Higher education now indebts students for jobs they could have gotten without it.

Evidence

It is worth stressing that none of the students I taught had any legal obligation to be at college. They could leave if they wanted to. But the lack of any meaningful employment opportunities, together with cynical encouragement from government means that college seems to be the easier, safer option. Deleuze says that Control societies are based on debt rather than enclosure; but there is a way in which the current education system both indebts and encloses students. Pay for your own exploitation, the logic insists – get into debt so you can get the same McJob you could have walked into if you’d left school at sixteen… — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 56

Deleuze says that Control societies are based on debt rather than enclosure; but there is a way in which the current education system both indebts and encloses students. Pay for your own exploitation, the logic insists – get into debt so you can get the same McJob you could have walked into if you’d left school at sixteen… — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 56

Categorization

• QUESTION: ‘Get into debt so you can get the same McJob you could have walked into at sixteen’ — the claim presumes McJobs, a contested empirical point about whether degrees now gatekeep even low-level employment.
• CANDY: The punchy ‘pay for your own exploitation’ inversion is tweetable on its own.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 56
• XREF: connects to: Education’s failure to deliver mobility mirrors the frontier’s broken promise. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 182; Higher education now produces skills instead of ideals or emancipation. — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 359; Student debt converts education into job training and suppresses rebellion. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 549 (+3 more)

Related

• Student debt converts education into job training and suppresses rebellion. (similarity 0.83)
• Education’s failure to deliver mobility mirrors the frontier’s broken promise. (similarity 0.80)
• Student radicalism stemmed from colleges failing to keep their career promises (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Student debt converts education into job training and suppresses rebellion. #expands (0.85) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 549
• Student radicalism stemmed from colleges failing to keep their career promises #expands (0.80) — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 1758
• Many for-profit students would be better off not attending college at all #corroborates (0.78) — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 292
• Guaranteed equal high income would remove the incentive to invest in costly education #qualifies (0.75)
• Higher education now produces skills instead of ideals or emancipation. #expands (0.72) — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 359