Discussing merit and college

 Read another chapter of tyranny of merit, have some things to say, although I expect this to be relatively short.

This chapter focused a lot on college admissions and trying to make them more meritocratic. Originally colleges were a bunch of rich people giving their rich kids opportunities to succeed, but eventually a lot of the big colleges wanted to make things more open and meritocratic. This chapter largely focused on this, discussing how it tried looking at SATs to develop an objective measure of intelligence, and this ended up failing because rich kids were more able to prepare for the SATs, and how they tried diversity initiatives and affirmative action, and student aid, and blah blah blah.

Now, I just want to say this. I went to college. I was the first in my family to do so. I did it primarily through financial aid from the college myself (awarded to me because of my academic record in high school) and of course, student debt. For me, I had a very meritocratic attitude in my college years, I believe I earned my place, and I was the kind of person who would flaunt my grades, and my test scores.

The fact is, my parents drilled it into me from a young age that this was the path of success, and I needed to go to college to avoid working in mcdonalds or doing the kind of back breaking labor my dad did all his life. He was always miserable, but trapped in this system as a wage slave, and I really didn't wanna end up like him. 

He didn't have the opportunities I had. He wasn't rich. My family was white working class. They never went to college. My dad's dream was always to go to college so he could've gotten a career that would have put him more on easy street. But because of his parents unwillingness to pay for it, and his inability to pay for it himself, he ended up going into the military instead, and afterward picked up a trade via night school. He always hated it. It was hard work, very physically punishing work, and I remember him working insanely long hours when I was a kid and I knew he hated every minute of it. 

I never really had a good idea of what I wanted in life. Quite frankly, I never really...wanted to work. When people asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up I always drew a blank. I used to say "movie star" because then you can kinda pretend to do anything, but you're always pretending. You're not actually doing. The fact was, I had no idea. All I knew was I looked forward to a future of work as an adult with dread. The very thought of it would give me crippling anxiety that only got worse as I got older.

Still, I was told that my life would be a lot better if I went to college. So I tried to work hard in school, got straight As and occasionally Bs, and eventually I got into college. Again, my academic record was the big driver. My parents always told me I needed my grades up, and I was given an academic scholarship on the basis of keeping my grades up in college. 

College itself was hard. I would only have 12 hours of lectures a week, but I would be expected to study for 4 hours for every hour in class. So this is a 60 hour week. We were strongly discouraged from working on top of it, and quite frankly, there was no way I could handle working on top of it. Sure some people did it, but they also settled for Cs. But yeah, I wanted to dedicate all of my time to academics, so I went into that.

My first year I was undecided. We were allowed to be undecided the first year, not needing to declare a major until the second year. So I went into all of these different subjects I needed to take anyway to see what stuck, and ultimately I decided on political science and criminology. If I had any dream at all, it was to be a politician. As you guys know, I was a radical right wing christian not all that unlike the likes of Mike Johnson, and I believed that God called me to politics and that I should become a politician to spread Christianity.So I focused on things like public policy, and used the criminology side of it to explore sociological sides of issues. This did shift my politics and moderated me a bit, but I still held my conservative christian worldview through college.

In grad school I went into a similar field at the university across town. I honed my skills further. But then in my last year I started questioning my faith, and ended up becoming an atheist right around the time I graduated. This basically radicalized me into a more liberal tradition, and entering the job market for the first time was a soul crushing experience. The fact was, there werent any jobs around me. The nearest metros with any jobs in my field were 50+ miles in either direction. And even looking at them, they paid quite poorly. We're talking campaign jobs that were 100 hours a week for $24,000 a year. Do the math on THAT one. It's not even minimum wage. A lot of places just wanted you to volunteer, with no promise of a job at all afterwards. I wanted to be paid for my work, I didnt wanna just do free labor for people so I held out. As far as paid jobs, all I saw were the same minimum wage jobs i couldve gotten out of high school. Many of my friends ended up taking up minimum wage work out of school, if they didnt have jobs already. It was a rude awakening. This was life during the great recession and its aftermath, and the big lesson I learned was that for all of the emphasis on education, it doesnt mean crap. Most places dont care about college degrees and most places that do also want experience. You need a job to get experience and experience to get a job. And I just never made it into things. I looked for work for a good 2 years after graduating, but slowly, and eventually gave up. My parents developed health issues, I needed to take care of them anyway, and I largely ended up putting that off. 

Around this time, I also became active on reddit, first in the atheist community, but also I began expanding my humanist view into politics too. And this economy ended up driving me hard to the left. And that's where my human centered capitalist ideas came from. I kinda realized that there was a disconnect between jobs and mental well being. We love to act like jobs give you purpose, but its not like they make jobs just for college grads to do. No, they make the jobs that need to be done. And if you dont like it, oh well, screw you. They dont care about your academic record or how smart you are. They care about your job experience and usefulness. And let's face it, being the "gifted" autistic individual who didnt know I had autism, I've always had a unique blend of being both highly intelligent from a "book smart" perspective, but completely and utterly useless at mundane minimum wage work. I just never had THAT kind of work ethic. Work always served the purpose of getting thigns done. I was working to learn, working to improve myself. But any time I'd say, help out at a church function, I'd get written off as being useless, or ripped on but all of the old ladies with their "if you have time to lean you have time to clean" philosophy. At the time it didnt seem like it mattered. The goal was to become educated enough to do more intellectual work I'm actually good at. But then I ended up finding out, just as I became an atheist, that there was no plan, there was no just deserts for those who work hard. And my life ended up falling apart.

My life isn't that uncommon either. My whole generation was encouraged to go to college. Everyone's parents had the same idea. Send kids to college, they become highly educated, they get high paying jobs. Boom, profit. 

The problem was that the reason college was so prestigious in the past was its exclusivity. Only the rich could afford it. Most people, quite frankly, didn't or couldnt. So if only a few people who are already well off go to college, they ended up coming out and getting the best jobs. As colleges started becoming more about merit, and people were able to go via financial aid and student loans, this caused college to become devalued in the job market. It no longer conferred the special status and the ticket to easy street that it once did. It was just another certification that some people needed but it didnt really open a ton of doors. In fact, my generation is considered "overeducated" by those who look at education purely as a job training thing. Because what happens when you have say a million college jobs, and 3 million graduates? Well, not everyone is gonna make it.

I forget where this stat was, but I read it a while back during this crapshow was going on in the early/mid 2010s, but I think it was said that out of those who went to college, only 20% of people ended up getting work in their field of study, and only half got a job that requires a college degree at all. And "requires a college degree" is relative. Some middle manager jobs require a college degree. So youre not really doing anything particularly rewarding or prestigious, some people ended up being a manager in walmart or something like that with their degree, and that counted. 

This has actually considered some people to turn against free college. I know Andrew Yang aint big on free college for example. This is one point I hard disagree with him on. If one looks at college education purely as a job training endeavor, yeah, it's a failure, and it's better to focus resources elsewhere. But if you see it as giving people an even playing field (which I support, the alternative is going back to college being some privilege only for the elite), and raising the bar of discourse in the country (I believe that a college educated population of free thinkers would end up making the country better in a lot of ways), then free college suddenly sounds like a good idea. 

Of course if everyone goes to college, that means that the job market is even more competitive, and if you like meritocracy, you should be for that. Even I'm for that. Some people don't like that though and believe its a waste of resources. 

Anyway, the book doesnt focus mostly on that, but I wanted to discuss the issue from my perspective before discussing the book's, because I honestly have some strong opinions on this subject. And I feel like the author's weird fixation on college misses the point.

This guy still thinks college education confers social status and is a door to an economy with more and better paying jobs. I disagree. He also sees a huge divide in society as those with a college education and those without, with those without resenting those with and those with being insufferably smug about it to those without. There is some truth to this. But there's more to the narrative than this.

As I said, education no longer guarantees opportunities. Sure it's correlated with them, with those with degrees doing better on average than those without, but there are obviously people who are pretty well off for themselves without a degree, and people who are, like me, kinda experiencing the crap end of the economy despite being highly educated. 

Maybe this is why my views are so unorthodox. Im too smart for the trumpers but i dont fit into the culture most liberals wish to express. I also think that the discussion of economic leftism has largely been left out of this discussion. Remember Hillary talking down to "bernie bros"? Here she was talking down to people with educations. Heck, thats actually the point. To them, we're TOO academic. We're too head in the clouds. We're too well read. We dont connect with the average person. How are we supposed to connect our ideas to like an inner city working class latina making $24k a year in NYC? Gee, idk, by advocating to make a better life? I mean, heres the thing. It's not always about the college. The liberals will use their insufferable smarm on us too. ANd a lot of what drives bernie's movement, and other movements parallel to his like yang's, are younger, college educated people who arent successful. Thats why student loan debt and free college was a huge plank of bernie's platform. And centrist libs were the ones playing their own resentment politics AGAINST US claiming we cant do that because blah blah blah. 

In some ways, the bernie bros have more in common with trumpers than with liberals. And there is similar resentment toward the establishment from the left. It's just that the ideology is more grounded on economics than culture. And in a lot of ways, we challenge the meritocracy narrative more than other groups would. because being educated, but also unsuccessful, we recognize that our system is screwed. That it is a numbers game, and that if we wanna bring prosperity back to america it has to come through things like working class movements and government policies. I dont always agree with the bernie camp these days, Im more yang gang myself as I've gone further and went full on pro UBI and anti work, but still, i feel like this book glosses over the fact that left wing populists exist too. 

On the flip side, I dont think that the big movement on the right is JUST resentment of the elites. It's cultural. It's a split between worldviews, one based in religious fundamentalism, tradition, authority, and folksy wisdom, and the other based on science, rationality, facts, and of course, education. Take it from an ex fundamentalist. The right doesnt resent college because they're not successful. The right is historically the party of meritocracy and the elites. The right hates college because of its liberal cultural values. Because its worldview stands in opposition of what the right typically believes, and the right typically just despises not being taken seriously because they're not educated.

Now, to throw in my lot on this, I'm with the left on this one, mostly. As I went to college, it kind of changed my perspective, as education kinda teaches you how things actually work systemically and gives people the tools to research and think for themselves, and this leads to a rejection of traditional conservative values. Heck, one thing i noticed when i became liberal is a lot of my conservative friends began to resent ME. Not because i was more successful than them, if anything, it was the opposite. One of them was more successful and had his crap together more than me but ripped on me because "I just expected the government to do everything for me". If anything, by rejecting the work ethic and meritocracy, and also being full of hubris due to my own intelligence and education myself, he kinda felt i was an insufferable butthole and cut off context. We did reconnect eventually and things are much more civil, but i avoid politics as a subject with him.

And, in some ways I think that white conservatives to some degree resent all of these measures that colleges do to be more exclusive. Because getting into college, in their mind, is about meritocracy. But if, say, you have only enough spots for 2000 students a year and you start doing affirmative action and diversity measures to take more kids from "underprivileged" backgrounds, THAT creates resentment because those students are seen as not earning their place, and only getting in due to reverse racism and not because they worked hard for it.

In some ways the liberal framework of trying to focus on expanding diversity in meritocratic ways....tends to create MORE resentment. Because it's not actually about merit, it becomes about things like skin color and percieved privilege, and that undermines it. I mean, the reason whites and the like, if anything, resent policies like affirmative action, isnt because they hate black people or whatever, but because they resent working their balls off to get into college only to get passed up for a sympathy pick on the basis of privilege.

Again, this is something that's poorly understood with the economy. We keep saying, due to the nature of growth, that it's not a zero sum game, but it actually is in a way. While growth does make the pie bigger in theory, it is a numbers game in practice, with our system effectively designed to throw a certain number of people into poverty. ANd when the system doesnt structurally support the ability of everyone to go to college, or everyone to get a good job, this induces economic anxiety into people, and when colleges themselves or other institutions like employers, starts implementing policies to pick people not based purely on merit, but on race and gender and background, THAT drives a lot of resentment. 

This weirdo meritocratic left just seems to miss the mark so hard sometimes. Like they WILL look down on white working class people, but because in their identity politics based worldview, they're not worthy of sympathy for being privileged, and THAT's what's dividing politics. 

Again it's not JUST about the college and the left being meritocratic. That's part of it, but I think the left has these social justice brainworms sometimes that skews their worldview from understanding that no, it's more complex than that. If anything, the social justice stuff is a problem because it's seen to UNDERMINE meritocracy. And THAT breeds resentment. What also breeds resentment is the culture war, and while yes, the right is uneducated and resents being told so, I dont see how to avoid that other than just trying to educate everyone so that we're all on the same page and we dont have a culture among half the country that glorifies literal stupidity. 

I think there's something to be said of resentment being driven along the lines of beating meritocracy into people as the end all be all of everything, and the left behaving in obviously unmeritocratic ways. It pushes meritocracy but then supports selectively choosing people who arent the best for college admissions. It supports the work ethic and the idea that you earn what you work for but then it gives only certain people welfare. 

I mean, here's the thing. When you have one system of rules for me, but another for thee, THAT drives resentment. My solution to the problem is to just have universal policies for everyone. I believe UBI would remove a lot of resentment insofar as welfare goes. I believe that free college would inevitably reduce tensions between the left and right and end some of the significant culture war divides driving politics. Will this fix all problems? No. But do my ideas represent a new paradigm that should be discussed? Yes. 

We need to learn how to properly overcome resentment politics. Racism in America's kryptonite. It's always been that ONE THING that drives americans irrationally mad, and keeps people divided over stupid nonsense. When you do this weird centrist liberal thing of helping some people while excluding others, that in itself drives resentment. You either need to go all in with like social democracy, or you need to go full on conservative. And because going full on conservative is no longer an option to me as i see such a way of life as nasty and brutish, I'm full on progressive. UBI, M4A, free college. Give it to everyone, heal the divides in society, stop all the resentment politics. 

As such, there's a lot I agree with that this guy says in this book, but I do think he overemphasizes the college problem and oversimplifies it. I also dont agree with some of the solutions he started going toward toward the end of this chapter about how we need to invest more in jobs programs. It seems like he's gonna go full "dignity of work' on me from here on out. Ugh. Well, to be fair my ideology is so cutting edge barely anyone follows it so not sure what else I expected, but I hate this dance between all of these old ideologies. 

Anyway if i have anything more to say, I'll report back.