Guest post: The only winners have been the upper class
Originally a comment by tigger the wing on Women’s fault.
This is how I remember things were for those of us born in the fifties. When I left secondary school in 1976, all general education was still being run, and paid for, by the government. So they had a vested interest in making sure that, insofar as possible, only those teens who would stick at studying and actually gain a good degree were funnelled into university. So kids were tested at eleven to assess what kind of further learning they were suited to, and the more academically-minded kids were sent to grammar (arts and sciences track) and technical (engineering track) schools, and those of a more practical bent were sent to secondary moderns (vocational training track). Of course, regardless of the intent of the inventors of the ‘eleven-plus’ pseudo-psychological/IQ test, everybody regarded it as a simple ‘pass or fail’.
Above all this, and quite separate from it, was the for-profit educational system, of fee-paying schools. Public schools being those which would accept any child whose parents could afford the fees, and private schools being those which had stricter criteria (in addition to being able to afford the fees/qualify for a bursary or scholarship).
Regardless of intent, with few exceptions the working class kids largely went to secondary moderns and, after getting their CSEs, went into basic jobs such as shop assistants and labourers, or community college; after earning City and Guilds certificates, they went on to become nurses, secretaries and mechanics. The middle class kids largely went to grammar and technical schools, and armed with GCEs went into nice, middle-class jobs; or, with ‘A’ levels, university; and became doctors, vets, engineers, architects and the like. The upper class kids went to Oxbridge and became lawyers, CEOs and politicians.
The socialists didn’t like this at all. Dividing kids into classes at the age of eleven on the basis of an elitist IQ test is manifestly unfair, so Labour tried their best to destroy the old three-tier system and make all children go to the same secondary schools regardless of their class, and receive the same education and study for the same exams (GCSEs). It worked; unprecedented numbers of working class children started to qualify for a university education, and join the middle class. The reactionaries didn’t like this at all; they like to have people stay in nice categories for them to boss about. At the first opportunity the Conservatives introduced fees for attending university again, putting social climbing once again out of reach for most. However, once your university is making a profit from its students, you’ll want to have as many students as you can get in through the door. Community colleges became universities, and could issue degrees instead of certificates. The reactionaries have responded by regarding a basic bachelor’s degree as the equivalent of a nice set of ‘A’ levels or a certificate, thus making it harder for anyone to get into a good job to earn the money needed to pay for a university education.
Add in the rise in house prices fueled by wealthy speculators, and thus cripplingly expensive mortgages, ‘Boomer’ parents like me have found it very difficult to have enough money in savings to pay the costs of educating our children, never mind helping them with housing. The only winners have been, as usual, the upper class. Don’t blame ‘The Boomers’ for the current situation; blame the wealthy, and the left wing parties for being too absorbed with ambition and in-fighting to fight for the rights of their natural constituency.
But but this suggests that the majority of boomers aren’t to blame for the modern mess, which would mean an end to using “OK boomer” as a snappy rebuttal.
It won’t take.
Thanks, Holms. [Insert smiley blowing a raspberry]
Good read, and a nice corrective. The folks in your generation who found the transition to the professional world much simpler than kids do in today’s society didn’t create that system, they just benefited from it — and not all of them did.
As somebody who once contemplated having an entire career in academia, I became aware in the late nineties that the baby boom generation was retiring at a slower rate than academic departments were being dismantled (my conclusion being that I should get out).
Ancient geezers with laminated class notes pontificated about ‘get up and go’ to the youth, having conveniently forgotten that, back when they got PhDs, universities hired them right out of the box for tenure-track positions, because back then a PhD was a rare credential, rather than the rock fight hiring is today, when a surplus of PhDs is created as cheaply as possible because that is a profitable racket for Big University.
I had forgotten that almost all of those geezers went to college in the first place because they were from the class that was funneled that way. So thanks for that.
I find your description of a dialectic between the impulse to progress and the recuperation of the wealthy class compelling.
One of the interesting things I hear from my son, who is in college now, is that he tries to stay away from upper middle-class white girls, because they’re the Wokest Of All. This, I think, is the cohort that’s now flooding campuses. Something about growing up in upper middle-class culture today causes that cohort to express their overwhelming anxiety in the artificial jargon of Wokeism. These girls provide the shock troops for the sort of educational breakdown seen at Evergreen (and at my son’s previous college). My son wants to avoid people who are likely to yell at him for displaying some sort of ideological impurity (e.g. transphobia), and he’s identified that demographic as the most likely to do so, so he avoids them.
My son prefers to hang out with kids from families with values similar to ours, and he finds them mainly among foreign students, Hispanic students, and students from more humble backgrounds (all of whom are in greater supply than at the liberal arts college he attended last year).
Students who grow up upper middle-class, or let’s just say “well-off,” in America are likely to have grown up very coddled, with pursuit of their individual resume-building as task one since elementary school. They have little contact with any adults who aren’t somehow working for them. Few well-off families eat dinner as a family every night, or spend much time together outside of the car that shuttles the kids from one impressive activity to another. Students who grow up in this strange world of disassociated privilege seem also much more likely to speak fluent Woke. My son and I talk about this phenomenon, and wonder why.
One thing I read recently that made some sense was thinking of Woke jargon as a language of privilege.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/woke-language-privilege
Maybe this is the latest step in your dialectic between progressivism and wealth.
It isn’t just the large number of PhDs being minted. It’s also the fact that colleges are relying so much on adjuncts because it is cheaper for them to hire part time cheap labor than invest in full time employees. The education suffers, the college suffers, the student suffers, but they save bucks. The instructors have little to no attachment to the school as an institution, and from my experience tend to develop much less rapport (though there are the occasional exceptions). They often have full time jobs elsewhere, and that takes most of their attention away from teaching. It is a big mistake to approach education this way, just as it is a big mistake to make the assumption that students should receive the degree they paid for, even if they did little to no work for it.
That makes sense, and is how I’ve thought of it for a long time. There is very little wokeness on our campus, because we are in a deep red state and the students tend to be working class. Most of the wokeness comes from a handful of faculty and employees who come from backgrounds much different than my own, backgrounds where they didn’t have to work through college, and they don’t have a clue what life is really about for the vast majority of people, so they are able to see things like trans as the most important issue. Also see most of it from the tiny out-of-the-closet gay employees and students on campus.
Just to correct that last sentence so I am not misunderstood; it is not the employees and students that are tiny. They are normal sized. It is the percentage and absolute number. There are probably a larger amount of gay people on campus, but this isn’t the best place to be out of the closet as anything other than white, Christian, heterosexual, and either male or married to a male.
Actually it was the Labour Govt that introduced tuition fees, soon after it came into office in 1997. As they are essentially a flat rate of £9k per annum, regardless of university, and are available as loans, they have certainly not put social climbing out of reach. Indeed, one of the major gripes of the “upper class’ (actually upper-middle) is that it has become much harder for pupils from elite schools such as Eton, Winchester and St Pauls to gain entry to Oxford and Cambridge, which have remained pretty much the same size since the 1970s while taking a higher proportion of both international and (recently) state school applicants.
Social climbing is farther out of reach in America, Richard. We have less class mobility than Britain does.
https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index-2020-why-economies-benefit-from-fixing-inequality
Though Harvard and the Ivies are likewise the traditional stomping grounds of our Colonial elite, they are also not growing as fast as demand.
That’s a plus for price, of course – and Harvard can offer free tuition to those very few poor kids who manage to attend.
One amusing side note on the growth, or lack thereof, of prestige universities can be seen in Berkeley. There, upper middle class homeowners are up in arms because of the distasteful (to them) growth of UC Berkeley. Heavens forbid, a city of 100,000 housing one of the two most prestigious state universities in the middle of a metropolitan region of 7 million people is growing and does not look like a village anymore! No more tall buildings! LOL
Richard,
To be precise to the point of pedantry: in the UK, tuition fees for overseas students were brought in at the start of the 1980s and would likely have been introduced even had Jim Callaghan scraped back in the 1979 election. There was an attempt in 1984 to introduce tuition fees for students deemed dependent children of the most affluent parents (as a sort of negative maintenance grant) but a Cabinet revolt led by Cecil Parkinson saw that watered down merely to immediate abolition of the minimum maintenance grant. The dead-of-covenant loophole (opened in 1980, allegedly through pure inadvertance) which had the effect of making maintenance of dependent children as students at university tax deductable at the standard rate of income tax on their parents’ income was closed in 1988.
If I recall correctly, the “deemed dependent” definition for means testing on parental income was only evaded by students who were at least one of married, over 25 or had two full years of national insurance contributions).
Moreover, to add to Richard’s point, the housing market speculation seen by the OP as synergistic with the fictitious introduction of tuition fees by the Conservatives was accepted as a fait accomplis by the Labour and Conservative parties alike once they witnessed the scale of the electoral disaster that overtook John Major in the form of the negative equity that resulted from attempting to put the genie back in the bottle and treat house price inflation like any other sort of inflation.
For this generation X-er it all worked out nicely – I saved for a deposit in the years of falling or stagnant house prices (1990-1997) which reached 78% when I bought my first house a few months before Blair arrived in Downing Street. Perhaps I was an evil speculator by virtue of my refusal to buy at more sensible deposit ratio.
Thank you for that very interesting historical background, Alan. I thought the deed of covenant loophole was discovered a little earlier? I’m pretty certain my father let me keep the refunded tax on the maintenance cheque he paid each term from October 1978 on, though I can’t remember exactly how the process worked.
I too bought my first property just a few months before Blair arrived in Downing St. It doubled in price in the seven years before I sold it, and quadrupled in the seven subsequent years, when I was out of the UK property market. Perhaps I should have been a wicked rentier.