One of the many guises in which the Trump-Musk duo presents itself to the American public, as they take office in the new administration, is as ”employers-in-chief”: seasoned businessmen entitled to give life advice to their fellow citizens on the basis of a purported real-life experience that cuts against received wisdom.
It is in this guise that both Trump and Musk recurrently attack higher education institutions as one of the as yet unconquered bastions of the “liberal America” they are now keen to tear down. Already during his first presidential bid in 2016, Trump famously stated that he “loves the poorly educated”. More recently, at a campaign rally in support of Trump’s re-election bid, Musk stated that “too many people spend four years in college, accumulate a ton of debt, and don’t have any useful skills they can apply afterwards”.
The message appears to be landing. According to recent polls, the percentage of Americans who express “a lot of confidence” in higher education has declined from 57% to 36% over the past decade, and only about one in four now believe it is “extremely” or “very important” to have a college degree to get a well-paying job in today’s economy.
Defending the emancipatory promise that has historically been at the heart of the United States’ higher education system against these attacks and widespread concerns requires going back to the basics about the nature of that promise. Simply pointing to statistics about the monetary returns of a college education won’t cut it, for at least two reasons.
To begin with, aggregate data says little about individual life or investment decisions. While it is true that on average college graduates make between 60% and 80% more than workers without college degrees, a lot depends on what you study, where and at what cost. A more detailed program-level assessment conducted by the Wharton professor Peter Cappelli found that “the cost-adjusted payoff from many college programs across the country – as much as one in four – is actually negative”.
More importantly, however, this purely monetary way of assessing the value of a college education already concedes too much to its critics. By focusing exclusively on the economic returns after graduation, it ignores the broader educational – but also moral and political – value of the experience of actually being in college.
There are not many times in most people’s lives nowadays when they can devote themselves to cultivating their own talents and opinions, without immediate regard to external constraints. Before entering college, most young people remain under the tutelage of their parents and are therefore at least in part constrained to do what they think is best for them. Afterwards, they usually have to enter the labor market, thereby falling under the authority of their employers, or at least the economic constraints of their revenue-generating activities.
That is why, in his recent book entitled The Student: A Short History, Wesleyan University’s president, Michael Roth, reminds us that the college experience has historically been construed as a “concrete exercise of freedom”. In advocating for the creation of a publicly funded university in the state of Virginia at the beginning of the 19th century, for instance, Thomas Jefferson maintained that it was essential for a citizenry aspiring to be “self-governing” to have the opportunity of spending a period of their lives dedicated to cultivating the capacity to “judge for themselves what will secure or endanger their freedom”, unencumbered from both familial authority and the burdens of toil work.
The usual retort against this conception of higher education as an intrinsically valuable exercise in freedom is that it can at best be available to a privileged few. The former director of the (for-profit) University of Phoenix, Mark DeFusco, is on record stating: “I’m happy that there are places in the world where people sit down and think. We need that. But that’s very expensive. And not everyone can do that. So for the vast majority of folks who don’t get that privilege, then I think it’s just business.”
Upon reflection, however, this is the stance that turns out to be most truly elitist, since it assumes that the freedom afforded by a dedicated period of cultivation of one’s own talents and opinions cannot – or indeed shouldn’t – be available to everyone. As a professor at a higher education institution – the City College of New York, founded with the explicit goal of “educating the whole people” – I cannot abide by such a surrender of America’s democratic promise, masquerading as realism.
For most of the predominantly working class and first-generation students on our campus, the decision to enroll is not a consequence of “privilege”. It involves significant costs and also risks. That is why it is generally experienced as an achievement in itself. By the very fact of going to college, these students already get to take part in what they themselves frequently – and unironically – refer to as the “American dream”.
In their eyes, this dream isn’t therefore reducible to a prospect of monetary payoff after graduation. It also includes a direct experience of freedom in the present. And although many City College students also have to work to support themselves while studying, they usually see their jobs as instrumental to their education, not the other way around.
I take there to be a lesson in this also for our “employers-in-chief” – which is that the American dream they are so fond of referring to as well isn’t for most people about rushing to serve them (more or less lucratively) on the job market, but rather about a more expansive life of freedom, of which higher education remains a core component.
Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti is executive director of the Moynihan Center and full professor of political science at the City College of New York.
