College: the American caste system
Let me tell you about an old friend of mine — one of the smartest, most talented people I’ve ever met.
She got kicked out of preschool because she was so smart she made all the other kids jealous. She won a bunch of Pokémon card game and video game tournaments, and even placed in the Top 32 at the World Championships one year.
In her spare time she makes really awesome music, and she’s gotten a bunch of paid performing gigs.
When she went to college she decided to major in business. After a semester she realized that was the wrong decision, because she’s not really into business. It’s not where her talents lie.
But she didn’t have the money to start school over from scratch. So she just dropped out.
Today she works at Starbucks making near-minimum wage. She also has over $30,000 in medical debt because she had to pay a bunch of money to get her teeth fixed.
She’s really smart. If someone hired her for a more prestigious job she would do great.
But because she doesn’t have a college degree, she can’t prove this. If she applied for better jobs, recruiters would assume she’s dumb because she didn’t graduate college.
So today, she’s stuck at the lowest rung of the job ladder, doing rote work that’s way beneath her skill level, working for people dumber than her.
Is that fair?
The Indian Caste System
Let me take you back to pre-colonial India for a second. You’re a member of the “untouchable” caste, which means you’re at the lowest rung of society.
As an “untouchable”, you weren’t allowed to eat with anyone from another caste. You weren’t allowed to have sex with anyone from another caste. You weren’t allowed to be friends with anyone from another caste. You weren’t even allowed to look at anyone from another caste.
You could only get a job sweeping the streets, or doing something else that was dirty. They wouldn’t let you do anything else.
Let’s say you live your life out as an untouchable, and then you die. Then you’re reborn as a poor kid in Mississippi.
They tell you that America is the “land of opportunity” where everyone is equal. Anyone talented enough can make something of themself. So this time around, you say to yourself, you’re gonna have a good life.
You decide that, whatever it takes, you’re gonna get a high-paying job at Goldman Sachs, or Facebook, or some other giant company that pays its workers insane amounts of money.
The only problem is, you’ve never been to college. You didn’t have the money when you were growing up. Your parents never told you it was important. It never made financial sense for you.
But you know you’re smart enough. You can code really well, and you can analyze financial statements really well. You’ve trained yourself to do everything that investment bankers and software engineers have to do.
So, you decide to apply for a job anyways. You know the odds are against you, and you know your only chance is to outwork everyone else. So you put hours and hours of work into perfecting your cover letter and your resumé. You fill out the perfect application. And then you hit “submit”.
No human ever even sees your application. It gets filtered out by the Applicant Tracking System because it doesn’t list a college education. It basically goes straight from your hands into the trash bin.
All your hard work goes to waste, and you end up getting a job at McDonald’s. Or selling drugs.
Meanwhile, a kid you knew in high school, who was always goofing off in class, never took anything seriously, and wasn’t even that smart, got into a great school because his parents knew how to work the system.
You’re scrolling social media one day, and one of his posts pops up. Apparently he works at Goldman Sachs.
Now, the American caste system is obviously not as intense as in pre-colonial India. We have a little class mobility, although not as much as we think.
And sure, if you had worked hard enough when you were in high school and figured out how to “work the system” for yourself, you could’ve gotten into a good college and entered America’s elite caste of graduates.
But in counterpoint, you’re being excluded from all the best jobs because you didn’t go to college. And you didn’t go to college because you grew up poor.
If that’s not a caste system, then what is?
How To Get Into College.
Consider Bobby, a hypothetical middle-class white kid who grew up in the suburbs.
Bobby isn’t that smart, and he’s kind of a fuckup, but everyone around him told him to do well in school. His parents pushed him to get decent grades and so he did. The one time he got a “C” his parents lobbied the school until they changed it to a B-.
Eddie probably won’t get into Harvard or Yale, but he’ll definitely get into a state school — which is more than enough to have a good life.
Now, consider Ricky, a hypothetical poor black kid who grew up in the inner city.
Ricky is incredibly streetsmart. He plays chess with all his friends and he consistently kicks their ass. And he enjoys learning about stuff that matters to him, and he can speak with detailed knowledge on the things he cares about.
But he doesn’t see the point of school, and he doesn’t trust his teachers, so he doesn’t try to get good grades. And his parents are split up and they don’t really care if he goes to college.
Which one of these kids has more potential? Ricky does. But who gets to go to college? Bobby does.
A few years later, Bobby gets the elite job that Ricky should get. Twenty years later, Bobby has a pretty wife, a house, and 2.2 children, while Ricky is in prison.
Is that fair?
How To Tell If An 18-Year-Old Is Smart
Why isn’t college a meritocracy? Why don’t the smartest kids get in?
The big problem is that college admissions officers don’t have a good way to evaluate 18-year-olds.
After all, how could they? 18-year-olds haven’t done anything yet. They have no meaningful life experience to speak of.
Imagine you’re looking at an apple tree. You’re trying to figure out which apple will be the tastiest to eat. But the apples won’t turn ripe for another 2 months. That’s basically what college admissions officers have to do.
You can’t really tell what kids are smart and what kids are dumb by reading an essay they wrote, or by looking at their SAT scores. In fact, that stuff tells you more about their parents.
When I was applying to colleges my mom did basically everything. She hired someone to help me write my essays and she showed me how to navigate the Common Application. If it weren’t for her I would’ve been totally lost.
She also hired someone to help me take the SAT test better. Taking SAT prep classes didn’t actually make me any smarter, it just taught me how to fill in multiple choice bubbles on an exam. But it made me look smarter on my college application.
College admissions officers can generally tell which kids from “good families” are too dumb for college. If your parents spend a bunch of money but your report card is all C’s, you’re not gonna go to Harvard.
But they can’t tell the other way around. They can’t tell which kids from “bad families” are smart enough. If you’re talented but you’re not from a “good family” then college admissions officers will ignore you.
That means whether or not you get into college — and therefore, whether or not you get into America’s upper caste — has more to do with your parents than it does with you.
Some meritocracy.
Does college make you smarter?
When you join a fraternity, you have to “rush”: you have to drink a bunch of beer and do chores for the seniors. And when you join the mafia, you have to “make your bones” by killing someone. Otherwise they won’t let you in.
Similarly, to join America’s upper caste, you have to go through 4 years of hazing. You have to spend $200,000 — and 4 years of your life — before they will accept you as one of their own.
At least, that’s what the “hazing ritual theory” of college says.
People will defend college by saying that college makes you smarter. They’ll say that it’s okay that college creates inequality because it helps people learn. And a rising tide lifts all boats.
They’ll say that if you go to college, you’ll make (on average) a higher salary. Doesn’t that prove that college makes you smarter?
But according to the “hazing ritual theory”, people don’t go to college to become smart. They go to college to prove they’re smart.
So how can you prove/disprove the “hazing ritual theory”? It’s actually really easy. You just have to look at salary data.
If college made you smarter, you would expect each additional year of college to boost your earnings by the around same amount. If the average person with no college made X per year, and the average freshman-year dropout made 2X, you’d expect the average sophomore-year dropout to make 3X.
But if the “hazing ritual theory” is right, then you would expect to reap enormous benefits after you graduate, but basically no benefit before then. The first few years of “learning” don’t affect your salary at all, and the biggest rewards come when they hand you the diploma.
The evidence supports the hazing ritual theory. On average, the first few years of college barely make a dent in your salary. If you go to college for 3 years, you’ll make only a little more than if you didn’t go to college at all. But then after you graduate, you get a giant raise.
In other words, college is just a hazing ritual to join American society’s upper caste. It doesn’t make you that much smarter.
Furthermore, anything you can learn in a college classroom for $25,000 a semester, you can learn on the internet for free. College is just an information middleman — the professors teach, not the universities. And now with the internet, the professors don’t need the universities to teach anymore.
College doesn’t have a monopoly on learning anymore. They only have a monopoly on the diplomas.
Why College Is The Problem, NOT The Solution
Once upon a time, when computers were exploding onto the scene, there weren’t enough people who understood computers. Technology companies had to hire whoever they could get, and pay them well — college degree or no.
The same thing happened in Silicon Valley in the early 2000’s. In the early days of PayPal, they hired whoever knew how to code, regardless of whether they had a college degree. They were desperate for software engineers.
And Lewie Ranieri, the legendary Salomon Brothers banker made famous by Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker, never went to college. He got a job in the Salomon Brothers mailroom, and worked his way up until he was making millions.
In other words, when there aren’t that many college graduates to go around, then companies have to hire people they normally wouldn’t hire.
Some people take a look at inequality in America, and they say that the solution is more college. The way you help poor kids escape poverty is by sending them to school. If they had a degree, then they could play the game like everyone else.
But imagine if no one went to college. Then they wouldn’t need a college degree to play the game. They could apply to whatever jobs they wanted, and they’d have the same chance as everyone else.
Right now, more Americans than ever before are going to college. But inequality has never been higher, and class mobility has never been lower.
So I say the solution is to send fewer people to college. If fewer people went to college then businesses would have to evaluate people’s talent for themselves, instead of letting the universities do it for them.
Another Reason Why College Isn’t The Answer: Debt Slavery
Also, I haven’t even talked about student loans yet.
Student loans are probably the biggest financial issue facing young people today. You can tell because Bernie Sanders, who promised young Americans free stuff in exchange for votes, made forgiving student loan debt a centerpiece of his campaigns.
It really sucks to have student loans. Imagine if the government took an extra $250 out of every paycheck you got. That’s what it’s like to have student loans.
That’s the cost of entering the “upper caste” in today’s America. You have to become a de facto indentured servant.
So if your solution to class inequality is to send more poor kids to college, guess what? You’re just gonna put them into debt.
It gets even worse. If you send poor kids to college to help them compete, a lot of them won’t graduate. A lot of kids get major culture shock when they’re around rich white kids, and they decide it’s not for them and they wanna go home.
That means they’ll have the worst of both worlds: they’ll be debt slaves with minimum wage jobs.
Hurting Yourself To Play The Game
In the 1990’s, home run totals in major league baseball reached record highs. In 1998, Mark McGwire hit 70, and Sammy Sosa hit 66. Then Barry Bonds hit 73 in 2001. The previous record was 61.
What was going on? The players were doing steroids. They were deliberately hurting themselves — taking years off their lifespan — so they could play the game better.
Some players, like Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire, were good before they did steroids, and steroids just made them better. But other players weren’t that good until they did steroids. Steroids made them just good enough to get a job in the majors.
Of course, that meant another baseball player didn’t get a job because he didn’t do steroids. After all, there are only so many big league roster spots available. If you wanted to make the majors, you pretty much had to do steroids, whether you liked it or not.
College is kind of like steroids for the job market: you have to hurt yourself if you want to play the game. Either you accept your status in America’s lower caste, or you go into debt slavery to enter the higher caste.
This is something you’re not allowed to say in polite company. This is because our society sees education as inherently “good”. And it’s taboo to question it.
But there’s no compelling evidence that college is good for society. The stories about why college is good simply don’t hold up to scrutiny. If anything, college is bad for society.
I don’t think we should get rid of college altogether. It still serves a useful purpose in training future scientists. But the amount of spots in colleges should be reduced.
At a minimum, federally guaranteed student loans should be banned — this will bring down the cost of college and end debt slavery.
We should also encourage more apprenticeship programs, trade schools, and other college alternatives where people can learn useful skills that help them get a good job.
Finally, we should develop better ways to identify who the talented 18-year-olds are, regardless of what their background is. This is the only way to give smart poor kids a chance to shine.
Hi! Thanks for reading. My name’s Theo and every Monday I publish an article about whatever was on my mind the week before… from social sciences to trends in modern society to the best ways to learn things.
If you have any thoughts about this article, I hope you’ll share them. This is a controversial subject. Plus, I don’t know everything, and I probably got a few things wrong in this article.
If you disagree with me, there’s a good chance that you’re right and I’m wrong. So take a deep breath, and then tell me what I’m missing in the comments. (Or alternatively, if you have your own stories/thoughts to add, feel free to share them.)
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Happy trails!
