More on college loans to needy students at sixth-rate schools

Noah is not a fan of my post on college loans:

Take a look at Gateway Community College's course offerings (pdf). Yes, there is one course on Intro to Cultural Anthropology, that Helen can attend, but there are far, far more on keyboarding and Toyota engine repair. Community colleges and for-profit universities (which are a really mixed bag, but the good ones are an important part of the post-secondary system) are by far the institutions least invested in imparting social capital and most concerned with direct skill provision.

You can see this because they don't have dorms, much less campuses. Helen's worry about teaching the language of "community service and extra-curriculars" might have some legitimacy when talking about Yale. I would disagree, but right now I don't have to. Her argument has literally no merit; it's describing a phenomenon she just made up.

Community colleges serve people who got a bad break in life and are working damn hard to make good. They're deeply troubled institutions, but they're improving and help tons of people. To make them the target for an already strange quest to get kids to stop going to college is singularly awful.

Dara starts an interesting back-and-forth in response:

It seems to me that, whatever the merits of Helen's argument, taking useful classes at college doesn't preclude its function of molding you to particular middle- or upper-class norms of behavior--and the inverse is even more true: a liberal-arts school doesn't necessarily teach behavior just because it doesn't teach basic job skills.

I'm also amused that you're skeptical of Helen's claim as it applies to Yale et al., because it's essentially a reiteration of Rob's argument in his post on Commencement...

Noah:

Taking career-path courses at school doesn't preclude imparting behavioral norms on you, no. But something has to impart them. If it isn't campus life, because there isn't any, and it isn't your courses, which are distinctly service-sector, I feel like Rob's robes at commencement are all that remains. That's a lot of heavy lifting for commencement to do as compared to how you spend every day for 2-4 years, don't you think?

So while in theory, the two aren't in conflict, I'm struggling to think of how community colleges as they exist could primarily be imparting norms of behavior.

Noah's right to say that colleges that "don't have dorms, much less campuses" don't acculturate students into the Daily Show mindset the way a place like UNC-Chapel Hill does, and I suppose I was insufficiently clear about what I think is the most pernicious "middle class value" that B.A. ubiquity reinforces: the idea that job training should always take place at a college.

The "strange quest to get kids to stop going to college" isn't so strange; there's no reason why human resources managers, accountants, daycare providers, or pastry chefs (to take a few examples from Gateway Community College's course offerings) should be expected to spend money that they probably can't spare on a community college degree. Bourgeois cultural hegemony is the consequence of degree inflation that I care most about, but that doesn't necessarily mean I think it's the most important or problematic one.

For the record, I liked Rob's Geertzian analysis of Commencement weekend, although I think he missed an important element of the "graduation" rite of passage: ritual humiliation.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere there is one response to a post of mine that I unreservedly endorse; hats off to Dave.