Today, only 42.6 percent of history PhDs are employed upon graduation, and few in academia. Those who find jobs in higher education often work as low-paid adjuncts - a category that was miniscule in 1975, but now makes up roughly 70 percent of American faculty.
Like internships, adjunct positions are often necessary to advance professionally - but only the well-off can afford to work them without living in poverty or debt. The result is a professoriate of an increasingly uniform class background, much like the policy, finance and journalism circles McArdle describes. Mobility is but a memory. "The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in almost any other advanced country for which there is data," writes economist Joseph E Stiglitz in an editorial aptly titled "Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth".
This is not to say that hard-working elites do not deserve their success, but that the greatest barrier to entry in many professions is financial, not intellectual. The ambition, hard work and idealism of women like the young Hillary Clinton have no currency in today's system, because only one type of currency - hard currency - counts.
One wonders how many future politicians, journalists, academics and leaders we are losing because they never have the chance to try. How many people from Hillary Clinton's middle-class background - or, for that matter, from Bill Clinton's rural poverty - can afford to tread the path of debt and unpaid labour required to succeed?
[WS:] Hard working elites deserving their success? Or perhaps being entitled to it? What is wrong with this picture?
The answer is rather simple, I suppose: the navel gazing professoriat complaining about diminishing career opportunities for themselves, but not seeing that this a trend that affects all "ordinary" occupations. That for most "ordinary" occupations the normal expectation is to have a menial- clerical-service type of job with zero security. So the professoriat does not have it that bad in comparison, even though it doe not get what it wants.
In the past that she writes about, very few people wanted to go to the academia because there were plenty of good jobs around. You did not have to go to college to have a meaningful, fulfilling and decently paying job. Those jobs are mostly gone, replaced with the service economy in which employee is equivalent to servant. The academia and related institutions do not have that bad in comparison to the rest of the economy.
However, I think she is right about the closing window of opportunity.
It is not really about cost of education, but about the caste system - a few overlords and star performers surrounded by the army of serfs who toil for their glory. This model certainly exists in the academia and probably most private corporations. It matters little how one attains the overlord status - in most cases it is probably not just nepotism and money but a lot of ambition and hard work too. What do matters is that this caste system is becoming the norm. That is, it does not matter whether aristocracy is hereditary or meritocratic - what matters is that it exists. I would also add that this is the model on which the academia is built - there might have been a democratic interlude in the 1960s and 1970s - but beyond that it has always been a very hierarchical and top heavy institution.
As far as I am concerned, the only thing that "hard working elites" truly deserve is the guillotine - it is very effective in trimming overblown ambitions and sense of entitlement to human proportions.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."