I'll be writing about this soon, but I think belonging to the aristocracy goes beyond graduating from Yale. There's a whole background network that prepares students for the admission race, and while the degree might open more opportunities, the full range of options requires knowing how to leverage the degree. That's more than who you k…
I'll be writing about this soon, but I think belonging to the aristocracy goes beyond graduating from Yale. There's a whole background network that prepares students for the admission race, and while the degree might open more opportunities, the full range of options requires knowing how to leverage the degree. That's more than who you know, it's the cultural language you speak, the shared set of assumptions, the underlying premise of what constitutes good character or meaningful living.
My colleague William Pannapacker, longtime columnist for the Chronicle, grew up blue collar in Pittsburgh. He graduated from Harvard, but struggled mightily on the academic job market before landing a position at a liberal arts college in Michigan. He left that position around the time that I left mine, and he's been effectively adrift ever since. He worked for a time as a telemarketer in Chicago (there was a better name for it), but made less than 50% what he did as a professor and was eventually laid off after maybe a year on the job. He started a consulting business but is now back on the job hunt. I think really belonging to the aristocracy means that you have a bunch of other people looking out for you when you're in a situation like that. The first-gen student can't use their family network, and they never really belonged to the aristocracy, so they're truly on their own. It's a story about college that should be more widely told.
David has written about this, and it's both troubling and pretty insulting to someone from my background: "The sense of a new aristocracy really hit for me when I realized how many of my cohort were marrying each other." Ironically, this was one reason I initially resisted majoring in English. I was not interested in all the novels about gentry trying to marry well. Thomas Hardy's milkmaids fascinated me more. But on another level, it makes sense -- marrying across classes isn't simple. Money, identity, and a whole range of other assumptions that go into daily life can conspire against love. I have learned some of that the hard way.
I'll add one more wrinkle. While it's true that college graduates dominate the managerial class, there are a LOT of impoverished college grads and perhaps an equal amount of thriving tradespeople. I have more than one cousin with just a high school education who earns in the mid six figures. Just as George Packer says that there are at least four different Americas, I think there might be two or three "middle classes." For my cousin in Alaska, that means earning quite a lot fishing for six months, then living on a sailboat in Florida, then piecemeal building a home on land near Kalispell, Montana. The main goal for that slice of the middle class is staying debt free, a foreign concept to many Americans trying to move up economically.
Thank you Josh. Look forward to your piece on this. What I'm writing here is mostly by way of a thought experiment. It is possible that the "new aristocracy" as worked out through education isn't really equivalent to the "old aristocracy" as worked out above all through blood. Where the analogy gets thin is, as you point out, in the sense of security - "new aristocrats" have nowhere near the security that old-fashioned landowners did.
It's a good thought experiment. I hope I didn't imply that you or David had insulted me! Poor choice of words, perhaps. Part of what I'm wondering about in tomorrow's essay is whether college is really transformative in the way it once was or whether it now just turns us into more of what we were at the start...
I'll be writing about this soon, but I think belonging to the aristocracy goes beyond graduating from Yale. There's a whole background network that prepares students for the admission race, and while the degree might open more opportunities, the full range of options requires knowing how to leverage the degree. That's more than who you know, it's the cultural language you speak, the shared set of assumptions, the underlying premise of what constitutes good character or meaningful living.
My colleague William Pannapacker, longtime columnist for the Chronicle, grew up blue collar in Pittsburgh. He graduated from Harvard, but struggled mightily on the academic job market before landing a position at a liberal arts college in Michigan. He left that position around the time that I left mine, and he's been effectively adrift ever since. He worked for a time as a telemarketer in Chicago (there was a better name for it), but made less than 50% what he did as a professor and was eventually laid off after maybe a year on the job. He started a consulting business but is now back on the job hunt. I think really belonging to the aristocracy means that you have a bunch of other people looking out for you when you're in a situation like that. The first-gen student can't use their family network, and they never really belonged to the aristocracy, so they're truly on their own. It's a story about college that should be more widely told.
David has written about this, and it's both troubling and pretty insulting to someone from my background: "The sense of a new aristocracy really hit for me when I realized how many of my cohort were marrying each other." Ironically, this was one reason I initially resisted majoring in English. I was not interested in all the novels about gentry trying to marry well. Thomas Hardy's milkmaids fascinated me more. But on another level, it makes sense -- marrying across classes isn't simple. Money, identity, and a whole range of other assumptions that go into daily life can conspire against love. I have learned some of that the hard way.
I'll add one more wrinkle. While it's true that college graduates dominate the managerial class, there are a LOT of impoverished college grads and perhaps an equal amount of thriving tradespeople. I have more than one cousin with just a high school education who earns in the mid six figures. Just as George Packer says that there are at least four different Americas, I think there might be two or three "middle classes." For my cousin in Alaska, that means earning quite a lot fishing for six months, then living on a sailboat in Florida, then piecemeal building a home on land near Kalispell, Montana. The main goal for that slice of the middle class is staying debt free, a foreign concept to many Americans trying to move up economically.
Thank you Josh. Look forward to your piece on this. What I'm writing here is mostly by way of a thought experiment. It is possible that the "new aristocracy" as worked out through education isn't really equivalent to the "old aristocracy" as worked out above all through blood. Where the analogy gets thin is, as you point out, in the sense of security - "new aristocrats" have nowhere near the security that old-fashioned landowners did.
It's a good thought experiment. I hope I didn't imply that you or David had insulted me! Poor choice of words, perhaps. Part of what I'm wondering about in tomorrow's essay is whether college is really transformative in the way it once was or whether it now just turns us into more of what we were at the start...