Did you know that Thomas Frank, best-known as author of What's The Matter With Kansas?, writes a monthly column in Harper's? It's always great reading, but August's installment is a standout.
Entitled "A Matter of Degrees", the column tackles the skyrocketing cost of college, and the fact that this price escalation has spawned an entire industry of fraud and misrepresentation about one's educational background.
Frank begins provocatively:
[T]he purpose of college isn't education per se…American undergrads spend less time at their studies nowadays than ever…at the most reputable schools they get great grades no matter how they perform.
But we aren't concerned about any of that. Americans have figured out that universities exist in order to man the gates of social class, and we pay our princely tuition rates in order to obtain just one thing: the degree, the golden ticket…Choosing the winners and losers is a task we have delegated to largely unregulated institutions housed in fake Gothic buildings, which have long since suppressed any qualms they once felt about tying a one-hundred-thousand-dollar anvil around the neck of a trusting teenager.
Then Frank
really takes the gloves off…
Along the way, he drops tidbits like this:
[T]he Dean of Admissions at MIT—the very person responsible for assessing academic credentials and, in fact, the author of a book of advice for college-bound students—confessed in 2007 that each of her advanced degrees was strictly imaginary.
But most striking is the case of Adam Wheeler, a young man who totally bamboozled Harvard into giving him all manner of awards and scholarships based on invented accomplishments and plagiarized papers. You really have to read about his exploits: they come across as more a piece of performance art than a fraudulent scheme.
Wheeler was fined and imprisoned for fooling Harvard. Then Frank drops the hammer:
When Harvard fools you, a different set of incentives applies…[T]he school's legitimate graduates and grandees—the very cream of the meritocracy crop—count among their number many of the folks who engineered the subprime disaster and the bank bailouts that haunt our economy still. They haven't paid for those crimes of misrepresentation and fraud, nor will they ever.
Never has the nation's system for choosing its leaders seemed more worthless. Our ruling class steers us into disaster after disaster…But accountability, it seems, is something that applies only to the people at the bottom, the ones who took out the bad mortgages or lied on their résumés. The pillars that prop up the system, meanwhile, are visibly corrupt: the sacred Credential signifies less and less each year but costs more and more to obtain. Yet we act as though it represents everything. It's a million-dollar coin made of pot metal—of course it attracts counterfeiters. And of course its value must be defended by an ever-expanding industry of résumé checkers and diploma-mill hunters. The boundaries are artificial, and that is precisely why they must be regulated so intensely: they are the only thing keeping the bunglers and knaves who rule us in their jobs.
Ouch! I'll just add that this story seems to tie in perfectly with Chris Hayes' new book,
Twilight of the Elites, which I haven't read but intend to.
It hasn't been a good summer for what passes as our "meritocracy."