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By Root 237 0

real seagulls, then the lunch itself, which I always savored. This calls to mind Marx, who writes that under conditions of estranged labor, man “no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions.” Over lunch Mike would recount the outrageous things he had written in his abstracts, which were then published under the names of untenured assistant professors. I could see my own future in such furtive moments of sabotage—the compensating pleasures of a cubicle drone. Always funny and gentle, one day Mike confided that he was doing quite a bit of heroin. On the job. This actually made some sense.

How was it that I, once a proudly self-employed electrician, had ended up among these walking wounded, a “knowledge worker” at a salary of $23,000? I hadn’t gone to graduate school for the sake of a career (rather, I wanted guidance reading some difficult books), but once I had the master’s degree I felt like I belonged to a certain order of society, and was entitled to its forms. Despite the beautiful ties I wore, it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as a manual worker.

Interlude: What College Is For

If I had pursued higher education for the sake of a career, it would have turned out to be a complete mistake; happily, this was not my situation, and I have no regrets about my studies. But many people seem to regard college, and even graduate school, as an extension of compulsory schooling. More than 90 percent of high school students “report that their guidance counselors encouraged them to go to college.”14

In this there is little accommodation of the diversity of dispositions, and of the fact that some very smart people are totally ill suited both to higher education and to the kind of work you’re supposed to do once you have a degree. Further, funneling everyone into college creates certain perversities in the labor market.

The sociologist of education Randall Collins describes a cycle of credential inflation that “could go on endlessly, until janitors need Ph.D.’s and babysitters are required to hold advanced degrees in child care.”15 The escalating demand for academic credentials gives the impression of an ever more knowledgeable society, whose members perform cognitive feats their unschooled parents could scarcely conceive of. Consider my abstracting job as it might have been described by a business journalist steeped in the latest talk about a “postindustrial society” or “creative economy.” I perfectly exemplified the knowledge worker, and what’s more, I had an advanced degree to match. My very existence, multiplied a millionfold, is precisely what puts the futurologist in a rapture: we are getting to be so smart! Yet, in viewing my situation from afar in this way, the M.A. degree serves only to obscure a more real stupidification of the work I secured with that credential, and a wage to match. What the hell is going on? Is this our society as a whole, buying more education only to scale new heights of stupidity?

If much corporate knowledge work is after all not terribly demanding on the brain, or even requires the active suppression of intelligence, then we would expect academic accomplishments to be a poor basis on which to make hiring decisions. And in fact, corporate recruiters say they care little about a student’s grades. The university itself is trusted to have done more than enough cognitive sorting on the day it admitted a student. In their book Higher Education and Corporate Realities, the sociologists Phillip Brown and Richard Scase quote one recruiter saying, “We find no correlation at all between your degree result and how well you get on in this company. Not at all. I wish there were. I would then be able to say, ‘Unless you’ve got [a good GPA], don’t bother.’”16

The irrelevance of what you actually learn (or don’t) in school for job performance is hard to square with a technocratic view of the economy, which is invariably coupled with a sunny presumption of meritocracy. Together, these views sometimes go by the name of “human capital theory.” According