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Hmm - this has a striking parallel to Jessica Rose's op Ed on the decline in Church attendance which seems to be more common in individuals without a BA:

"every demographic group in the United States is becoming less religious, but groups that are overrepresented among people with no religion in particular are those without high school diplomas, who are single, who don’t have children and who earn less than $50,000 a year."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/opinion/religion-affiliation-community.html?unlocked_article_code=9dIbgh1c8f29v5sZ2wjw6iT1qtiGA3Y75Owix7rJdHDPHcENKxFE9f0-_Zq56Ukv0k3-LNb62MGhX-ct8ZObltHcnWNTM4hD_SYqIia3C1YVUzscauLathsRhgeWaCfqVATUO6_0FmdB7zgqgBfeqEBvSB_co0GNlDQNMqTr0mVc-rchoCPyGE6G3SI_tc6uH0-9JB8MbNc4joTZYplE8nBi2xkU3H_UYwDuqf9rtW940z0DyH3y2FtQeGDSty1BJrCmTxEqh6eEoGzBmeKO6sGTFnUbJypShTTHhznWUHBgoK525p2B4dja-NILZ_ON81_ZmCk3OZTvEnGuoYHIl_6k6lGH7M9w&smid=url-share

It seems both the academy and the church are failing the poor and the oppressed 😭

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There is a terrifying divide between "vocational" and "academic" with each side seemingly unwilling or unable to address the division. I proposed a joint program where students would complete programs in carpentry, electric, plumbing, etc. in tandem with a liberal arts degree. Maybe they would get jobs as managers in the manufacturing or service world, or maybe they would like having well-paid hands-on jobs or get inspired and head into grad school or whatever. More options! Appreciation for different ways of working! The admin (at my college) was not interested, vocational contacts were not interested, and in talking to students (a growing number of first generation) - they were not at all interested.

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That would help for those in the “trades”. I haven’t read their economic analysis yet, but the real issue is the decline in manufacturing, farming, and extractive industries.

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How much of the data from Case and Deaton comes from the higher ed system that existed before the raft of online trade schools, pseudo-universities, and covid-transformed teaching? I wonder how much these new BAs are going to close the gap on that graph.

The adjunct faculty pool is a major reason for universities having lost respect, not because the teaching isn't good but often because it is and is grossly underpaid. This sends the message that a BA is coming from a sweatshop. Is that going to lift folks out of poverty and depression? They're being taught by people in poverty and subject to depression.

Until the Trump con that unleashed an undead army valorizing ignorance as power and belief as fact, I suffered far less at the hands of the blue-collar worker with the high school diploma than I have at the hands of affirmative action enabled academics and their privileged white tenured patrons.

I'm a supporter of Affirmative Action's mission. I'm also a supporter of improving Affirmative Action's implementation. It has only changed the nature of bigotry, creating low-hanging fruit for those who want to blame black people or immigrants or "the gays" for their problems. Academia has created the opposite employment environment from most other American employers, and regularly pats itself on the back for having done so. The trouble is, that strategy isn't working except to puff up people already secure in their positions who lie loudly about how they just discovered Mozart to stave off anyone looking into how they made their brochure less white. It's too often enabled the underqualified, let professors who aren't cultural scholars pretend to be, and misrepresented the academic fields it's supposed to be articulating. So I question, as a left-winger, how Affirmative Action, DEI loyalty statements, and other such devices are adding credibility, let alone personal empowerment and consversational engagement, to the bachelor's degree.

Too many (certainly humanities) professors have forgotten, if they've ever even experienced, working twelve months a year and relinquishing several of their basic human rights every single day to keep a job. Add the politicization of curriculum, then promote professors to administrative positions, and we widen the gap between who is earning those BAs and the pedagogy and presence of the people teaching them.

You seem like an exception to me--reading Case and Deaton and wondering what can be done. Too many administrators who teach one class a year to "stay in touch" don't strike me as caring at all about the BA except when, for instance, they can get foreign nationals to pay full freight, pass English without speaking it (e.g., an adjunct teaches the class under duress), go home to apply that knowledge to the infrastructures of our international competitors, and so serve as an "income stream." I wonder whose suicides those BAs are preventing, because those BAs aren't helping an American kid mark higher on that graph while her neighbors talk down college, shop at Wal Mart, then flaunt a Tesla.

The folks teaching in humanities disciplines were woefully unprepared for the transactional and STEM assault brought by state legislators, college boards, and college administrators. During a time when humanities programs should have been making themselves more accessible and useful to the public, when absurd numbers of bureaucrats were added to university payrolls, instead humanities professors poked the bear and then ran inside the ivory tower when the bear got mad. The ones who actually practiced, say literary criticism (my hand is in the air), got abused by their own colleagues, not by students and parents. Now the BA is being determined, not just earned, by an awful lot of bears. The bachelor's degree is being bought at a higher price and in a very different atmosphere than the one in which professors were respected, college was affordable, and a larger portion of the nation understood what a full liberal arts education could accomplish for a human being, not just for a job candidate.

There are, indeed, Philistines with no interest in education who have decided their comfortable beliefs are superior to inconvenient facts, who are suckers to Peterson's and Carlson's opportunistic manipulations (Trump went to Wharton!), who are homophobic and racist blunt instruments--not because they lack bachelor's degrees, but because they are on a blind mission to destroy humanities degrees for being intrinsically offensive to them. We are obligating the college educated, many of whom are living on starvation wages, to reach the enthusiastically uneducated but mechanically skilled who don't have a problem with money but don't know how to be human beings. Is a BA in gender studies going to help?

I think that means we can also obligate those without bachelor's degrees to stop using ignorance to defend stupidity as a virtue in order to avoid college, promote a system that devalues it, and spin themselves down into meaner existences. A BA in gender studies might help.

Academia has found plenty of ways not to help people who actually want it, and it's found a way to make a BA a simple transaction--like a certificate--that says you can do a certain set of jobs. The insulting irony there is that the universities with established reputations overcharge you. They keep poor people from having access to the BA poor people need.

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There’s a lot here but to pick out a couple of things: it’s weird that college has focused on vocational concerns while simultaneously ignoring those vocational challenges for those without a BA. On the proliferation of non-trad degree programs: have you read Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Lower Ed? It’s fabulous. Perhaps we need a better name for gender studies?

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