The Art, Trade, and Mystery of a College Education

I’ve been thinking about indentured servitude. Never fear. Not as a current career choice, but as a concept. Here’s a pretty chaste description of indentured servitude from a chatbot:

Indentured servitude is a form of labor where a person signs a contract to work for another for a specified period, typically in exchange for passage, food, and shelter. This arrangement often involved working without salary for several years to repay debts or gain access to new opportunities.

Upon reflection, I realized I’d written about the topic before. In 2005(!), which made me wonder if I was going crazy, since my term of indenture to blogging should be over, and maybe I should be manumitted by now. I’ve been writing so long I have to start quoting myself to sound smart. It’s only a matter of time before I start referring to myself in the third person. At any rate, here’s an excerpt from Sign Me Up:

How did people live? Dress? Labor? Raise children? Learn? What did they sit on, and what kind of dwelling did they live in? Places like Williamsburg catalog just these quotidian details, and bless them for it.
Really dry books like “Houses of Williamsburg” have the scholarly details that lend perspective to our own lives, when we see how far we have come, but also how much we still retain. I found one particularly telling detail in it. It’s a contract for Indenture between an orphaned boy and a bricklayer. Here it is:

This Indenture Witnesseth that John Webb an Orphan hath put himself, and by these Presents doth voluntarily and of his own free Will and Accord. put himself apprentice to William Phillips of Williamsburg Bricklayer to learn his Art, Trade, and Mystery: and after the Manner of and Apprentice to serve the said William Phillips from the day of the date hereof for and during and unto the full end and Term of five Years next ensuing during all which Term, the said Apprentice, his said Master faithfully shall serve, and his Secrets keep, who’s lawful commands at all Times readily obey; He shall do no damage to his said Master, nor see it to be done by others, without giving Notice thereof to his said master. He shall not waste his said Master’s Goods nor lend them unlawfully to any…

To the modern eye, this looks like two paces from slavery. But not to the modern tradesman’s eye. Because what you just read was essentially the same as the situation my peers and I entered into when we entered the building trades in the seventies. It wasn’t written down, but it was spoken, or understood. I’ll serve you faithfully if you teach me a trade is the bargain we all struck with someone older, wiser, and more experienced, and who wouldn’t mind having a seventeen year old around to pick up the 90 pound sacks of cement for him. And the only two questions asked of the prospective applicant were: Will you work hard? and: Will you stick around long enough to make my investment in your learning pay off? Answer yes, and you’d be pointed to a stack of something heavy that very minute.

I think people mistake internships, paid and gratis, for a modern form of indentured servitude. I don’t see it. No matter what the HR Gorgon promises you, you’re not there to be instructed in the Art, Trade, and Mystery of anything. You’re there to do scut work for little or no pay. The only information you can glean is by what we used to call “stealing with your eyes.” We used to do it in construction, too. You’d catch glimpses of what was going on in the overall scheme of construction work if you looked around while pushing a wheelbarrow full of concrete and being yelled at. But you could do that by standing on the sidewalk and watching the work through the chain-link fence. It’s not the same entree to the inner sanctum of the trades, or any business. You’ll be schooled in the Art, Trade, and Mystery of the coffee maker and the photocopier, and that’s about it.

No, the closest version of indentured servitude in today’s world is a university education. It’s on a slightly different timeline. You’ll notice John Webb up there in the excerpt was cut loose after five years, just like the average college student who slept late on too many mornings and took five years to finish. However, John’s payment method for the privilege of learning his trade was working for the whole five years, many times with no pay, just room and board. The college student gets his room and board tacked on his bill, and starts paying it after he’s cut loose. And if the headlines in the paper are to be believed, he’s going to be paying it well into the future, bordering on the hereafter. Some people get their Social Security payments garnished to pay college loans. Yikes. The term of indenture is limitless.

Of course I shouldn’t have referred to the typical college student as a “he” in the last paragraph. Only girls go to college now, more or less. Hell, black women alone have a higher enrollment rate in college than white men at this point. College is for girls, and if you don’t believe me, read a list of the classes on offer.

Well, whoever’s going to college is having a hard time paying back their student loans, and they’d like them to be erased. They owe their soul to the company store, and they resent it. I can’t say I blame them. It’s easy to fall back on Calvin Coolidge’s retort when Europe wanted their loans forgiven after WW I: “They hired the money, didn’t they?”, but that’s unlikely to be helpful. Better decisions should have been made, it’s true, but until we have a Time Masheen, we have to deal with the here and now, and it sucks.

We had a better solution to the problem back when I graduated from high school. If you didn’t have the money, you  didn’t go to college, no matter what your SAT scores said. Or more likely, you went to some local, lower-tier college and stuck to degrees that would pay off after graduation, with affordable credit hours. I can remember a fey weirdo guidance counselor telling me that I could go to Notre Dame. I told him my parents didn’t have that kind of money. He said there were all kinds of loans and scholarships that I could apply for. I told him he’d misunderstood me, and I was referring to the $28 fee to submit the application. That about ended the conversation.

The most important part of the deal was the Art, Trade, and Mystery portion of the indenture: Back to me:

“Art, Trade, and Mystery” is wonderful. I’ve never heard it described better. Good construction work is an art, and so many poor souls flounder around these days because they learn the “art” in a desultory fashion, get stars in their eyes, and go out on their own without learning the “Trade” which refers to the business end of the deal. “Mystery” is the magnificent capstone to the trio of benefits. Specialized skills and knowledge are the heart of any trade, and customers know better than anyone that hiring a tradesmen to do anything for you is a descent into mystery. The plumber knows the mystery of making the contents of the toilet bowl disappear, and for that mystery you’re glad to pay him.

What, pray tell, is the Art, Trade, and Mystery made available to a typical college graduate in today’s day and age? There isn’t any. A college education doesn’t even attempt to teach anything useful for the economy the kids are dumped into, outside of a few specialties like medicine or cybersecurity or something. Everyone else gets a hand full of gimme, and a mouth full of no justice no peace! But no matter how much communism they marinate in, even if they seized the means of production, they wouldn’t even know how to turn it on, never mind operate it. Their lives, and their education, are a long, desultory attempt to avoid any means of production by any means necessary. They just want stuff, and have been coached to expect it. There’s a reason high-minded commies just loot Fendi bags when their riots get the upper hand. The concatenation of money and effort and time and planning and production that puts the trashy designer things they covet into the stores they’re looting is opaque to them.

That’s the Art, Trade, and Mystery of the university system, and it’s broken. The halls of academe exist solely to do two things: replicate themselves, and produce drones capable only of make-work sinecures in the government, non-profits and NGOs. They’re not even interested in the economy at large. There’s a reason why they call it the “dreaded private sector.” Asking students who come out of this system to pay their debts by earning money by being productive in the dreaded private sector is a fool’s errand. They’re not incapable of working at something that produces enough return to pay their loans. Much worse than that. They’re intellectually allergic to the whole idea. They were promised the Art, Trade, and Mystery of a government or quasi-government feather bed, and when it’s not available anymore, they aren’t going to “learn to code,” or egad, learn to mine. They’re going to immediately fall into 24/7 political agitation to turn the government machine on again, and turn the knob up to eleven, and by the way, break off the knob.

That’s why trying to collect student debt from the existing graduates with the Brobdingnagian debt and no prospects is a mistake, a form of Sunk Cost Fallacy. The money was wasted. They are not educated. They can’t pay. Any competent manager of any size business knows that holding accounts receivable on your books that will never be paid is a recipe for bankruptcy, because your balance sheet will look fine until you actually have to pay a bill, using only illusory receipts. Smart businesses write things off in real time, and look things in the face.

The Sisyphean Debt Graduates won’t thank you for writing off their debts, of course. “Handful of gimme” is an attitude that doesn’t go into remission just like that. But they’ll think their troubles are over the minute you do it. They’re not capable of making their way in the world without a sinecure, and they won’t find one. The best you can hope for is that a few of them might wise up, and have a low-key normal life. But for the rest of them? Student debt forgiveness is just a financial ice floe they’ll willingly climb aboard. You can wave to them after you push them out to sea, but you can’t help them. The polar bears will thank you for it, though.

The true problem with trying to collect noncollectable student loan debt is that we’re trying to get the money from the wrong parties. The university system promised each and every one of these students riches without working. They peddled the Art, Trade, and Mystery of being a tapeworm on the economic body collective, and didn’t deliver.  You can’t reward bait and switch marketing.  So the colleges are swimming in endowment money, about a trillion dollars in the US. It’s not enough to pay off the entire 1.7 trillion dollar outstanding student loan debt, but it would make a nice down payment, don’t you think. Not to worry. The faculty members and administrators can all get jobs serving food out a hole in the wall to pay the rest of it, for however long it takes.