The Other Thing College Is For (and Why It Matters)

cross-posted from Dagblog

If you ask anyone what colleges and universities are for, they'll give you more or less the same answer: to educate people.  That's a good answer. It's the one I give myself. But it's only half the truth. Colleges and universities actually fulfill two separate roles. We all know about both of them. We only talk about one of them. And because of that, we misunderstand almost everything about how higher education works and how it might be improved.

Every individual college and university exists to educate: to teach people things they did not previously know. (People disagree over what the goal of education should be, but agree that education is the goal.) But colleges also confer social prestige on their graduates. Some confer a large amount, some a smaller amount, and some confer little or none. Taken together as a system, the American colleges and universities have both a teaching function and a sorting function.

I dislike the sorting function and would rather it not exist. But saying that a deeply embedded social practice ought not to exist doesn't get rid of it. Too many people are committed to it, and too many people believe in that social practice as a simple reflection of reality. American higher education labels students by the "quality" (meaning the selectivity and prestige) of the school they attended. People by and large take those labels as real indicators of students' intelligence, likely prospects, and so forth. This social labeling is part of America's class system.

We don't talk about this much, because most people don't like talking about the class system. It's difficult and embarrassing. (And before anyone finds this discussion of class upsetting or insulting, let me say two things. First, I'm not saying that some people should have more social prestige than others. I'm pointing out that in practice they do. I'm trying to describe how the system works, not endorsing it. Second, while talking to another person about their class position can be insulting and a way of putting them down, not talking about how the larger system works is a way of keeping the system in place and letting the people on top get away with things.) But even when we don't talk about class, and maybe especially when we don't talk about it, we experience it a real force in our society. We all know that Princeton alumni enjoy advantages that alumni of poor public colleges do not get. We feel it.

Our public debates about higher education are confused because we don't talk openly or think clearly about the two different functions. It's easier to pretend that colleges are doing only a single thing. But that leads us into misunderstandings because we don't acknowledge how our things really operate or, worse still, talk about one function as if it were the other.

Some people talk about the "great education" a school provides when they really mean the social cachet it provides. Some perceive socially-disadvantaged schools as genuinely providing less learning, no matter the quality of actual education there; those schools are simply "bad schools." These people conflate education and social prestige without being aware that they're doing it, and have trouble perceiving educational quality separately from educational privilege. Other people sometimes deny that anything happens at universities but social differentiation, and are prone to claiming that no actual education happens at elite schools, and so on. This is also a radical misunderstanding, and saying that nobody at Yale learns anything that people don't learn in night school is such an overstatement that it undermines the speaker's point. If two schools have different budgets and different missions, there will be real differences in educational outcomes. No one who's worked in higher education can honestly deny that.

There are schools that are good at teaching students things. There are schools that are good at giving their students social credibility. There are schools that do both well, and schools that do neither. And some can only do one. There are schools that do an excellent job of educating their students but cannot give them any social prestige. There are also, I'm afraid, schools that provide mediocre or poor educations but do better at conferring social capital.

Why does this matter? Because those two basic functions, educating and conferring prestige, have distinct and opposed economic logics.

Education is an absolute and unlimited commodity. The more you produce, the better. Teaching people things is perhaps the ultimate non-zero-sum game.

Social prestige is a relative and inherently limited commodity. The value of selectivity and exclusivity lies in the fact that most people are excluded. In a perfect world, every student could be superbly educated, but in no possible world could every student be more prestigious than every other student. "Exclusivity for all" is a nonsense slogan. Conferring prestige on students is very much a zero-sum game, where one student can only gain from what some other student, somewhere, loses.

The prestige game matters because a school's prestige is its lifeline to more tangible resources, most importantly funding and potential students. A selective institution must maintain its perceived selectivity, its reputation for being hard to get into, for fear of losing access to the most desirable students. The difficulty of getting into a school is key to the social value of getting in to it, which is why exclusive universities trumpet their obscenely low admissions rate every year. Selectivity turns out to be self-fulfilling; if you lose your reputation for selectivity, the students you want most will stop applying.

If your college or university dedicates itself strictly to education without any thought of conferring social prestige, both the school and its students will suffer for that choice. The students and the institution will be stigmatized by many people, and their actual educational achievement will often go unrecognized. Graduates will face disadvantages on the job market; the school will be starved of resources. This is the story of public higher education in America over the past thirty years.

If your university protects its students' best interests, and its own, by working to build its own prestige (and thereby the prestige it confers on its alumni), it must enter a ceaseless zero-sum competition with its peers and rivals. This competition may strike some observers as dysfunctional, but it is an entirely rational and inevitable response to the underlying system of rewards. Since prestige is always relative, any institution must constantly be trying to keep up with its peers and stay ahead of the schools behind it. Every administration tries to move up in the pecking order, which is probably the only viable strategy for not falling further down in that order. You have to run just to stand still.

Understanding the prestige competition between universities is crucial to understanding all the other intractable, poorly-explained questions in American higher education: how admissions work, why costs keep rising, why there seems to be such emphasis on research, what the current rage of enthusiasm for MOOCs is all about. Unless you separate out the questions of education and prestige, it's hard not to misunderstand these questions.

Many people, for example, talk about the "high-quality courses" from Harvard and Stanford (which have taken the lead in MOOC production) being turned into MOOCs. But that is not an evaluation of educational quality; it is an evaluation of institutional prestige. If you don't make any distinction between teaching and creating prestige, then it seems self-evident that a class from Harvard is better than a class from Underfunded State. If you think of teaching and conferring prestige as separate things, the MOOCs look like a pretty bad deal.

One of the MOOCs that gets the most press is a version of one of Harvard's most famous gut classes, a class universally known among undergraduates by a derogatory nickname. (I can't remember ever hearing a Harvard student call that course by its actual name. For practical purposes "Heroes for Zeroes" is its name.) I won't call it a bad course. (I've never taken it.) But there are plenty of classics professors at much less glorious places capable of teaching equally useful courses on the same material and making those courses more challenging for the students. Questions of prestige aside, taking that particular course at Harvard is not a better deal than taking an equivalent course at any number of less-glorious schools.

But the MOOC version of that notoriously-easy class is actually much easier than the Harvard class itself. At least students in the actual class write a few college papers, which get read and graded by teaching assistants who are studying for their own classics PhDs in the field (i.e. by smart people who can read classical Greek in the original). That's not possible for MOOCs, especially because of the Massive Open part. So someone taking the MOOC version just takes multiple-choice reading quizzes instead. And instead of a weekly face-to-face discussion session with one of those doctoral students (who actually knows what's going on in the material), there are lightly moderated online discussion boards. Now the educational product is very clearly inferior to taking a real class on the subject almost anywhere. Even a face-to-face version that's not quite as good as the face-to-face Harvard class is still much better than taking the Harvard MOOC. Talking about the MOOC as superior to a real course at Inglorious State is simply delusional. And replacing face-to-face classes at poor schools with MOOCs from rich, famous schools would be a rotten deal for students at the poor schools.

Does this mean that Harvard doesn't do as good a job educating its students as less prestigious schools do? No. It spends more resources on education than poorer schools can dream of spending, and that matters. But it is not going to spend the kind of money it spends on its own handpicked students on every random stranger who signs up for a MOOC. It could not and would not. Harvard will always save its high-cost, high-value educational products for its own students.

Cheerleaders for MOOCs talk about how they will make education more democratic, breaking down the exclusivity of the elite schools and making elite educations available for all. That has nothing to do with reality. The two most prominent MOOC providers, Harvard and Stanford, are currently wrestling for boasting rights over whose admissions rate is lower. (Stanford's rate finally fell below Harvard's by a tenth of one percent. They want everyone to know. Harvard wants everyone to forget.) Both universities are intent on turning away more applicants every year, and publicly boast about how many excellent students they have turned away. These are not schools committed to breaking down exclusivity. These are schools committed to being the most exclusive. Exclusivity is their business.

If you take a MOOC produced at Harvard or Stanford, you don't get the full educational value that the real Harvard or Stanford version of the class provides. But you get absolutely none of the prestige that Harvard and Stanford gives its students. Part of the cachet of going to those schools is getting into a school that turns down more than 94% of its applicants. MOOCs take everyone who logs on. Harvard and Stanford have enormous social value because they are clubs almost no one can get into. MOOCs are clubs that will take anyone as a member.

In fact, the point of a Harvard or Stanford MOOC is to remind you that you are NOT at Harvard and Stanford, that you are NOT one of the chosen few who gets to take the real class. They get to go to the selective school. You get to wish that you were one of them, with your nose pressed up against the monitor glass. The point is not for Harvard and Stanford to reduce the educational difference between the haves and the have-nots. The point is to increase the prestige difference between the haves and the have-nots. It isn't democratic. It isn't even very nice.

Dear Oscar: The Depression Was Not That Pretty

I went to see The King's Speech, because it was nominated for all those awards and because Monday is Five Dollar Night. I like the actors in it a lot, but I'm glad I didn't spend more than five dollars. The King's Speech may well win the Oscar for Best Picture, but that just goes to show that you don't need originality, drama, artistic perception or a compelling story to win an Oscar.

From the opening moments of that film I was forced to think, once again, a thought that's been building up slowly and irresistibly over the past several years of movie-going:

I am really, really tired of the Great Depression looking so goddamned pretty.

You know how the Thirties look in the movies: all those lovingly restored cars, polished to a deep black-mirror gleam, all those beautifully tailored vintage clothes, all those hats. At the movies, it seems completely inexplicable that hats ever went out of style: every hat looks so good! Everyone looks so good in hats! How could anyone not wear one? You have to watch a movie actually filmed in the Thirties, rather than merely set in the Thirties, to see what people actually looked like in those hats. You also need to watch a movie made during the Depression, instead of set during the Depression, to have any chance that the movie will acknowledge the Depression itself or the tens of millions of people mired in desperate poverty.

Some of the Hollywood movies from the Thirties are entertainments designed to ignore the tough times happening in the real world, while others make those tough times into the story. But nearly every high-end art-house movie set in the Thirties, the kind of movie that prides itself on being "serious", ignores the tough times that were happening in the real world. Low-brow moviemakers used to offer up escape from the Thirties. Now high-brow moviemakers offer the Thirties as a place to escape to.

Some of this is just the Costume Drama Effect, which invests props and costumes with fetishistic glamor. In old Warner Brothers pictures, people drive cars. In a costume dramas they drive carefully restored antique cars, which is a very different thing. The same thing goes for clothes and hats; there's a difference between wearing a wool jacket and wearing an obsessively recreated wool jacket. The camera treats them differently, too. When you've spent that much time and effort and money getting the cars and hats and silver trays just right, you focus (literally and figuratively) on the cars and hats and silver in a way you wouldn't if you were filming a contemporary setting on a normal costume budget. The same phenomenon is at work when the camera in The Social Network lingers repeatedly over that movie's detailed recreation of the Harvard campus. (No one has been allowed to film on Harvard's campus since the makers of Love Story, another craptastic Oscar nominee, allegedly trashed the joint.) The film makers worked so hard to make its Harvard look real that they need you to notice and admire it. And of course, when you're focusing on the nice clothes and cars and silver, it's natural to focus your costume dramas on the people with the nicest clothes and cars and antique silver. Costume drama has always favored the upper classes.

But just because something has become a cliche doesn't make it less hackneyed or dishonest. There will always be some historical dramas about people with country houses and butlers and really cool cigarette holders. They have their place; there are many that I enjoy. But how many do we need, and why are so many allegedly ambitious and "serious" film makers willing to accept the severely limited view of the world that those country houses afforded? At this point Brideshead has been revisited, and re-revisted, and re-re-re-re-revisited. What makes film makers think there's anything else to see there? In the actual Thirties, most artists knew (or at least suspected) that the world of the aristocracy was not the whole world, and even when the story was about aristocrats there was a healthy understanding that they were not the whole story.

The King's Speech, on the other hand, lazily assumes the Duke of York's view of the world. The speech therapist, Lionel Logue, may be from a much lower class and live in much less comfortable circumstances, but the movie has no real interest in those circumstances or that class. Logue's character exists to serve the Duke of York's, both formally and on the level of plot. The movie is perfectly happy with that; it is convinced that both men belong exactly where the British class system has put them. Any exceptions to protocol made in the speech therapist's consulting room are daring enough; everywhere else they are iron-clad. This is a movie that, entirely without irony, depicts Wallis Simpson's failure to greet the Duchess of York with the proper etiquette as an important character flaw. The only way to be entirely unironic about something like that is to be at least a little bit stupid.

The Depression is nowhere to be seen in this movie. The distant rumblings of World War II are to be heard from far off, but only because they provide context for the movie's great challenge: Albert Windsor's speech impediment. This is a movie that seriously proposes that George VI's speech therapy was a major front in World War II. Worse yet, it doesn't even try to sell the viewer on that proposition. It takes for granted that the viewers buy it.

I foolishly thought World War II was won by millions of factory workers working night and day to build weapons and equipment for millions of soldiers who risked (and often lost) their lives over years of grinding, grueling battle. Silly me. Now I understand that was won by a member of the British royal family keeping his appointments with his speech therapist, except when he didn't. Because, after all, if the King of England weren't able to make a good speech into a microphone, the British would have needed to fall back on the speech-making talents of Winston Churchill.

I'm okay with building up a central character as the prime mover in events that were much more complicated and beyond any individual's full control. Lawrence of Arabia is not a piece of hack work. The Social Network tells another not-terribly-plausible tale of a privileged individual almost single-handedly changing things, but it sells that story, and allows its account to be challenged in the movie itself. (Facebook is obviously not a ground-breakingly original invention, but the winner in a market competition between a bunch of remarkably similar social-networking sites. The question of where Mark Zuckerberg's personal genius comes from isn't rooted in the real world, but at least the movie works hard to root it into cinematic reality for two hours.) Protagonists who can be put forward as world-shakers tend to be very privileged, for reasons both of literary tradition and of real-world opportunity. But a film needs to sell its version. It needs, at the very least, to make it plausible. The makers of The King's Speech don't seem to have entertained an instant's doubt that George VI and his diction exercises were of world-shaking importance. Worse yet, they don't seem to have entertained even an instant's suspicion that anyone else could doubt that either. That makes the film more than a little stupid.

The saddest thing about The King's Speech is how very ordinary its type of badness has become. It's favored for major awards, despite its stupidity, because so many other allegedly thoughtful art movies are stupid in exactly the same ways. It doesn't sell its silly ideas because it expects it audience, the well-educated upscale audience that goes to see historical dramas, to believe them already.

That audience now takes it for granted that a comfortable and privileged figure can meaningfully combat a major political evil (Nazism, Communism, apartheid) simply by espousing a little symbolic opposition. That goes down well with an audience that would like believing the right things (whether left, right, or center) to be all that it takes. The audience has also grown quite comfortable identifying with Very Important People, and doesn't bother to ask why they are important. (At one point in The King's Speech, Colin Firth laments how pointless it is to be a 20th-century king, a lament that this movie couldn't afford if it didn't count on its audience to believe that Firth's character is Very Important and to thrill to the way he Shoulders His Heavy Responsibilities.) This is an audience that doesn't relate to the little guy. They're more than happy to identify with those born into privilege. And for that audience part of the point of historical drama is to gape at the luxury of the aristocrats' lives, and to enjoy all the really wonderful bespoke hats.

Furthermore, although this may simply be my own eroding patience, it seems to me that over the last twenty years or so historical films headed for art theaters have been set more and more often, with less and less nuance, in exactly the times and places where economic inequality was greatest: in the period between the two World Wars, in the Gilded Age, during the British Raj. Maybe I've only begun to notice it more. But either way, these movies seductively and relentlessly present their audience, a highly educated and relatively privileged section of the moviegoing public, a vision of history as seen through the eyes of unearned privilege. In that vision the periods of grossest inequality, the decades marred by needless poverty and rank injustice, are shown as a series of golden ages. As the income distribution curve of our own economy has come to look more and more like that of a third world nation, our most educated and self-consciously intellectual filmgoers have been seeing film after film that makes such retrograde social arrangements look elegant and appealing. Those movies say that it's good to live in such an unequal society, that inequality creates luxury and refinement and charm. Historical drama does for those eras what those eras struggled and failed to do for themselves: hide all the work, and the sweat, and the unpleasant, undeniable truths.

cross-posted at Dagblog