any sense as it was worded. (Apologies.)

I should’ve re-quoted the first two sentences and then said, “While I agree with the proposed disassociation, my preoccupations still extend to higher education: I disagree that our concern for educational opportunity is, or should be, bounded by our concern for the vocational opportunity it consequently provides.” Then, etc, as before.

I know little more than McLemee’s article and the Wikipedia say: After graduating from Harvard he tried a few things including Opus Dei before returning to Harvard where he did something in facilities management to keep body and soul together while writing book reviews and availing himself of the library and possibly other facilities.

My point, made in as much awareness of the story as I have just presented, was that the person being so dismissive of concerns about access to elite institutions of higher education was himself a graduate of such an institution, of all the institutions offering unconsuming jobs he chose to return to one (there was the practical consideration of access to a good library) and the fact that he works at one merited a place in the first line of a profile of him.

If he had, as I have above failed to persuade you to consider, as an alternative kept up the school teaching or written reviews professionally or worked in Starbucks or at a community college the tone of that first line would have been quite different. I see the joke but it hinges on the shocking revelation that he is not on the academic staff (gosh, he’s like Will Hunting and Benjamin Button all in one! Imagine!) of the institution and that very fact that it merits comment confirms the importance of elite educational institutions and therefore of access to them.

It seems clear to me that Harvard has a value to him and to those who value his work that extends beyond access to first class air travel. Are there no other people for whom this is true? Or do they all have lots of money?

In case I have still not made myself clear I am unimpressed at Scialabba’s willingness to forego access to elite educational institutions on behalf of others and surprised that others are sympathetic. It’s not attractive when it’s Lord Farquad speaking and it’s not attractive here.

The purpose of [concern with access to higher education] is to change the current distribution of jobs and educational credentials, since that is what determines the distribution of status, leisure, medical care, retirement security, and most other social and individual goods.

I disagree. But then, perhaps I am the only American who is actively arguing for a restructuring of public higher education that would allow any resident to take a class that interests them, as a leisure activity, with minimal manageable cost in line with other accessible luxuries.

I am deeply uncomfortable with any reduction of higher education to job training, and I would maintain that this reduction is supported in Americans’ minds in part because education is sufficiently expensive to preclude any other purpose. This is exacerbated when policies to defray the cost of attendance are designed to only support full-time students in pursuit of a credential.

What’s my problem with this? Higher education is conceptualized in terms of its capacity to mobilize a person into a preferred socioeconomic status precisely because it is sufficiently inaccessible to ensure its selectivity as a marker.

All else being equal, if everyone achieved roughly equivalent educational credentials, employers and discriminatory social institutions would out of necessity develop new markers for discrimination.

There are jobs aplenty which demand at the application-submission process an educational credential that is frankly irrelevant to the occupation itself; the credential is a fungible marker, and if too many individuals attain that marked condition, the employer will simply design a different way to discriminate.

It is rather more appropriate to conceptualize higher education as a public good in and of itself, one which should be made reasonably accessible to the entire body public. By reducing the cost of attendance sufficiently much to ensure equal opportunity to take courses without seeking a degree, we as a side effect ensure it is possible to afford

Some folks above are correct to mention loans are a big concern: I admittedly dropped a master’s program because I’d already racked up $40K in loan debts and didn’t want to rack up $20K more for a third year.

Wow. I think you have been hook-line-sinkered. There is a, shall we say, playful ambiguity in that “heraldic presentation.”

I don’t know enough about Scialabba to know why he has chosen to pursue his career at his alma mater rather than at, say, a high school in Florida or a national park in New Mexico or somewhere where the families of the people whose access to his alma mater is in question might work.

Bunbury, I would appreciate it greatly if you would clarify for us what you understand Scialabba’s career at Harvard to be.

I don’t know enough about Scialabba to know why he has chosen to pursue his career at his alma mater rather than at, say, a high school in Florida or a national park in New Mexico or somewhere where the families of the people whose access to his alma mater is in question might work. Might it have something to do with access to what goes on there?

A purpose of any form of education policy is indeed to change the current distribution of jobs and educational credentials. So what? We shouldn’t worry if people can read or not because that isn’t a fair basis for the distribution of wealth? Scialabba seems to have achieved the impressive feat of being more complacent than Alan Milburn.

In what way are the two concerns in competition? I can only see that one might regard letting proles enter elite institutions as a way of buying off trouble makers or legitimising a corrupt system but that really is crazy talk.

This smacks of the thinking behind the story, I hope apocryphal, I heard at Oxford that the students at said university had voted to demand the end of extra Oxbridge weighting of means tested student grants on the grounds that it was elitist. It is certainly the sort of thinking that has lead Labour to make a complete pigs ear of its higher education policy.

I note that Scott McLemee’s profile of Scialabba begins:

George Scialabba is an essayist and critic working at Harvard University

If this is the case, does “undermatching” really matter?