This is actually a statue at Columbia University, but who gives a shit? Photo via Flickr user Mike Steele
Welcome back to Life Inside the Bubble, a newsletter about wealth and privilege.
When I was in high school in Seattle, nearly 20 years ago now, a teacher named Mr. Rye had some advice for us about college. This was a “magnet school,” so it had a big population of kids (mostly white and Asian) from all over the city who had attended a gifted program somewhere, as well as local kids from the surrounding Central District, which was historically Black but gentrifying. Mr. Rye taught all kinds of kids. I think his class was called “intro to technology,” and you learned how computers worked, how to put cards into a motherboard, how to make Flash videos, knowledge that’s all more or less outdated now. He also dispensed life lessons, one of which was that going to a private four-year college was a terrible deal.
The kids who took a bunch of AP classes were largely children of the bubble, and many of them anticipated going to a top-end college, which their parents probably wouldn’t struggle much to pay for. The local non-bubble kids, whose horizons were unfairly limited, would mostly go to community college or maybe the University of Washington, which many of the bubble kids regarded as a “safety school.” But Mr. Rye argued that whoever you were, however much money you had, you should think of a college degree as an asset you paid for, like a house or a car. A degree was valuable, but a piece of paper from an Ivy League school wasn’t several times more valuable than a degree from a state school. A lot of the education you got was largely the same, and after a few years in the workforce the brand name of your degree would barely matter. What you should do, he counseled, was go to community college, which had very low tuition, take classes with an eye to transferring the credits to the UW, then switch over to the UW after you got your associate’s degree. You’d only need to pay two years of UW tuition, which for Washington State residents was pretty low anyway.
He was right: UW is a perfectly good school, and community college is a much better value than, say, Harvard. But kids are dumb, so I went to a private art school in New York, which even with some scholarship money cost over $20,000 a year. I majored in creative writing, and my fellow students were mostly privileged bubble people—sending your kid to study poetry or whatever the fuck in New York is something pretty much only rich people do.
Now, a creative writing BFA is pretty much worthless as a degree, but if you have one you can go on to get a creative writing MFA, which is equally worthless but tends to cost a lot more. One classmate of mine hopped right into the Columbia University graduate school to get an MFA, where the tuition (if I remember right) was something like $40,000 a year. Today, it’s up to $66,000 a year, with a very limited number of scholarships available. Mr. Rye would have had a heart attack.
For years, left-wing activists have been demanding the cancellation of student debt, and they are on the precipice of actually achieving at least a partial victory. The Biden administration is considering a preliminary plan to forgive $10,000 per borrower, provided that borrower earns less than $150,000 a year. This would eliminate at least half of the outstanding balance of about half of all student debtors, but the debt cancellation people (along with many parts of the Democratic coalition, including unions) have argued that this isn’t enough. All student debtors, they say, have been victimized to a degree by an unjust system that particularly harms people of color. While a majority of student loan debt is held by white people, Black and Hispanic/Latino students suffer the most under this system: Nearly half of all Black student debtors owe an average of 12 percent more than they initially borrowed because they are more likely to struggle paying down the debt faster than their interest accrues.
The call to cancel student debt comes out of a larger anti-debt movement that has its roots in Occupy Wall Street. Activists involved in this movement have purchased debt on the secondary market for pennies on the dollar in order to cancel it, they’ve called for student debtors to engage in a “debt strike” by reducing their monthly payments to zero, they’ve provided tools to Californians burdened by rent debt. An organization inspired by this movement has forgiven nearly $7 billion in medical debt. The anti-debt people believe that all debt is unjust on some level. Debt is a form of control—society pushes you to take on as much debt as you can through home loans, car loans, student loans, and credit cards, then punishes you for being unable to pay. The argument isn’t to cancel student debt, it’s to end all debt.
But student loans have become the focus of the mainstream debate thanks to a novel theory promoted by Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign that claims the Department of Education could unilaterally cancel student debt. The Biden administration appears willing to make use of this theory, but it won’t go as far as Warren promised she would in terms of quantities forgiven. The argument between centrists and leftists has become mostly about numbers: how much should be forgiven for whom, whether forgiveness would be regressive, who would be helped the most by it.
That this is where the discourse has landed is enraging on multiple levels. Firstly, student debt relief is a clumsy tool to relieve inequality. If progressives wanted to get serious about debt relief they could focus on medical debt, which is manifestly more crippling and unjust than student debt. If Democrats wanted to give money to people, they could consider things like a gas tax holiday rather than a giveaway exclusive to student debtors. But procedural bullshit and the inadequacy of the fractured U.S. governmental system means that student debt forgiveness is the only option on the table because apparently the lawyers say it’s OK for whatever reason.
Secondly, student debt forgiveness may be an utterly righteous, truly progressive cause—but it’s a bit hard not to see arguments in its favor as self-serving when they come from people who have themselves racked up a big student loan tab. Student debt affects millions, but when you read a horror story about someone who is being crushed under the weight of six figures in loans, those loans tend to be accrued in grad school. Only around 13 percent of Americans have student loan debt, and as of 2020 only 25 percent of student borrowers went to graduate school, yet they account for about half of all student debt. The financial pain of these people is real, but some debtors clearly come from privileged backgrounds1 and others have used their advanced degrees to get high-paying jobs. At a time when everyone has to deal with inflation and onerous gas prices, why should a tiny minority of Americans, including doctors and lawyers and people who made the poor choice to pay for a Columbia MFA, get singled out for relief? Is it because the hyper-educated are overrepresented in progressive politics and can make themselves heard on Twitter and inside the Democratic Party? What kind of radical leftism is this that demands the government subsidize overpriced social science degrees after the fact for people making six figures?
Thirdly, in focusing on the elimination of debt, the radical left has made a villain of Joe Biden, a familiar and convenient target. It has become just another fracture in the never-ending battle between starry-eyed socialists and tedious, bean-counting centrists. Meanwhile, the real villains will slink away, untouched: the schools.
I’m not talking about the scummy for-profit trade schools that prey on low-income students with false promises and gouge them2. There’s a higher class of predator, programs at well-regarded fancy institutions that charge inflated prices for education, like the “Master’s of Arts Program in Humanities” at the University of Chicago that costs over $60,000 per year and provides little in the way of real-world value. Another example: According to the Wall Street Journal, NYU graduates who got a master’s in publishing had a median debt load of $116,000 and were earning a median $42,000 two years after graduation, figures that aren’t surprising if you know anything about entry-level publishing industry salaries. Undergraduate educations from high-end schools might be less scammy—Ivy League degrees confer authority—but the prices are still outrageous, especially when the school in question has a multibillion-dollar endowment. Oberlin has an annual tuition of nearly $60,000. Come the fuck on.
The best thing you can say about these programs is that the targets of their scams tend to be children of the bubble, or more precisely their parents, who foot all or most of the bill. But students from poor backgrounds sometimes attend these programs because they believe the bullshit, then find themselves unable to ever pay off their loans. It’s fair to blame America’s higher education system in general for outrageously high student loan balances, but really the “system” ’is made up of individual actors, including universities who are grifting naive students and their status-obsessed parents into massively overpaying for a piece of paper. Ironically, these schools are often outwardly obsessed with social justice and equity, when they could make the U.S. a more equitable place by shutting their doors for good.
Relief for current student debtors does not protect the incoming generation of freshmen and MFA seekers from these scams. Student debt forgiveness is a half measure, a compromise with procedural necessity that does nothing to help the vast majority of Americans. It’s weak.
Instead, we should tear down these hoity-toity scam factories. I don’t care how the teardown happens, which combo of state and federal laws would need to change. Abolish NYU. Turn the dorms into affordable housing, retrain the underpaid adjuncts as welders and carpenters, send the kids off to their local community college, where they’ll learn just as much. They’ll probably have more fun, too. Mr. Rye knew nearly 20 years ago that private colleges are mostly just scams. If there is an impulse among these schools’ alumni to defend them, it’s because they don’t want to admit that they were taken advantage of as starry-eyed 18-year-olds. At best these places are institutions where apple-polishers refine their elitism; at worst they are confidence schemes whose main beneficiaries are the administrators who get to turn those humanities postdoc dollars into a lake house. Those fuckers don’t need lake houses, and the world doesn’t need NYU.