Debt For College. Debt For Life.

It came in the mail, mixed in with the barrage of college and university flyers that my 17 year old son has been receiving since he first took the PSAT.

It was a brown-black envelope, decorated with a pattern made of positive-thinking words.

On the front, two short declarative statements:

"For College.  For Life."

I thought, at first, it was a marketing offer for a credit card, in this case, the Discover card.  Which it might have been.

Obviously, the good folks at the College Board have not just marketed my son to colleges, but have also sold his information to the credit card companies.  Or to a reseller of information.

I was, at first, a little cheesed.  The absolute last thing you want a young person to start out their life with is debt.  Credit cards in the hands of freshmen are dangerous, dangerous things, and can trap the unwise or the unwary in a cycle of overconsumption and financial insecurity.  They create unrealistic, debt-fueled expectations for what life is like, at precisely the time when they have limited incomes and only the modest capacity to sustain themselves.

But if you can get a young adult hooked on the debt-expectation early, they'll stay hooked.

So I was prepared to be furious with the College Board, but then I thought, wait a minute.  This might be an offer from Discover's student loan branch, as the credit card company has gone into the very lucrative business of making loans to college-bound students.

For most college bound folks, isn't that what college itself is these days?  Debt, driven by social anxieties and expectations?

Here, these huge and bloated institutions, that market the "experience" of college more aggressively than they market the life-knowledge that college is meant to impart.  Higher education is increasingly fueled on the false growth of debt, with endless administrative structures and entertainment complexes springing up even as adjunct professors and teaching assistants are paid dismal salaries to do the actual teaching.

But we need it, must have it, or we will not be successful.  And so of course we go into hock, because what colleges market is success, is winning, is being able to have the good things in life.  We want that.  We want to touch it and hold it and be it.

So we must go into debt, or our culture tells us we cannot have these things.

Was it for college loans, or for a credit card?  I looked at the unopened envelope again.

Really, is there a difference?

It went straight into the recycling.  Unopened.

Agreeing With Rick Santorum

I don't, not really.   But as we're exposed more and more to the wit and wisdom of someone who actually has a conceivable shot at the nomination of the GOP, his vigorous...and I believe genuine...courting of the far right "base" of the Republican party has gotten him in a bit of trouble.   Two recent statements in particular have gotten him in hot water.   In the first, he suggested that when President Obama encouraged young people to go to college, that was a snobby thing to do.   In the second, he took issue with the idea of the separation of church and state.

Both of these statements haven't been received well, for reasons that are relatively obvious.   They should scare the bejabbers out of anyone who wants America not to emulate the dynamics of Afghan culture.

And yet there's truth in both of them.   Not the truth Mr. Santorum thinks is in them, but truth nonetheless.

Let's look at college education.  For Candidate Santorum, the issue with going to college is that...well...it makes you less likely to believe the way he believes.  The more you engage with the great thoughts of humankind, the more you study physics and biology, heck, the more you study religion and how it came to be, well, the less likely you are to share Santorum's belief system.   It doesn't mean you can't be deeply faithful, mind you.  But it does diminish the odds of you being radically, rigidly ultraconservative.

He's totally wrong about the value of education.  And yet, hidden under all the crazy, he's right.  He may not know it, but he's right.

As I've suggested before, that college is increasingly the only goal of our secondary education system is a problem.  Why?  A variety of reasons.   College just isn't for everyone.  Not everyone's vocation requires the engagement with the sorts of things you get as part of a liberal arts degree.   I've known some bright, successful, capable human beings who didn't go to college, and chose instead to focus on developing their skills in their chosen field.  Like, say, a guy I know who is a highly competent mechanic.  He was as driven and as called to that field as any teacher or lawyer.  A four year degree for him just would not have made a lick of sense.

If it was something you could do without incurring a huge debt?  Then, sure.  Give it a go.  But that is not where we are.  It would be pointless, if you are a young adult with a clear sense of what you want to do in life, to start your adult life tens of thousands of dollars in debt for an education that didn't prepare you for that life.  

And the idea that such a human being has less value?  Preposterous.  Offensive.  Absurd.  And though I'd like to say it isn't, assuming that an absence of higher education means less valuable is a real feature of our society.

And as for religion in the public sphere?   Well, Candidate Santorum shows here that he has no clue, none, why the separation of faith and state is so vital.   If the integrity of our republic is to stand, no one belief system can ever be permitted to use the power of the state to enforce its doctrines or teachings.  That would, rather obviously, impinge on the Constitutional liberties of all those who do not share that particular tradition.  It would also betray the essence of Christian faith.  

Santorum does not get this.   Nor, frankly, does he understand that when you step into the public sphere as a person of faith, you need to be able to articulate your faith in ways that resonate with those who do not share it.  This was the one great truth coming out of Richard Neuhaus and his classic work The Naked Public Square.  Neuhaus was Catholic, and conservative, but he understood the necessity of recognizing the dynamics of faith in a democratic culture.

But Rick may not have read that one, because, you know, it says the word "Naked."

And yet, again, there's truth buried under the crazy.  People of faith who are not hypocrites bring their faith into every action they undertake.   If we are citizens of a democratic republic and Christian, then the teachings of Jesus will inform our actions as citizens.  It will govern how we vote, how we speak, and our positions on social issues.   In so far as that is true, we are full participants in the public square.   We may also publicly declare that foundation, should we so choose.

But if our intent is to persuade others who do not share our faith of the validity of our position, then we must do so in ways that step outside of the language of our faith.   This is something that fundamentalists and ideologues do rather badly.

The Higher Education Bubble

In a very slightly self-congratulatory way, the Washington Post's local section today affirmed what any inside-the-Beltway denizen already knows: we are the most educated region in the nation. Yeah, I know, y'all assume Washington is just a gray and sorrowful land in which soulless bureaucrats sit and fill out endless, pointless paperwork in tiny little offices like extras in Terry Gilliam's Brazil. And maybe we are.

But we do so because of our superlative levels of higher edufimicashun.

In the DC environs, 46.8% of residents have undergraduate degrees. 21.9% of us have graduate degrees. That beats every other region or jurisdiction in the country. This surfaces something of a puzzler. On the one hand, Americans who live outside the Beltway are fond of railing on the DC area. We are "those Beltway insiders." We are not "real Americans."

On the other hand, the goal of most Americans is to get what is increasingly viewed as a prerequisite for success: a college degree. That's your ticket to the good life, or so the story goes. It's a sign of attainment, of intelligence, and of stick-to-itiveness. By that standard, DC must be, by definition, the place inhabited by the most successful, driven, and capable Americans.

Only there's a problem with that, one that goes deep into an underlying dysfunction in our culture. There is, to my eyes, a problem with the whole "college as a prerequisite for life as a viable human being" thing. Undergraduate education, at least for me, proved profoundly useful. It was in my Religious Studies program at UVA that I began finding my way into a faith that could engage both my heart and my intellect. Seminary prepared me to go deeper, and to teach, and to preach.

But what my undergrad and graduate studies did not do was prepare me to work. Working prepared me to work. I learned the ethic that makes for successful work as a dishwasher. As a stock clerk. As a forklift-driving warehouseman. As a cabbie. I learned office skills as a fetch-and-carry intern. None of those things...not one of them...tapped into the knowledge I received as a student at Mistah Jeffahson's University. Or, frankly, in seminary.

Yet as our captains of industry offshore the industrial foundation that once provided blue collar workers with gainful, productive, lifelong employment, Americans are increasingly driven to attend college. You can't just work 9 to 5 on the line, and come home to your nice little house. There is no line. You need a degree to succeed. And so that becomes the goal, even if 1) it doesn't meet the broader needs of our society and 2) the number of jobs appropriate for a general college education no longer match the volume of graduates.

That cultural trend is, I'm convinced, is one of the primary reasons college education is growing so damnably expensive. It's a simple matter of supply and demand. With the collapse of our industrial base, the only jobs that can sustain our expected standard of living are for the educated. Knowing this, people are willing to undertake huge debt loads to finance their education.

Fueled by debt-driven spending, the costs of higher-ed soared, in the same way that housing costs soared. That was fine, though. You could pay off your loans over the years when that college degree reaped it's expected rewards.

Only, as anyone who knows anyone under 30 realizes, those rewards are now far from certain. The huge debt burden you undertook to get your English degree or your degree in Anthropology or Women's Studies or Architecture or Automotive Engineering gets you exactly nothing. The jobs for such souls aren't there. Nor, given the broader trends in the global economy, do they appear to be likely to return.

I find myself wondering if, at some point, people will realize this.