Culture, Class, Privilege, and the (justifiable?) Aggrievement of the Privileged

A great many people in my educational* and professional class are mystified by the insecurities of the white lower-middle class, especially in the context of national politics and the Trump phenomenon.  I try to avoid using this blog to discuss national politics, but I think this issue intersects with many of the class and educational issues that I've been discussing on this blog, so I will make an exception.

Someone whom I know recently wondered why Trump's supporters feel like outsiders or underdogs in a society that privileges white people above all others.  There are many assumptions buried in that question, because using the word "privilege" in regard to race connotes a certain viewpoint about social justice.  Within the framework of those assumptions, the question is purely rhetorical, because it is almost impossible to give any answer other than "Clearly those ridiculous people are wrong" and still be consistent with those assumptions.  I will have to step outside of those assumptions in order to give some better answer than that, but I will try to stay as close to those assumptions as possible, because the difficulty of communicating between people with different premises is just as great in one direction as it is in the other (to be maximally relativist).

Let us begin by acknowledging that in many (though not all) cases, bigotry is a real factor in the political motivation.  Bigotry is illegitimate.  Full stop.  Nonetheless, it is not the entirety of the motivation, and bigotry thrives most easily in the presence of real fears.

In examining those fears, we go to a central theme of this blog: America has not done a good job of transitioning its lower-middle class to a post-industrial economy.  Inequality of wealth and income bear out that observation. The most aggrieved whites are often either people who have suffered from that, or people whose friends and families have suffered from that. Some are even from families that were too disadvantaged to even benefit from the industrial economy, let alone what has come after.

The other thing that bears this out is the sheer amount of protectionism in Trump's rally speeches.  His comments on immigrants capture the media spotlight, but he has plenty to say about economic protectionism, and the victims of the post-industrial economy are eager to hear that.  If he were only about building walls and kicking out Muslims he would not have made it as far as he has.  He's doing more than just promising to kick ass.  He's promising JOBS.  I think those promises are plainly false, but he's making them, and people like them.

Academia has been particularly bad at responding to the effects of the post-industrial economy.  Some of it is for good reason:  If there's anyone geared to producing "knowledge workers" it's academics.  Good for us.  Nothing wrong with focusing on our comparative advantage (to touch on trade issues again...).  The other reason for the bad response, though, involves values and culture.  Academics are quite comfortable talking about privilege in the context of race/color/ethnicity, sex/gender, sexuality, disability, etc., but a profession disproportionately populated by people whose parents have advanced degrees is curiously uninterested in privileges associated with social and economic class.  Fancy that.  Yes, yes, every university pays some token attention to the concerns of first generation college students, and we all say something about low income as a form of disadvantage, but the fights that get people riled up are far more likely to involve race or gender.

And don't think that low-income whites aren't aware of that.  Don't think that for one second.  They may not read the Chronicle of Higher Education, they may not know (or care) about student government officers facing political fallout for wearing sombreros at a party, but they know what liberals talk about.

Furthermore, economic class is not the only dimension of class.  America has a "high" culture (well, "high" by American standards, probably "middlebrow"--at best--by European standards), and certain subsets of white people are well aware (and often proudly aware) that they aren't in it.  Country music and NASCAR and whatnot may be big business, but many of the bankers who handle that money probably have tickets to whatever is playing at Carnegie Hall.

If this were just about entertainment preferences, eh, to each his own. But it's more than that.  There are cultural differences on many levels, and they matter to people.  Southern whites haven't helped their case by claiming the Confederacy as a cultural point of pride, but there are plenty who don't do that and yet still feel out of place in white "high" culture.  One place where cultural and economic class issues intersect is in the value considerations that we bring to the question "How will we respond to the post-industrial economy?"  For more than 2 decades, the answers of the center-left have been:

1) Social programs.  Social programs have their place, but social programs do not fulfill the very human need to be a provider, and they do produce ill effects that many lower-middle-class whites are witness to.  These ill effects, and the lack of a solution that makes people into providers, offend their moral conscience.

2) Education:  There's nothing wrong with education.  I've devoted my life to it!  Still, one recurring theme of this blog is that it's often easier to improve educational systems via improvements to the economy than it is to improve the economy via improvements to the educational system. 

There have been real benefits to expanding higher education, but it's also been accompanied by credential inflation, and we've been bad at confronting that tension.  The middle class is very aware that there was a time when (at least some) high school graduates could get a "good" desk job without a Bachelor's degree, and they are very aware that that time is gone. Admittedly, those paths sans college were more for the middle class and upper-middle-class than the lower-middle class, but the existence of those paths meant that the climb from the lower-middle class to a desk job did not involve student loans. You "only" had to climb one rung through hard work at a free public high school, plus some (challenging) socialization. But you didn't need to write anyone a check.

3) Diversity: The left will work (or at least talk) tirelessly to improve the color balance of elite professional groups, but what does that matter for anyone else?  Should you feel better if your house is fraudulently foreclosed upon by a bank whose management team includes people of color?  Diversifying the 1% doesn't make the 99% any less screwed, even if it does ease the consciences of the 1-percenters.

"But I want more than that!  I'm working for diversity for everyone, not just the 1%!"  You believe that, and maybe you do work for that, but there's a lot of money at stake here.  Don't fool yourself into thinking that diversity workshops in nice hotel conference rooms, facilitated by expensively-dressed people, are really about the 99%.  That's not how it works.  Ask yourself why the moneyed and respectable, and leaders of government funding agencies and academic institutions talk more about diversity than they talk about the working class in the post-industrial economy.  And then read Class Dismissed by John Marsh and The Trouble With Diversity by Walter Benn Michaels for left-leaning critiques of how elite political and educational cultures largely dismiss economic class in their considerations.  (And note that I've blogged responses to both of those books, and you can find them on the list of tags.)

None of this is to say that the white working class doesn't enjoy certain advantages over people of color.  Of course they do.  That's a given.  But the white working class is well aware of the white people who enjoy advantages over them, and (more importantly) the white working class is well aware that white elites see something virtuous in token efforts to help disadvantaged people of color but not disadvantaged whites. Meaningful reform of the post-industrial economy might threaten business models.  Diversity generates good PR.  Lower-income whites know this, and they thus see themselves as disfavored in the elite consensus.  

And they know that it's "safe" to sneer at them in educated circles.  I doubt that your typical Trump voter reads Inside Higher Ed (though I do wonder about a few people in the comments section...) but they would not be surprised to read this article on racism, in which a professor includes in her venting about students (a time-honored tradition, and one that is not alien to the middle class, since we often have schoolteachers in our families) a derisive reference to poor whites and "Wonder Bread."  Can anybody imagine a writer concerned with social justice making a similar comment about poor people from other ethnic/racial backgrounds and foods stereotypically associated with those groups, and getting it published in a higher education publication?

"But, but, they have privilege!"  Yes, their privilege.  Let's talk about that word.  When I was growing up (in a Midwestern swing state, FWIW), "privileged" was a word to describe the upper class and upper-middle class.  It wasn't a word to describe facets of most people's lives.  That doesn't mean that there isn't a valid concept there; I freely admit that most of the things that people refer to under the social justice term "privilege" are real and important things that we need to confront.  At the same time, though, the connotations of that word are just horrible.  Not being shot by the cops at a routine traffic stop should be regarded as a baseline guarantee, not a privilege.  "Privilege" connotes something above and beyond baseline.  You might reply that for people of color it is NOT a baseline guarantee, and you're right.  Fortunately, we have a term for that, one that is quite accurate, and one that does not try to paint the experiences of low-income white people with the same broad brush as the experiences of rich people, and one that avoids treating "not getting shot" as something that should be considered above and beyond normal.  Do you know what that term is?  "Racist double standard."  It elegantly sums up a lot of things that fall under the banner of "white privilege", just as "sexist double standard" sums up a lot of things that fall under the banner of "male privilege."  And these terms do so without equating the lived experience of the poor with the highly advantageous circumstances of the rich.

Some of you may be objecting that it's sociological lingo, a perfectly fine piece of jargon.  By all means, use jargon in professional circles.  I will never tell sociologists what words to use when they are sociologizing with other sociologists.  And I freely admit that there's nothing wrong with linguistic evolution (hence I'm writing this in English rather than Indo-European).  But when you communicate outside of the circles of people who make a professional study of race and gender and disadvantage, you will be more effective if you consider the connotations that a term carries in the wider society.  You'll also be more effective if you don't view social justice as requiring the masses to adopt the correct academic jargon.

Does any of this excuse Trump supporters, or other instances of supporting demagoguery or bigotry?  Of course not.  What I hope it does do is explain the insecurities that many people carry, and why they feel that their fears are not being addressed by our more respectable elites.  If we do not fashion a genuinely inclusive and progressive consensus that includes a politically significant but economically disadvantaged group, then we will harvest bitter fruits for many years to come.

Finally, some of you might be thinking "You keep talking about the problems with the post-industrial economy, but what do you want to DO about it?"  Beats me.  If I actually knew what to DO about it I'd start a business, solve the most pressing economic problems of our time, and in the process become a billionaire.  (Then I'd go full-on mad scientist and build an underground lair with a doomsday device...)  But the fact that I can't find a solution does not mean that I'll deny the problem.

*I originally began this sentence with "A lot of..." but then changed it to "A great many..." because "A lot of" just sounds too informal, like something that a student would write.  That's educational privilege right there.

Class Dismissed: Concluding thoughts

About half of the last chapter is devoted to arguing that economic problems need economic solutions.  I agree with the general premise.  Marsh argues the specifics from very much a left/progressive perspective, and your agreement with this portion of the chapter will depend in large part on how many of his premises you share.  However, even if you have a different view of social and economic problems, I think the general proposition that schools cannot be the sole solution to poverty is a sound one.  Indeed, one could take a very conservative, traditionalist view of education and argue for education as building minds, building character, and building citizens, rather than view education as building workers.  To a large extent that's the view of William F. Buckley in God and Man at Yale, a book on higher education that is written from a perspective quite different from that of John Marsh.

Marsh goes there, to some extent, in the second half of the chapter.  He greatly sympathizes with the view that education is a good in itself, irrespective of whether it enhances productivity.  There are a great many people who have argued that a well-educated citizenry is a necessary (though hardly sufficient) bulwark against many forms of tyranny.  However, as Marsh points out, the belief that if we just send everyone to school they'll become better voters is almost as naive as the view that if we just send everyone to school they'll become higher-paid workers.  Educational problems are hard enough to solve on their own, and even harder to solve as means to some other end.

Marsh's final view is one that I basically agree with in the broad strokes:  Education is a good unto itself, but it also does play at least some role in ameliorating social and economic problems.  While it is neither just nor feasible to treat education as the only path to economic improvement, as long as society does treat it that way there will be people seeking education to that end, and it is right and proper that we do what we can for the people who are doing their best to study towards a better future.  However, while we have a duty to do what we can for the students in front of us, I do think we need to communicate clearly to the broader society that we can help people reach intellectual milestones but we cannot transform the economy, we cannot nullify the supply and demand factors that will erode the college earnings premium when degree production rises, and we cannot work miracles when we are sent woefully under-prepared students.  We need to do what we can for those in front of us, but we need to be realistic in telling the wider world what we can do.

In a day or two I'll start blogging another book.

Chapter 4 of Class Dismissed: Left psychology, right psychology, and reformer psychology

Marsh proposes in the last few pages of Chapter 4 that a nearly-exclusive focus on education as the answer to poverty and inequality arises largely because Americans want to believe that we have or can have a system where people get what they deserve.  Teaching a man to fish satisfies the liberal impulse to do something to help people, but also satisfies the conservative impulse to make the poor responsible for themselves.  (I hasten to add that that conservative impulse to favor personal responsibility is certainly not a bad one, if acted on in concert with other considerations as part of a balanced approach.)

What I find most illuminating about this simple and reasonable framing is that it sheds light on one of the stranger aspects of academic culture:  When I go to a presentation on educational reforms and improvements, the presenters usually bear fundamentally conservative tokens of establishment figures (funding, titles, the imprimatur of elite organization) yet they speak a language of social justice, equity, benevolence, transformation, and "shaking things up." These are not stereotypical lefty fringe figures lecturing in sandals or whatever; they would be completely inoffensive in the eyes of a conservative donor. Analyzed against the ruler of the political left-right axis, they exemplify the bipartisan nature of the consensus that Marsh identifies.  Left and right both agree that we can and should fix all social problems via educational reforms, so you get the weird situation of a STEM education reformer talking about social justice and equity and diversity but also saying that we need more Americans and fewer foreigners in STEM for the sake of our national defense.

I always marvel at the weird situation of sitting in a presentation by a person with countless accolades from stodgy professional organizations and a title like "Associate Vice Provost for Academic Initiatives" (or even, at one conference, "College President") speaking animatedly about completely overhauling the entire academic landscape because everything that we've ever done needs to be swept away.  I am admittedly a boring person who was born seven years after the end of the sixties, and I have attended precious few protests, but everything I've heard about shaking up establishments, rejecting the old ways, and agitating for equity tells me that you shouldn't go looking for bold, anti-establishment thinking in a hotel conference space with frigid air conditioning*, especially if the alleged reformer is wearing a suit and commanding a speaking fee.

Despite that, a great many academics come out of these events speaking in a language that at time comes close to that of a religious convert.  Many academics profess no religious faith but nonetheless offer narratives that sound tantalizingly close to conversion experiences or born-again faith when discussing their experiences with pedagogical reform efforts.  The whole thing is bizarre to me, and not just because I'm a product of Catholic grade school and a practicing** Catholic to this day, i.e. a person for whom born-again narratives are alien.  Even if I were irreligious, I think I would be suspicious that these establishment-seeming figures will actually make the world a more equitable place.

I still don't know why so many college professors eat those presentations up like they're pita chips with Trader Joe's humus***, but at least I have some context for understanding why these workshop presenters are so bizarre:  They are embodying the left-right consensus nature of educational reform, hence you get the equity and justice language of the left from somebody bearing markers that could open the doors of the most conservative establishments.  Everyone else in the room might be eating it up, but I feel like I'm staring at a bizarre alien monster that just stepped out of a flying saucer.

*Seriously, why are conference rooms and event spaces always air-conditioned to the point that there's at least one condensed matter physicist doing a superconductivity experiment in the corner?
**Well, as practicing as a typical American Catholic, which is to say that I'm not batting 1.000 on mass attendance.
***The snack food of choice for academics everywhere.

Chapter 4 of Class Dismissed: It's the economy, stupid!

Chapter 4 traces the trajectory of the idea that education is THE solution to problems of poverty and economic inequity.  Marsh's take is that in the 1960's there was a political moment where a War on Poverty seemed feasible and worthwhile, but that idea mostly collapsed, and improvements to education were the one idea that survived from the collapse.  Personally, I think the idea of a winnable War on Poverty is hubris, given the multi-faceted and eternal nature of the problem.  Dissecting the nature and causes of poverty would take us far afield from the educational interests motivating my blogging here, but irrespective of one's own optimism or pessimism on this topic, and irrespective of what one thinks a proper solution or mitigation would or should look like, improvements to education can only be part of the solution, not the bulk of the solution. As Marsh notes repeatedly, treating education as the entirety of the solution rather than a mere component of it essentially amounts to a postulate that the problem is entirely with the poor people, and that if they are improved then poverty is solved.  If only it were that simple.

Marsh puts a negative face on the motives behind regarding education as the solution, and I'll get there in the next post.  First, though, I'll examine the best possible defense of the idea that poverty can be fixed entirely through education.  We're all familiar with the saying "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, but teach a man to fish and he can feed himself thereafter."  There are certainly important ideas in that saying, whether you view it through a conservative lens that sees moral hazard in handouts or a more sympathetic lens that sees dignity in labor.  However, it's also a false dichotomy.  What if you teach a person to fish but there are hardly any reliable boats available?  What if pollution is killing all of the fish in the vicinity?  The point I'm getting at in my analogy is that even if one mostly takes handouts off of the list of options, "teach a man to fish" leaves the structure of the economy unexamined.  Is the growing bifurcation between rich and poor solely a consequence of poor people lacking the skills (whether through their own faults or accidents of birth) to compete in the modern economy, or are structural factors and economic policies also in play?  If the later, will the economy have well-paying jobs available for all of the people lifted up if we just expand educational opportunity?

Mind you, I don't believe that education is completely irrelevant to issues of poverty and inequality.  Certainly, education plays a substantial role in one's job prospects.  However, I'm unconvinced that endlessly-expanding college enrollment rosters will fix everything, especially in the context of sending more people into STEM careers.*  Saying that skill development helps people improve their prospects in life is different from saying that policy-makers have an accurate view of which fields will be in demand, and which types of education will help the most people prosper.  Indeed, if I had an accurate forecast of the job market I would probably be able to find ways to make trillions of dollars in equities and commodities markets, since I would know which sectors will prosper or decline, and which raw materials they'll need.  The choice isn't between teaching a man to fish and giving him a fish, it's between giving him food and some combination of teaching him to fish, improving the water quality in the bay, teaching him to grow corn, improving irrigation infrastructure, teaching him to grow apples, improving the rules on pesticides, etc.

On the other side of the coin, while I echo Marsh when he rejects the hypothesis that poverty can be addressed solely by improving poor people, it would be factually and ethically incorrect to deny that poverty does make its mark on people, and often that mark shows up in school.  On page 153, Marsh cites a 1972 book that makes a point we've seen repeated in studies again and again over the years:  Parental income affects educational outcomes at least as well as educational outcomes affect subsequent income.**  So, just as we cannot ignore aspects of economic opportunity that go beyond educational opportunity, we also cannot ignore the fact that poverty leaves its cruel mark on people and thus affects how educational opportunity will play out.  Maybe the better order of operations is to improve job opportunities so that the children of today's workers can do better in school, rather than improve schools in the hopes that people will eventually get better jobs.

Of course, "Just improve the job market!" is easier said than done, and I certainly have no easy prescriptions there.  On the other hand, "Just improve the schools!" is also easier said than done, and decades of tinkering with schools has not reduced economic inequality in the US.  I don't claim to know what the solution is, but I concur with Marsh's point that a single-minded focus on schools is not the way to go.

*An excellent book has been written on that topic.  I read it when it came out last year, but maybe I'll return to it and blog it at some point.
**This is the next book that I plan to blog.  Although the statistical data is now more than 40 years out of date, I plan to read it with the hopes of understanding how thinking on the issue has evolved over time.

Chapter 3 of Class Dismissed: Character, Citizenship, and Liberal Arts

I'm half-way through Chapter 3 of Class Dismissed.  This chapter traces the history of American views on education and its purpose.  I'm not well-versed in this history, which is to say that while I've heard a number of narratives that most other people have also heard, I've never examined enough sources to say with confidence whether those narratives are truly representative of everything going on in society at the time.  I know a tiny bit about what, say, some of the Puritans wrote 400 years ago, but I don't know how many people agreed with them or what else was going on.

Nonetheless, everything that I'm familiar with is consistent with Marsh's narrative that in early American history education was mostly viewed as being a path to character development rather than economic development.  The Puritans, an under-appreciated group of early Americans (IMHO) were great promoters of literacy, but one of their main motives for promoting education (though certainly not the only motive) was so that people could study the Bible, not so that they could further the ends of Mammon.  Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were both involved in the founding of great universities (UVA and Penn, respectively) and both were interested in the development of citizens and leaders and the protection of liberty, not GDP growth.  (Which is not to say that these industrious men were uninterested in commerce, just that they saw character development and civic virtue as the first order effects of education, and prosperity as resulting from character and work.)

Interestingly, Chad Orzel just put up a tangentially relevant post on defenses of the humanities (some of them being better than others). Although modern liberal arts advocates can (and probably should) cite all sorts of statistics about the economic prospects of liberal arts grads, the truth is that liberal arts education, especially in the traditional environment of a small, residential liberal arts college, is more about developing people than developing workers (and rightly so).  Our most traditional institutions descend from an era where the purpose of higher education was, in part, to take the sons of a certain class and steer them through rites of passage in a residential experience that might vary in intellectual rigor (remember, George W. Bush graduated from Yale!) but included a fair amount of socialization, some of it simply frat parties but much of it indoctrination into the norms and rituals of a certain class, through the sports of the upper class, extracurriculars, etc.  In that setting, it was fine to study art history rather than accounting because the purpose was to develop a certain type of man, who would then participate in the affairs of the class from which he came (or, for a few lucky scholarship students, the class which they were joining).

The immediate retort from passionate defenders of liberal arts colleges might be to cite the academic rigor and selectivity of elite liberal arts colleges in the modern era.  First, I have immense respect for liberal arts colleges, including the way that they have kept their purpose of character-building and socialization while developing into a more modern concept of academic rigor and challenge.  I believe that they have modernized in the best possible way.  Second, I agree that many of them have made heroic efforts to blend academic selectivity with inclusive values, and that they are no longer merely places for the sons (and now daughters) of a certain class to go through rites of passage.

My point in mentioning these institutions and their roots in the past is not to condemn them as relics, but to contrast them with an unhealthily vocational modern view of education.  I think that every passionate defender of the liberal arts would agree that a purely vocational view of higher education is ill-advised.  What I see Marsh bringing to this conversation is a recognition that viewing education as the primary path to class mobility, a view endorsed by a great many people in a great many settings, including some of the most committed defenders of inclusive values, is fundamentally a vocational view of college.  Even viewing a philosophy degree from a residential college as a path to economic class mobility is, in an important sense, a vocational view of college, and Marsh is trying to make us recognize that so that we might challenge it.

Marsh also makes the case that prior to the 20th century, and even into the 20th century for many people, the path to prosperity was seen as arising from work ethic, good character, and ingenuity, not academic achievement.  This is peripherally in synchrony with Lani Guinier's urging that academic institutions promote teamwork over individual scholastic prowess, though prosperity is not Guinier's primary motive in urging reform of higher education.  (Indeed, she urges less emphasis on individuals seeking the highest possible income.)  This is also in synchrony with my exposure to older books and magazines and entertainment urging young kids to work hard and be honest and thereby achieve the American Dream; GPA is not mentioned much.

I'm just at the part of the chapter where Marsh gets into how education got to be viewed as the paramount path to prosperity in the eyes of social reformers.  I'll blog about that when I've finished the chapter.

Marsh, first 1.5 chapters

I don't have a lot to say about the first chapter of Class Dismissed.  It lays out the case that economic inequality is real and growing in the US, and that the effects of inequality (relative economic disadvantage) are real, even if not as obvious as the effect of material disadvantage (i.e. disadvantage on an absolute scale rather than a relative scale).  John Marsh is not an economist, but he's definitely well-read and he draws on a lot of data sets (primarily government statistics) rather than secondary analyses.  Not being an expert on these sorts of macroeconomic statistics myself, I'd be reluctant to cite Marsh's analyses as the final word on any detailed issue, but the overall picture is reasonable enough and well-referenced.

I'm half-way through chapter 2, where he starts arguing that we can't educate our way out of this problem.  I have issues with a few specifics, like his annoying habit of saying that when a particular type of labor is abundant the demand is low.  I know what he means--he means that if there are lots of people available then employers won't have to search very hard or compete very much, therefore those types of workers are not "in demand" in the colloquial sense of the term.  However, in economics there is a very important conceptual distinction between supply and demand.  Also, on page 43 (to go back to chapter 1 but stay on the theme of harping on economics) he makes a rather assertion about the effects of immigration on wages, and his only reference is to a NYT article.  I wish he had directly cited whichever primary sources are referenced in the NYT.

Still, his big picture analysis is dead-on:  He keeps pointing out that if we flooded the market with more graduates in a particular area of expertise the compensation would go down.  That reduction in salaries is definitely not an argument against educating people; even if we view education through a purely economic lens there are still economic benefits to having educated people available, and the people who get those jobs are (often) better off than they would be without that education.  Still, the formula is not simply "These jobs pay $X, so educate more people and we'll have more people making $X."  John Marsh makes that point where so many others fail to get it.  Educating more people WILL reduce the college wage premium relative to less-killed jobs.  The only question is whether the reduction in the wage premium will be pocketed by consumers (cheaper services), employers (cheaper labor, bigger profits), and/or the less-educated (college grads lifted out of their ranks eschew the jobs done by the less-educated, so the less-educated have less competition and their wages go up).  It is by no means obvious that the gains won't be pocketed by employers, and the past few decades of economic history give us no reason for optimism.

He also notes that the "knowledge worker" jobs are often (though of course not always) the ones that can be most easily moved across national borders and done remotely, while many of the jobs most likely to stay "in person", i.e. not be outsourced or off-shored, are not necessarily jobs that pay well or require a lot of education.  Again, this is not an argument against getting an education, but it is an argument against treating education as our society's guaranteed (and only) path to economic equality.  The tea leaves do not necessarily point that way, despite all the protestations to the contrary.

Do not dismiss "Class Dismissed"

I should be working on something else, but I'm reading.  I'm reading a book relevant to my work, but still, I'm reading.  The book is Class Dismissed: Why we cannot teach or learn our way out of inequality.  I will simply quote something from the introduction, something that is rarely said but very true:

Some people may escape poverty and low incomes through education, but a problem arises when education becomes the only escape route from these conditions--because that road will very quickly become bottlenecked. As the political scientist Gordon Lafer has written "It is appropriate for every parent to hope that their child becomes a professional; but it is not appropriate for federal policy makers to hope that every American becomes one."  As another economist has put it, "Going to college is a lot like standing up at a concert to see better.  Selfishly speaking, it works, but from a social point of view, we shouldn't encourage it."

Unlike others who argue this point, however, my concern is not with the inefficiencies that come from everyone standing up to see better but, rather, the injustices that result.  That is, my concern is with those who cannot stand up, those who, either because of lack of abilities, lack of interest, or other barriers to entry do not or cannot earn a college degree.  Insisting that they really should is neither a wise nor a particularly human solution to the problem these workers will encounter in the labor market.

Nor is it a particularly feasible one.  As I explore later in this book, the U.S. economy, despite claims to the contrary, will continue to produce more jobs that do not require a college degree than jobs that do.  A college degree will not make those jobs pay any more than the pittance they currently do.  As some of my colleagues from graduate school could confirm, a Ph.D. working as a bartender earns bartender wages, not a professor's salary.  W hat will make those bartending and other unskilled jobs pay something closer to a living wage--if not a living wage itself--constitutes, to my mind, one of the major public policy challenges of the twenty-first century.  Education, however, is not the answer. (Pages 19-20)

I would add that an economy that treats the BA/BS as the default is an economy whose labor market becomes something of a monoculture.  It wouldn't be healthy for us, even if it were feasible.