A MEDITATION ON SOME COMMENTS

In responding to some interesting comments to my last post, I should like to take the opportunity to explore once again the subject that has troubled me for a long time and on which I have, I believe, commented a number of times on this blog. At the end of a suggestive comment, David G writes:  “A third change: unlike 70 years ago, college now provides the necessary entry ticket into most good-paying jobs—I guess you could call that an "improvement"? That may be more of an explanation for tuition increases, though I don't think it explains the explosion in college tuition over the past 10–20 years.”

 

As I have several times observed, in 1950 when I first went to college only 5% of adults in America had college degrees, which meant that most of the positions in the economy that now require a college degree were filled by people who did not have one. Today by way of contrast one third of adults 26 years old and older have college degrees. I do not think one can explain the change by some sort of dramatic upgrading of the skills and training required by jobs these days. These days to get into a management training position in a big corporation you need a Bachelor’s degree and possibly also an MBA. Whatever it is you learn on the way to earning those degrees, I seriously doubt that much of it is required to do well as a management trainee.

 

Because of the steeply pyramidal structure of the modern capitalist job world, with good salaries and good fringe benefits available in only a minority of job openings, there is, inevitably, severe competition for those relatively scarce good jobs. The result is credential creep and the privileging of those whose credentials are acquired at a small number of “good” schools. 51 years ago, in my little book The Ideal of the University I proposed random admission to colleges and universities as a way both of eliminating the pressure on elementary and high school students to get into the “good” schools (which is to say schools that provide what David G calls the necessary entry ticket into most good paying jobs) and of eliminating most if not all of the advantage to be gained from securing one’s credential at an elite school. I suspect the value of the credential from the elite school in contemporary society, in combination with the variety of other things commenters mentioned, explains a good deal of the soaring tuition price.

 

But that still leaves open the question why the job world has the steeply pyramidal compensation structure that we see today. And this is a question whose answer has been puzzling me for many years. Indeed, in the essay The Future of Socialism which I wrote and never published some years ago, I observed that Marx’s failure to anticipate this pyramidal structure was one of his three big failures.

 

One obvious answer to the question is, I believe, clearly wrong, namely that the higher pay of the good jobs is required to compensate workers for the cost of acquiring the specialized skills demanded by those jobs. There are two reasons why I think this is wrong. The first is that societies around the world have long since socialized the basic literacy and numeracy skills required for modern jobs through the institution of free elementary and secondary public education and there is no reason at all for not doing the same with regard to any additional skills needed by jobs that now place one in the middle or upper middle-class. The second problem with this explanation is that the lifetime compensation for the good jobs so far exceeds the cost of tertiary education that that cost cannot reasonably explain how much that lifetime compensation exceeds the lifetime compensation of jobs not requiring a tertiary degree.

 

I am not interested in arguing about whether people who bother to get the tertiary degree deserve the higher wages. What puzzles me is that employers who are everywhere and always eager to drive down the wages of their employees should collectively agree to reproduce a pyramidal wage structure that essentially has the effect of transferring a portion of the surplus to the higher paid workers, something that capital in general is not known for.

 

More and more these days capital is driving down labor costs by undermining labor unions, and by substituting contract employees and temporary employees for regular full-time employees. As I think I have observed before in these pages, the modern gig economy, as it has come to be called, is a recent perfection of this repressive tendency.

 

Since employers have no hesitation about driving down the wages of their lower paid employees, what on earth keeps them from driving down the wages of their higher paid employees? I simply do not understand. How might an employer do this? Well, one answer is to lower the wages of the higher paid employees while simultaneously throwing the positions open to jobseekers who do not have tertiary degrees. Since I am absolutely convinced that what college students gain from a college education is, for the most part, not at all required for the successful performance of the jobs they eventually get, the employers would lose nothing in productivity and gain something in a smaller wages bill.

 

But the pyramid of worker compensation seemingly gets steeper, not less steep, as the years go by. I confess that I just do not understand it.

 

Needless to say, my 51-year-old proposal for random admissions to colleges and universities is not about to be adopted but if it were, I am persuaded that the good effects would be enormous. Would employers continue to favor graduates of the Ivy League if they knew that the graduates of those elite institutions were as students no better than the graduates of UMass or Ball State or North Carolina Central University?

 

It is an interesting question.