Cultural Capital Never Wastes a Crisis

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If you are unfamiliar with the idea of education as a form of cultural capital, it’s easy to think of the idea as static. You either have it or you don’t. The Open Education movement, as recently described in the New York Times (“As Colleges Make Courses Available Free Online, Others Cash In”), however nicely illustrates that education cultural capital works as a complex dynamic, an economy or an ecosystem. It’s capital, and so it doesn’t simply accumulate, it circulates, and as it circulates it changes, sometimes subtly.

In this case,the implicit question seems to be, “what happens to the educational capital of, say, Harvard or Yale if they give away their course materials.” In one sense, of course, these course materials (objectified capital) allow access to the institutional capital; if you invest the time and energy, you should be able to accumulate the same capital as any other student. It’s not so simple, of course. As the educators cited in the piece imply, the capital is transformed by severing it so radically from the setting–the classroom–in which it is accumulated.

You can’t accumulate the social capital of an elite degree from a distance, not without the development of particular systems, such as hybrid courses. Institutions risk little by making this material freely available; in fact, they broaden institutional capital by sharpening its philanthropic image, a necessity a liberal democratic society. It’s not a give away, in fact, but a form of accumulation. What’s interesting, of course, is that others– individually or collectively– might find ways to leverage the open source materials in new ways.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing

Change

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“Today will go down in history as the day when the federal government chose to invest in college students over bank profits,” said United States Student Association (USSA) President Gregory Cendana. “By ending wasteful subsidies to private lenders and directing over sixty billion dollars of savings into financial aid programs, this legislation will ensure that millions of low-income and traditionally underrepresented students have access to higher education.”

Education is a Right, “Victory for Students as Historic Student Aid Reform Passes in Congress“

After the passage of the health reform bill, which included sweeping changes to the financing of higher education, I think it’s legitimate to ask, “How clever is the Obama administration?” If we went back in time to the FDR administration, we’d see similar sorts of political posturing. On the right, the world seemed to be ending as a Democratic administration gave in to Communist influence. FDR, like Obama, faced a hostile supreme court, war, and an opposition that seemed to have lost touch with reality.

On the left, the administartion seemed to be co-oping and watering down social democratic ideas. When the dust cleared– say, two decades or so later, after a horrific world war, we had some good (if limited) programs, like social security. A few decades later, and the Civil Rights Act and Medicare and Medicaid followed the same pattern. On the right, it was the end of the world, and on the left, the ideas were watered down and hardly recognizable. I think history has proven the left criticism correct, by and large.

If we had a national pension plan and a single payer health care system, we would all be better off socially and economically. I am not sure that we will ever get past our American propensity for frontier violence, but we might have a more just society. The contemporary right, though, seems wholly unaware that they are replaying their historical role as ugly and self destructive Americans. I honestly can’t tell if the Obama administration is equally unaware or playing some other game altogether.

Posted in: Writing

The Cost of Class

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College teachers, such as myself, are always telling our students that whatever else they get out of college, (and I hope they get a lot more) they can be confident that their investment of time and energy will underwrite a lifetime of relative economic prosperity. (Last night’s passage of the health reform bill may make an equally important contribution to the financial security of the middle class.) Doug Henwood’s recent costs and benefits analysis of education (“I’m borrowing my way through college…“) shows that this is still true.

Someone who doesn’t finish high school will on average earn only half as much as a high school graduate; if you earn a graduate degree, you can earn 2 to 3 times the income of a high school graduate. The caveat, and it’s a big caveat, is that students are leaving college with more and more debt. One reason is that college costs have risen dramatically, outpacing even medicine. And while there are grants available, the prohibitive costs have helped to ensure that class reproduction rather than class mobility is the new normal.

I see other limits to access in my classes, which are dominated by working class students; it’s particularly dramatic at the end of each session, when I’m thinking once more about the students who give up or, more mysteriously, sign up for the class but never show up, much less participate. There seems to be two main kinds of problems. One one side are students who don’t have the skills. Maybe they dropped out, or are non-native speakers, or just slipped through school without learning to write. They often mistrust teachers.

On the other side are students whose lives seem to be so chaotic and difficult that they can’t quite muster the discipline and focus. This is hard to judge accurately, of course; in any class there are always an alarming number of family deaths and catastrophes. (It’s more effective than “the dog ate my paper.”) But I know from my own family that too many of these stories are true and that if you don’t have much help (or money) to begin with, then every sort of problem is that much more draining and difficult and time consuming.

Posted in: Online Places, Professional, Writing