The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

by Sarah Kendzior

  Information is power, but information is also freedom. With that freedom comes responsibility. Scholars can no longer question whether their work is relevant to a broader audience, because in the digital age, that audience is simply too broad. All scholarly work is relevant to someone – and the impact can be profound. Whether we allow that impact to be realized remains to be seen.

  --Originally published January 18, 2013

  The immorality of college admissions

  On October 6, New York magazine published an article on the demise of "ethical parenting". A new generation of parents were encouraging cheating, doing their children's homework, bribing powerful officials, and sabotaging their children's rivals.

  "Parenthood means you cannot possibly behave as though society's rules and norms apply equally to all," writes the author, Lisa Miller. She describes a social order where the ends are believed to justify the means, regardless of who gets hurt. Miller attributes the rise of unethical parenting to a declining economy: "The accoutrements of middle-class stability and comfort feel like they're slipping away, even to those of us living smack in the middle of them."

  What Miller never explicitly says is that every act of lying, cheating and cruelty she describes is directed at one goal: Getting a child into a prestigious college. Nothing else drives the immoral behavior depicted, making one wonder - is it the parents who are unethical? Or is it higher education itself?

  Miller's article is one of many trend pieces showcasing how parents sacrifice both their integrity and their bank accounts in the quest for college admission. The New York Times alone has run dozens of articles on high schools that cost $40,000 per year, preschools that cost $43,000 per year, and SAT tutors who charge $35,000 per student.

  The luxurious world depicted in these articles is unfamiliar to the average American family, which makes $52,000 per year. One might wonder why the struggles of wealthy parents are covered so closely when they represent such a tiny percent of the population. That is, until you look at who comprises the entering classes of America's "need-blind" universities.

  Faux diversity

  "Diversity" is a cherished value of American schools - so long as that diversity does not include students whose families earn less than the tuition fee. Elite universities favor those willing to pay to play - and play again until they win.

  Only 3.8 percent of American families make more than $200,000 per year. But at Harvard University, 45.6 percent of incoming freshman come from families making $200,000 or more. A mere 4 percent of Harvard students come from a family in the bottom quintile of US incomes, and only 17.8 percent come from the bottom three quintiles.

  "We admit students without any regard for financial need - a policy we call 'need-blind admission'," Harvard's website proudly proclaims. Harvard charges $54,496 per year for tuition, room and board, but waives the fees for families making less than $60,000 per year.

  This would be a laudable policy were Harvard admitting low-income students in any significant numbers, but they are not. Instead, they fill their ranks with the children of the elite portrayed in Miller's article - elites who drop hundreds of thousands of dollars on private schools, exorbitant "enrichment" activities, and personal tutors that almost no Americans can afford.

  Harvard's admission is "need-blind" only in that it turns a blind eye to actual need. Like many universities, it increases its number of aid recipients by inflating its price tag. With tuition higher than the median US household income, students from families making $200,000 are now deemed poor enough to qualify for financial aid.

  "You can afford Harvard," the admissions site boasts, noting that 70 percent of students receive assistance. They neglect to mention that this 70 percent represents some of the wealthiest people in the country.

  This is not to say that a family making $100,000 or even $200,000 does not merit financial aid to attend Harvard. They do, but only because Harvard charges obscenely high tuition, despite having an endowment of over $30 billion. Their price tag functions as a social signifier and a "go away" sign, a sticker designed to shock - and deter.

  Harvard is but one of many US universities whose admissions policies ensure that the entering class is comprised of the ruling class. Studies by the New America Foundation note that most merit aid goes to wealthy families, and that "merit aid policy is associated with a decrease in the percentage of low-income and black students, particularly at the more selective institutions."

  While universities like Harvard keep out the poor by redefining wealth as poverty, others practice more blatant discrimination. At George Washington University, students who cannot pay full tuition are put on a waitlist while wealthier students are let in. In 2012, less than 1 percent of waitlisted students were admitted.

  Like Harvard, George Washington had advertised itself as "need-blind" until revelations of its admissions process came to light. It now defines itself as "need-aware" - a phrase which implies they are aware of need, but seemingly unconcerned with fulfilling it.

  Wealth as merit

  Defenders of elite universities argue that the poor are not a target of discrimination, but are simply less qualified for admission. They point to lower SAT scores, a dearth of extracurricular activities, and lackluster standards of achievement at impoverished public schools.

  What they are defending is a system in which wealth is passed off as merit, in which credentials are not earned but bought. Aptitude is a quality measured by how much money you can spend on its continual reassessment.

  Students whose parents pay tens of thousands for SAT tutors to help their child take the test over and over compete against students who struggle to pay the fee to take the test once. Students who spend afternoons on "enrichment" activities compete against students working service jobs to pay bills - jobs which don't "count" in the admissions process. Students who shell out for exotic volunteer trips abroad compete with students of what C Z Nnaemeka termed "the un-exotic underclass" - the poor who have "the misfortune of being insufficiently interesting", the poor who make up most of the US today.

  For upper class parents, the college admissions process has become a test of loyalty: What will you spend, what values will you compromise, for your child to be accepted? For lower class parents, admissions is a test failed at birth: An absence of wealth guised as a deficiency of merit. In the middle are the students, stranded players in a rigged game.

  It does not have to be this way. Imagine a college application system in which applicants could only take standardized tests once. Imagine a system in which young people working jobs to support their families were valued as much as those who travel and "volunteer" on their parents' dime. Imagine a system in which we valued what a person did with what he had, instead of mistaking a lack of resources for a lack of ability.

  Imagine a system in which a child's future did not rest on his parents' past.

  A higher education system that once promoted social mobility now serves to solidify class barriers. Desperate parents compromise their principles in order to spare their children rejection. But it is the system itself that must be rejected. True merit cannot be bought - and admission should not be either.

  --Originally published October 29, 2013

  College is a promise the economy does not keep

  In 2000, New York Times columnist David Brooks published a sociological study of the United States that now reads like science fiction. Bobos in Paradise chronicled how a new upper class of "Bobos" - bourgeois bohemians - struggled to navigate life's dazzling options in a time of unparalleled prosperity. As presidential candidates Al Gore and George W Bush debated how to spend the projected $5trn government surplus, Brooks took on the micro crisis: How would baby boomers handle the psychic strain of making money at fulfilling jobs?

  "This is the age of discretionary income," Brooks declared, noting that liberal arts majors were "at top income brackets" and journalists made "six-figure salaries". The WASP aristocracy that had long ruled the US had been replaced wit
h a meritocracy based on hard work and creative prowess. Anyone could join - provided he or she had the right education.

  Therein lay the hidden anxiety. According to Brooks, baby boomers had surmounted class and ethnic barriers through the accumulation of credentials. A degree from Harvard now carried more prestige - and provided more opportunity - than the bloodlines that had propelled the Protestant elite.

  But the appeal of a college degree was also its fatal flaw: Anyone could get it. The formula could only work once. The same educational system that created new elites now threatened the prospects of their heirs.

  "Members of the educated class can never be secure about their children's future," Brooks wrote. "Compared to past elites, little is guaranteed."

  He claimed the burden of maintaining success fell on the children themselves, who would have to "work through school" just like their parents.

  As it turned out, there was another way.

  In the 14 years since Bobos was published, elites have done much to guarantee their children's security. Namely, they have raised the price of the credentials needed to participate in the new meritocracy by such dramatic measures that it locks out a large part of the population while sending nearly everyone else into debt.

  Since 2000, the average cost of tuition and fees has more than doubled, while student loan debt has grown at double-digit rates and well-paying jobs have all but vanished. Since 2001, employment in low-wage occupations has increased by 8.7 percent while employment in middle-wage occupations has decreased by 7.3 percent. The most popular industries pay poorly: According to the April 2014 jobs report, four of the top six industries that saw job creation were in the lowest paying fields. Meanwhile, in prestigious professions entry-level jobs have been replaced with full-time, unpaid internships.

  Today's youth are the best educated generation in US history. But opportunities are reserved only for those who can buy them. Young US citizens have inherited an entrenched meritocracy that combines the baby boomers' emphasis on education with the class rigidity of the WASP aristocracy it allegedly undermined.

  Purchasing credentials

  College does not guarantee a job. It is debatable whether college - in a time of defunded and eliminated programs, rampant grade inflation, and limited student-professor interaction - offers much of an education, at least one for which it is worth taking on significant debt. So why go?

  People go to college because not going to college carries a penalty. College is a purchased loyalty oath to an imagined employer. College shows you are serious enough about your life to risk ruining it early on. College is a promise the economy does not keep - but not going to college promises you will struggle to survive.

  In an entrenched meritocracy, those who cannot purchase credentials are not only ineligible for most middle-class jobs, but are informed that their plight is the result of poor "choices". This ignores that the "choice" of college usually requires walking the road of financial ruin to get the reward - a reward of employment that, in this economy, is illusory.

  Credentialism is economic discrimination disguised as opportunity. Over the past 40 years, professions that never required a college degree began demanding it.

  "The United States has become the most rigidly credentialized society in the world," write James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield in their 2005 book Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money. "A BA is required for jobs that by no stretch of imagination need two years of full-time training, let alone four."

  The promotion of college as a requirement for a middle-class life in an era of shrinking middle-class jobs has resulted in an increase in workers whose jobs do not require the degree - 15 percent of taxi cab drivers, 18 percent of firefighters. More perniciously, it has resulted in the exclusion of the non-college educated from professions of public influence. In 1971, 58 percent of journalists had a college degree. Today 92 percent do, and at many publications, a graduate degree in journalism is required - despite the fact that most renowned journalists have never formally studied journalism.

  Journalism is one of many fields of public influence - including politics - in which credentials function as de facto permission to speak, rendering those who lack them less likely to be employed and less able to afford to stay in their field. Ability is discounted without credentials, but the ability to purchase credentials rests, more often than not, on family wealth.

  A 'less worse' future

  In media and policy circles, this is not how the story is told. A college degree is portrayed as a promise rather than a threat. "People Who Skip College Are Giving Up $800,000 On Average" proclaimed Business Insider, one of a slew of publications that portrayed college as the ticket to a near million-dollar prize.

  The $800,000 figure came from a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco showing that the average US college graduate will earn at least $800,000 more than the average high school graduate, and that "college is still worth it". The report relied mainly on 20th century data, drawing conclusions from a short-lived period in US history when college was cheaper and wages were higher.

  That said, the report is not wrong: A college graduate will earn more than a high school graduate. But the real problem is that today both groups earn less and sacrifice more - in time, money, and personal freedom. College does not offer a better future, but a less worse one. College is not a cure for economic insecurity, but a symptom of the broader plague of credentialism.

  In an op-ed for New York magazine, Benjamin Wallace-Wells cites the popularity of French economist Thomas Piketty to claim that the questions David Brooks and others raised "about the culture of the meritocracy, about what kinds of people got ahead in American life" were "obsolete". America's new language is economics, he writes - oblivious to the fact that economics is, and always was, the language of meritocracy.

  "The Bobo meritocracy will not easily be toppled, even if some group of people were to rise up and conclude that it should be," Brooks wrote in 2000. He is right that it will not be easy. But the first step to toppling a meritocracy is recognizing that it is not a meritocracy. You do not need a college education to know you have been screwed.

  --Originally published May 14, 2014

  PART V: MEDIA

  Managed expectations in the post-employment economy

  On March 4, Olga Khazan, the new editor of the Global section of theAtlantic, sent an email to Nate Thayer, a veteran journalist covering Asian political affairs. Khazan had seen an article Thayer had written about North Korea and liked it. She wanted to know if he could "repurpose" it for the Atlantic website.

  "We unfortunately can't pay you for it," she wrote Thayer. "But we do reach 13 million readers a month."

  Thayer was appalled. He explained that he was a professional journalist "not in the habit of giving my services for free to for-profit media outlets so they can make money by using my work and efforts by removing my ability to pay my bills and feed my children".

  Khazan apologized and explained that the Atlantic was out of money. She told him the most they paid for an original story was $100, but they did not have $100 at the moment. All they could offer Thayer was "exposure" to benefit his "professional goals". Thayer's professional goal was to pay his bills. Outraged, he posted the exchange on his blog. It went viral within hours.

  Who pays?

  The news that the Atlantic - one of the oldest and most venerated publications in America - paid its writers little or nothing came as a shock to many, but not to journalists struggling to make a living in the post-employment economy. Freelance rates have plunged over the past decade, a decline tracked on the crowd-sourced website Who Pays Writers? (the answer: hardly anyone).

  Some journalists say this is not a big deal. Unpaid labor should be expected, even treasured. In an article called "People Writing for Free on the Internet Is an Enormous Boon to Society", salaried Slate columnist Matthew Yglesias argued that if people demanded money for their labor, the world would be deprived of important works. "This
Nine Inch Nails/Carly Rae Jepsen mashup is amazing, for example," he wrote.

  Atlantic employees say they feel the freelancers' pain, but there is nothing they can do. Editor James Bennett apologized for offending Thayer and added that "when we publish original, reported work by freelancers, we pay them".

  This claim was dismissed by Atlantic contributors who were paid nothing for their original, reported contributions. In a lengthy defense of the Atlantic's publishing practices, Technology editor Alexis Madrigal argued that while the game of journalism "sucks", it was too late to change the rules: "You still have limited funds. You still can't pay freelancers a living wage."

  But then where is all the money going? "The Atlantic is two things every legacy publishing company would like to be: profitable and more reliant on digital advertising revenues than on print," writes Forbes magazine. 2012 brought the Atlantic a record profit, beating out the record profit of 2011, with 59 percent of earnings coming from digital revenues. Not every writer at the Atlantic is suffering for their craft. When the Atlantic recruited staff writer Jeffrey Goldberg, they sent his daughter ponies and offered him a lavish six-figure salary. Thayer had once been offered $125,000 by the magazine to write six articles.

  The problem in journalism is not that people are writing for free. It is that people are writing for free for companies that are making a profit. It is that people are doing the same work and getting paid radically disparate wages. It is that corporations making record earnings will not allocate their budgets to provide menial compensation to the workers who make them a success.

  The post-employment economy

  The Atlantic is far from the only publication to withhold wages, nor is journalism the only field. In academia, adjunct professors live in poverty doing the same work as the average professor paid $73,207 per year. In many industries - including policy, entertainment, and business - interns do the same jobs as salaried employees and are paid nothing or next to nothing. "We need to hire a 22-22-22," said one new media manager quoted in the New York Times, meaning a 22-year-old willing to work 22-hour days for $22,000 a year.