—Originally published October 29, 2013
College Is a Promise the Economy Does Not Keep
In 2000, New York Times columnist David Brooks published a sociological study of the United States that now reads like science fiction. Bobos in Paradise chronicled how a new upper class of “Bobos”—bourgeois bohemians—struggled to navigate life’s dazzling options in a time of unparalleled prosperity. As presidential candidates Al Gore and George W. Bush debated how to spend the projected $5 trillion government surplus, Brooks took on the micro-crisis: How would baby boomers handle the psychic strain of making money at fulfilling jobs?
“This is the age of discretionary income,” Brooks declared, noting that liberal arts majors were “at top income brackets” and journalists made “six-figure salaries.” The WASP aristocracy that had long ruled the U.S. had been replaced with a meritocracy based on hard work and creative prowess. Anyone could join—provided he or she had the right education.
Therein lay the hidden anxiety. According to Brooks, baby boomers had surmounted class and ethnic barriers through the accumulation of credentials. A degree from Harvard now carried more prestige—and provided more opportunity—than the bloodlines that had propelled the Protestant elite.
But the appeal of a college degree was also its fatal flaw: anyone could get it. The formula could only work once, as the same educational system that created new elites now threatened the prospects of their heirs.
“Members of the educated class can never be secure about their children’s future,” Brooks wrote. “Compared to past elites, little is guaranteed.”
He claimed the burden of maintaining success fell on the children themselves, who would have to “work through school” just like their parents.
As it turned out, there was another way.
In the fourteen years since Bobos was published, elites have done much to guarantee their children’s security. Namely, they have raised the price of the credentials needed to participate in the new meritocracy by such dramatic measures that it locks out a large part of the population while sending nearly everyone else into debt.
Since 2000, the average cost of tuition and fees has more than doubled, while student loan debt has grown at double-digit rates and well-paying jobs have all but vanished. Since 2001, employment in low-wage occupations has increased by 8.7 percent while employment in middle-wage occupations has decreased by 7.3 percent. The most popular industries pay poorly: according to the April 2014 jobs report, four of the top six industries that saw job creation were in the lowest-paying fields. Meanwhile, in prestigious professions, entry-level jobs have been replaced with full-time, unpaid internships.
Today’s youth are the best-educated generation in U.S. history. But opportunities are reserved only for those who can buy them. Young U.S. citizens have inherited an entrenched meritocracy that combines the baby boomers’ emphasis on education with the class rigidity of the WASP aristocracy it allegedly undermined.
Purchasing Credentials
College does not guarantee a job. It is debatable whether college—in a time of defunded and eliminated programs, rampant grade inflation, and limited student-professor interaction—offers much of an education, at least one for which it is worth taking on significant debt. So why go?
People go to college because not going to college carries a penalty. College is a purchased loyalty oath to an imagined employer. College shows you are serious enough about your life to risk ruining it early on. College is a promise the economy does not keep—but not going to college promises you will struggle to survive.
In an entrenched meritocracy, those who cannot purchase credentials are not only ineligible for most middle-class jobs but are informed that their plight is the result of poor “choices.” This ignores that the “choice” of college usually requires walking the road of financial ruin to get the reward—a reward of employment that, in this economy, is illusory.
Credentialism is economic discrimination disguised as opportunity. Over the past forty years, professions that never required a college degree began demanding it.
“The United States has become the most rigidly credentialized society in the world,” write James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield in their 2005 book Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money. “A BA is required for jobs that by no stretch of the imagination need two years of full-time training, let alone four.”
The promotion of college as a requirement for a middle-class life in an era of shrinking middle-class jobs has resulted in an increase in workers whose jobs do not require the degree—15 percent of taxicab drivers, 18 percent of firefighters. More perniciously, it has resulted in the exclusion of the non-college-educated from professions of public influence. In 1971, 58 percent of journalists had a college degree. Today 92 percent do, and at many publications, a graduate degree in journalism is required—despite the fact that most renowned journalists have never formally studied journalism.
Journalism is one of many fields of public influence—including politics—in which credentials function as de facto permission to speak, rendering those who lack them less likely to be employed and less able to afford to stay in their field. Ability is discounted without credentials, but the ability to purchase credentials rests, more often than not, on family wealth.
A “Less Worse” Future
In media and policy circles, this is not how the story is told. A college degree is portrayed as a promise rather than a threat. “People Who Skip College Are Giving Up $800,000 On Average,” proclaimed Business Insider, one of a slew of publications that portrayed college as the ticket to a near-million-dollar prize.
The $800,000 figure came from a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco showing that the average U.S. college graduate will earn at least $800,000 more than the average high school graduate, and that “college is still worth it.” The report relied mainly on twentieth-century data, drawing conclusions from a short-lived period in U.S. history when college was cheaper and wages were higher.
That said, the report is not wrong: a college graduate will earn more than a high school graduate. But the real problem is that today both groups earn less and sacrifice more—in time, money, and personal freedom. College does not offer a better future, but a less worse one. College is not a cure for economic insecurity, but a symptom of the broader plague of credentialism.
In an op-ed for New York magazine, Benjamin Wallace-Wells cites the popularity of French economist Thomas Piketty to claim that the questions David Brooks and others raised “about the culture of the meritocracy, about what kinds of people got ahead in American life” were “obsolete.” America’s new language is economics, he writes—oblivious to the fact that economics is, and always has been, the language of meritocracy.
“The Bobo meritocracy will not easily be toppled, even if some group of people were to rise up and conclude that it should be,” Brooks wrote in 2000. He is right that it will not be easy. But the first step to toppling a meritocracy is recognizing that it is not a meritocracy. You do not need a college education to know you have been screwed.
—Originally published May 14, 2014
PART V
Media
Managed Expectations in the Post-Employment Economy
On March 4, Olga Khazan, the new editor of the Global section of The Atlantic, sent an email to Nate Thayer, a veteran journalist covering Asian political affairs. Khazan had seen an article Thayer had written about North Korea and liked it. She wanted to know if he could “repurpose” it for the Atlantic website.
“We unfortunately can’t pay you for it,” she wrote Thayer. “But we do reach 13 million readers a month.”
Thayer was appalled. He explained that he was a professional journalist “not in the habit of giving my services for free to for-profit media outlets so they can make money by using my work and efforts by removing my ability to pay my bills and feed my children.”
Khazan apologized and explained that The Atlantic was out of mo
ney. She told him the most they paid for an original story was $100, but they did not have $100 at the moment. All they could offer Thayer was “exposure” to benefit his “professional goals.” Thayer’s professional goal was to pay his bills. Outraged, he posted the exchange on his blog. It went viral within hours.
Who Pays?
The news that The Atlantic—one of the oldest and most venerated publications in America—paid its writers little or nothing came as a shock to many, but not to journalists struggling to make a living in the post-employment economy. Freelance rates have plunged over the past decade, a decline tracked on the crowdsourced website “Who Pays Writers?” (The answer: hardly anyone.)
Some journalists say this is not a big deal. Unpaid labor should be expected, even treasured. In an article called “People Writing for Free on the Internet Is an Enormous Boon to Society,” salaried Slate columnist Matthew Yglesias argued that if people demanded money for their labor, the world would be deprived of important works. “This Nine Inch Nails/Carly Rae Jepsen mashup is amazing, for example,” he wrote.
Atlantic employees say they feel the freelancers’ pain, but there is nothing they can do. Editor James Bennet apologized for offending Thayer and added that “when we publish original, reported work by freelancers, we pay them.”
This claim was dismissed by Atlantic contributors who were paid nothing for their original, reported contributions. In a lengthy defense of The Atlantic’s publishing practices, technology editor Alexis Madrigal argued that while the game of journalism “sucks,” it was too late to change the rules: “You still have limited funds. You still can’t pay freelancers a living wage.”
But then where is all the money going? “The Atlantic is two things every legacy publishing company would like to be: profitable and more reliant on digital advertising revenues than on print,” writes Forbes magazine. Two thousand twelve brought The Atlantic a record profit, beating out its record profit of 2011, with 59 percent of earnings coming from digital revenues. Not every writer at The Atlantic is suffering for their craft. When the magazine recruited staff writer Jeffrey Goldberg, they sent his daughter ponies and offered him a lavish six-figure salary. Thayer had once been offered $125,000 by the magazine to write six articles.
* * *
The economic crisis is a crisis of managed expectations. Americans are being conditioned to accept their own exploitation as normal.
* * *
The problem in journalism is not that people are writing for free. It is that people are writing for free for companies that are making a profit. It is that people are doing the same work and getting paid radically disparate wages. It is that corporations making record earnings will not allocate their budgets to provide menial compensation to the workers who make them a success.
The Post-Employment Economy
The Atlantic is far from the only publication to withhold wages, and journalism isn’t the only field to do so. In academia, adjunct professors live in poverty doing the same work as the average professor paid $73,207 per year. In many industries—including policy, entertainment, and business—interns do the same jobs as salaried employees and are paid nothing or next to nothing. “We need to hire a 22-22-22,” said one new media manager quoted in The New York Times, meaning a 22-year-old willing to work 22-hour days for $22,000 a year.
Shortly before the Atlantic story broke, a video depicting income inequality in the United States went viral. Based on data from a 2011 study, the video showed that most Americans seek a more equitable distribution of wealth than what they believe exists—but that the reality of income inequality is far worse than they had imagined. When income was graphed, the middle class was barely distinguishable from the poor. Eighty percent of Americans hold 7 percent of the nation’s wealth, while 1 percent of Americans hold 40 percent of the nation’s wealth.
The video noted that 92 percent of Americans think this is wrong. So why does it continue? The answer lies in a combination of fear and myth-making that has characterized public perception of the economy since the 2008 collapse. Americans are taught to believe the economy is in a permanent crisis—a position seemingly validated by their own experience.
But has the permanent crisis become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Economic analyst Eric Garland notes that since 2008, executive compensation has steadily risen, but the myth of hard times is peddled to both frighten and lure a permanent supply of unpaid, precarious labor.
“You’re only 28. Or 33,” he writes, mocking the corporate pitch. “You have a long career ahead of you. You can get paid later! After all, we don’t have budget for interns this year. We used that money to increase executive pay at a rate five times greater than the cost of living. Because the economy is terrible right now! And we’re at all-time record highs of corporate cash reserves and profits. But it’s terrible!”
The economic crisis is a crisis of managed expectations. Americans are being conditioned to accept their own exploitation as normal. Ridden with debt from the minute they graduate college, they compete for the privilege of working without pay. They no longer earn money—they earn the prospect of making money. They are paid in “connections” and “exposure.” But they should insist on more.
I understand why they do not. When the Atlantic story broke, many journalists were tempted to write about their own mistreatment. Some did, but others held back. They did not want to seem angry or ungrateful. They did not want to risk losing what little they had. They were told to pay their dues, and now they are paying for it with their dignity.
In the post-employment economy, is self-respect something we can afford? Or is it another devalued commodity we are expected to give away?
—Originally published March 12, 2013
Who Is a “Journalist”? People Who Can Afford to Be
On September 12, a U.S. Senate panel approved legislation designed to protect journalists from having to reveal their confidential sources. In order to do this, the panel had to define “journalist.” According to the proposed law, a journalist is “an employee, independent contractor or agent of an entity that disseminates news or information … [who has been] employed for one year within the last 20 years or three months within the last five years.”
The definition was met with approval by some and dismay by others. Politico, a website that tracks the minutiae of the D.C. elite, praised it as “a step forward for independent and non-traditional media organizations.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that seeks to protect free speech online, decried it as offering insufficient protection for independent bloggers, reiterating its earlier argument that “Congress should link shield law protections to the practice of journalism as opposed to the profession.”
The Senate debate over who is a “journalist” arose in the aftermath of WikiLeaks, whose activity has been defined as both journalism and espionage. Expanding the definition of a journalist means expanding the legal protection journalists receive.
“I can’t support it if everyone who has a blog has a special privilege … or if Edward Snowden were to sit down and write this stuff, he would have a privilege. I’m not going to go there,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, in a statement political commentator Matt Drudge denounced as “fascist.”
The debate over who is a journalist is a debate over journalistic privilege. But in a prestige economy, the privilege to protect the confidentiality of sources is not the only privilege at play.
Journalism is increasingly a profession only the wealthy can enter. To narrow the definition of “journalist” to those affiliated with established news organizations denies legal protection not only to organizations like WikiLeaks, but also to the writers and bloggers who cannot afford the exorbitant credentials and unpaid internships that provide entry into the trade.
“The journalists who can tell my story—the story of urban or inner-city America—have taken a job in marketing while disseminating their opinions on blogs,” writes freelance journalist David Dennis. Since the rece
ssion began in 2008, racial diversity in the media has declined while gender imbalance has remained high. The bloggers to whom Dennis refers would have no legal protection under the Senate’s definition.
Whom would the Senate’s definition protect? Journalists employed at established publications, who are mainly white men from privileged backgrounds—a category of people who may have little interest in critiquing the establishment that benefits them. The Senate’s definition of “journalist” protects the people who need it least.
The Price of Journalism Today
What does it take to succeed in journalism today? For Canadian writer Alexandra Kimball, it was a surprise inheritance. Only after a financial windfall was her freelance career possible.
“To be a writer in this market requires not only money, but a concept of ‘work’ that is most easily gained from privilege,” she writes. “It requires a sense of entitlement … and requires you to think of working for free—at an internship, say, or on one of those gratis assignments that seem to be everywhere now—as an opportunity rather than an insult or a scam.”
As digital media gave more writers a voice, qualifications for journalism jobs became more stringent and dependent on wealth. This is true worldwide. In 2009, the average cost of journalism school, often a prerequisite for hire in the U.S., was $31,000. Some universities charge over $50,000; along with living expenses the total bill can be above $80,000 (median U.S. household income is $52,000). A British government report showed that in the U.K., journalism is the third most exclusive profession to enter, with the greatest decline in social mobility among its practitioners.
The predominance of privilege has led to a deterioration of journalistic standards. “The people who have time to fool around for no money are the people who already have lots of it,” writes journalist James Bloodworth. “And if they are the journalists of the future our media will probably resemble the establishment talking to itself, and if that’s the case we will all be worse off, not only us hacks.”
The View from Flyover Country Page 11