The Proletarieat Ate My Advanced Degree, Or: How the Fall of Elite Education Works for Me

From: Freepik.com

[Originally posted: 25 February 2025]

My oldest son, who is now 16 years old, has just recently decided that he wants to enroll in a 2-year technical college type of program after completing high school. I must have been successful at persuading him that he must do at least that much if he's going to get the type of career that he would be happy with.

The thought that I've had to work through here is about how we were going to maintain ourselves career- and family-wise given that we were not going to have the resources to give our children the kind of education that me or my parents or siblings had. My parents, two of my other three siblings, and I all have Master's degrees. All in different fields, but all at that level, aside from my autistic brother.

I've been keen on finding solutions that stand a chance of working for everyone, as opposed to only a few. This became a problem of conscience, as it increasingly seemed to be the case that only those who were supported by a rather vast pile of political and material wealth could afford to keep themselves at that level and style of education. At the same time, in the classrooms, there were many students I saw that wondered what the point of many of their required courses was, as they did not see the value in them, nor especially how they could monetize them. My view now is very much more generalized over those matters (to be inclusive of much learning that does not appear very useful at first), but my doubt about the elite structures supporting advanced education remained.

Where things stand for us now (and I say "us" because I know I'm not really alone even when I appear to be) is: in terms of what's economically supportable, we've lost 4 years of education. Where we once had Master's degrees, these have dropped into the practice of new technical ventures after as little as 2 years of college-level work. If we are ever again to rebuild a comprehensive thought process that doesn't fall into the dangerous trap of unsupported and unsupportable elitism, I suspect it's a very good bet to start at this level and work it from there (rather than form a dependency on educational baubles dropped from a decaying tower on high).

Continuing this thought, if in your past life you only had 2 years of college, Wonderful! You're now effectively, mentally, back in high school. I recall one author writing that going to work for a contemporary large corporation was socially like going back to high school, and from what I've seen of large corporations, I don't disagree. I also note that I've heard Mexicans say the United States sells itself short by using the term "college" rather than "university" to refer to the Bachelor's experience. Maybe they make a point to socially "college" themselves more in high school.

If in your past life you had a Bachelor's degree, Congratulations! You're now a high school grad. In the real world, I've come to think of the term "high" as referring in some ways to the high powers and principalities of the world, those patterns of thinking that we feel we must reckon with, which put up or destroy barriers between you and others, or between one idea and another. Or, perhaps less seriously, marijuana. The world's your oyster.

If in your past life you were a Doctor, Congratulations! You're now a Master, with all the problems that it entails, including the particularly difficult fact that masters can and do have servants, those people who are economically bound to follow a master's orders. Insert ethical considerations about economic inequality and society design. The reshaping of societies is a real thing that can be done at this level. But you can't be foolish about it.

Now, knowing all of this, of having psychologically perceived some of the vast damages and destructions and blood sports and predatory patterns that exist not only in politics, but also economics, and indeed inside the very place that you work in, what am I looking for in this next "job search"?

This is a tough question, one that has only increased in toughness and the number of factors that I consider as my knowledge has grown.

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The real world can be a scary place. In my yearslong attempt to find a "dream job" scenario, I landed only in a nightmare scenario. I did not know what I needed to know to grow to maturity in this way, and I had to fight to keep what I had learned as there seemed to be a concerted effort to close that knowledge off from me before I could cognitively frame and secure it.

If this had not happened, we would have remained naive children with advanced-looking paper, never maturing in the way that we ought.

We were so far gone along that naive path that we were even propping up "experts" who appeared to be learned, but who didn't actually know anything, having touched neither the real world nor its real evil. In this respect, what has been done in showing us real evil is good! (Not that the evil is good, but what was done in response given that evil was good.)

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A footnote on why I have been writing these articles: I'm experimenting with this open/public blog/article form to put raw materials and any kind of real progress I wish to communicate out into a public space, not for likes or attention, but simply to let people read it. The fear, in the past, was that something of these types that I put out there won't be well-received, or misconstrued, or reacted against badly. In the past, I've been too censorious of myself: sometimes, for example, there's something that barely makes any sense to me, but there is some connection and/or a very strong feeling there, and I make better sense of it only after it's been communicated. It's a little "The Ring"-like in that you only get rid of it after you communicate it. There's also a right to free speech here, which can help alleviate or limit the blowback you might receive when you put some of yourself (and what you really think) out in the open.