This is an installment in an irregular series of quick meditations on what I’m calling the “personal economy,” inspired by E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful.
Prior to World War II, the Chinese government calculated that it took the equivalent of 30 peasants’ annual work to educate one person for a single year at a university. In other words, the equivalent energy that thirty people would spend laboring over the course of a year was required to support that individual during a single year of studies. Assuming a four-year program, that means it took 120 peasant work years to graduate that lucky person and send them into the world to ply their new trade.
I know nothing of what a Chinese university in the 1930’s looked like, but my intuition tells me that the cost of food, housing, and supporting infrastructure of facilities and humans required by an American college student in the 2020’s is somewhat larger. We have no subsistence peasants to measure by—or rather, we keep them elsewhere—but no doubt a college education is an immense investment beyond what we typically consider.
E.F. Schumacher pointed out that the reason a society would invest so much productive capital in a person’s education was not out of some special love for that kid. They figured that the knowledgeable professional, for example a doctor, would provide as much or more benefit to the community in return. Throwing away resources on someone who never serves the community would be absurd. Education, in that sense, was a responsibility. It was a debt owed by the recipient to his fellows who made it possible, and when he acted in good faith, he would graduate to ask himself how he could immediately serve those who for so long served him.
It might be argued that a modern university student owes no such debt, because he graduates with a six-figure one of the cash variety. Students pay their own way, and they pay it back eventually because student debt can’t be discharged through bankruptcy in America.
That only works if we translate peasant work hours into dollars, as if they’re the same thing. Dollars do nothing but stand in as a token for energy. Throwing money in a hole doesn’t produce an education. For that, you need facilities, professors, texts, and equipment for the specialist. In a modern university, you need a small city of support staff. You need a power plant and waste management, plumbers and electricians, administrators and custodians, roads and buses. All of these things may or may not be “paid” for by tuition. Even if they are, none of those materials or human work hours can be used in service of anything else, because they’re spoken for in the name of higher education. We have finite time and resources, so every building is one that can’t be built elsewhere. Every sewer line repaired is one that can’t be tended elsewhere.
The answer, of course, is that universities create jobs for people who wouldn’t have had them. They aren’t peasant farmers because we gave them something to do. That may be true, but gave them something to do for what? So that we can produce professionals who ideally provide their communities with worth in excess of the 30, or 3,000, or however many peasant work hours they require. Does every graduate do that?
I have a college degree, and I would need a lot of antiperspirant if I had to explain just how I’ve paid back the burden of my education.
Modern educations aren’t designed to enrich the student’s community. Last week, I showed how most of the brighter bulbs end up leaving altogether for a handful of megalopolises. The hinterlands produce fruit that they never taste, and the soil grows more barren by the year. An education in the 2020’s is designed to fill corporate and university jobs with management material. Are all of those positions necessary? Are the companies they work for useful to people who stopped at a diploma or worse? Sometimes. But in most cases, I would argue otherwise.
What’s more, there seems to be a sense of this in the graduates. In his book Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber spoke to a variety of educated workers who report that despite having easy work and nice salaries, they suffer from anxiety, depression, and worthlessness. They lament that their jobs are not only unprofitable for the organization and useless to anyone outside it, but have no meaning other than to give another manager more people to manage. They may have never heard of Schumacher’s suggestion that an education is both a gift and a responsibility, but they suffer it as deeply as an unpaid student loan. Some may wish they had gone to work in a humbler and more productive field, but the burden of those loans makes it impossible to do anything but serve one company or another until they’re debt-free and too old to change careers.
Though it forces me to confront a personal failure, I like the idea of education as a responsibility. Every resource and hour of human labor that enabled me to go to school was an investment. If 18-year olds viewed it as such, how many would go to college, knowing that they had to pay back more than just a loan? Would it change their major? The most lucrative careers aren’t always the ones that do the community the most good. Often, in fact, they do the most harm. Thinking of education as a way to gain membership into a socioeconomic class and provide income for a home and lots of online shopping ensures that we send our clever kids far away to do nothing of value to anyone but themselves. It acts as a funnel, slurping wealth upward to university administrators and corporate employers. We’ve managed to hide the peasants, but those work hours are still lost.
On the other hand, thinking of education as a debt of service orients the graduate to careers that enrich communities instead of bosses. There might be less money in it, but useful work holds other rewards. In those terms, it’s helpful to ask, “How much student debt do I still carry?”