Why did I get this book?
This could not be more in my wheelhouse, and I like Bunch’s writing otherwise.
Is it what I thought it was?
Completely. Maybe a little too much so, but that’s not Bunch’s fault, it’s just that I know this material all too well. I did like his description of four groups of Americans and how they relate to college, and he works the connection of higher education and the rise of Trumpism very adroitly.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
If I ever teach the course Why College? again, I’d likely use this as the introductory textbook for the course. It’s a very good compact history of and commentary upon postwar American higher education, and it would especially put a lot of things into perspective for current college-age students.
Quotes
“If the American Dream isn’t college anymore, can we start working on a better one? And could that Next New Thing arrive before political rage and resentment trigger a new civil war?”
“The fascinating thing about both Outer Coast’s Plato-reading outdoors enthusiasts and Williamson, with its flag-waving, chapel-going, beloved-by-conservatives hands-on trade education, is that they are essentially saying the same thing: There are different, better ways to prepare young people for the world, in a time when the vast American college-industrial complex clearly is not working for so many.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
In his proposed fix—essentially a new covenant arising from a new Truman Commission—Bunch tries to hold on to the terms of the “Wisconsin Idea”, a conception of liberal education that sought to combine some vision of workforce preparation and open-ended intellectual exploration. He notes that the branch point where American conservatives turned away from the latter was Ronald Reagan’s declaration as governor of California that “taxpayers shouldn’t subsidize intellectual curiosity”. But I have to say that Bunch edges pretty close at points to Obama’s repackaging of Reagan’s contempt, as in his famous dismissal of art history as not providing any return on investment. (Obama apologized, but the comment was a pretty revealing look into his administration’s general attitude towards higher education.) It’s a really hard needle to thread. Practicing academics will talk about the value of intellectual curiosity in a way that doesn’t engage current students, doesn’t acknowledge the role of the university in reproducing wealth inequality, and doesn’t fully come to grips with the entanglement of credentialism with the labor market. Politicians like Scott Walker and Ron DeSantis will run hard in the opposite direction, bent on destroying everything that isn’t tightly about providing a credential for a specific skilled job. But that means it’s all the more important for someone like Bunch to try and say what he means when he wants to carve out a space for something like intellectual curiosity and not just restrict it to a privileged few in expensive selective colleges and universities.
I was surprised not to see Bunch talking more about for-profit universities or citing Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Lower Ed. I think one reason is that Bunch has very plainly decided that there are two villains that he’s going after: the Republicans who followed Reagan’s lead and brutally undercut public education and the elite wealthy private universities and colleges, starting with the Ivy League. He’s quite aware that the press makes the mistake of treating the Ivies and their peers as if they define what higher education is for contemporary Americans but he very nearly falls into the trap himself, despite some very good attention to Kutztown University and a recognition that the students at Kutztown are vastly more typical. Cottom’s book extends that reorientation to for-profits and community colleges. When we talk about the problem of college debt, for example, we’re talking some about students at institutions like Kutztown and even more students of for-profit institutions. Bunch remembers that only sometimes, and like a lot of critics sometimes wanders back to seeing debt and expense in terms of the elite privates that he especially dislikes. The two are definitely entangled, and his discussion of Kutztown brings that out—essentially some of the heaviest debt loads are also associated with some of the worst outcomes in terms of securing social mobility or job security; wealthy institutions with large endowments offer big discounts on their sticker price and then return better outcomes for the fortunate few who receive those discounts—along with the already-wealthy who pay full fare. But it seems important to be crystal clear about this—one of the ways that the Republicans and some Democrats have been undercutting debt relief is by deliberately implying that debt relief primarily benefits the graduates of elite institutions who already have good job prospects, which is absolutely not who would benefit.
I was also a bit surprised that Bunch didn’t do some kind of close engagement with a community college. Community colleges only come into focus in his discussion of proposed fixes, in fact; HBCUs also don’t figure here at all.
There are a few points where Bunch is, like many people writing this kind of advocacy, a bit credulous when and if a public figure is saying the right kind of thing that suits Bunch’s argument without necessarily looking to verify it. For example, he just trusts that when Elon Musk says that he has set out deliberately to hire people at Tesla without any attention to whether they have a college or high school credential, that all he wants is “evidence of exceptional ability”. It turns out that it’s true that Tesla hires a higher percentage of non-college employees, but that once you look at the most highly skilled jobs within Tesla (e.g., engineers), the company hires pretty much the same number of people with college degrees as any other tech or manufacturing firm—that is to say, almost all of them. This is just another version of the same issue as in the case of Big Tech CEOs and other corporate leaders saying they value a liberal education more than specific professional credentials. That is often a statement about the people they want in their c-suite; it is not a statement that their human resources department uses as guidance for the majority of hires. Hell, you can’t even get liberal-arts colleges and universities to privilege liberal education in hiring for many skilled jobs.
If Bunch doesn’t fully grapple with this, it’s because he’s accepted the proposition that higher education is somehow responsible for the inequalities and inadequacies of the U.S. labor market rather than a sign of those inequalities and inadequacies. Politicians love that idea too (liberals and conservatives alike) because they have absolutely no idea of how to intervene in the labor market. For liberals, funding education is their answer to fixing inequality; for conservatives, defunding education is their answer. In both cases, that’s mostly an alibi. Higher education’s guilt is partly a result of a devil’s bargain: accepting the assigned responsibility, being the alibi, in the hopes of either holding on to some tenuous fragment of being a public good or at least being seen as important. In the meantime, we’ve traversed through an era where workforce development was genuinely seen as important to corporate success, in the 1950s and 1960s, where firms actually believed in doing on-the-job training for the more specific technical labor they needed, to the 1980s and onward, where corporate success was mostly about driving the stock price higher via laying off employees. Since that time, nobody’s ever gotten a big jump in the stock price off of news that the company was going to hire five hundred new employees to build a major new initiative. Those kinds of growing dysfunctions in how companies, managers and investors relate to workers at all levels have badly undercut the value of any educational attainment, but the problem doesn’t really start with the educational institutions themselves. (Any more than the catastrophic dysfunctionality of American public health originates in the actual provision of diagnosis and therapeutic intervention within a doctor’s office—a point that Bunch actually makes late in the book.)