A Proto-Scamblogger From 1975

"Law schools are already graduating twice as many lawyers every year as the Department of Labor thinks will be needed, and the oversupply will grow every year."

"College, then, may be a good place for those few young people who are really drawn to academic work, who would rather read than eat, but it has become too expensive, in time, money and intellectual effort to serve as a holding pen for large numbers of our young.  We ought to make it possible for these reluctant, unhappy students to find alternative ways of growing up and realistic preparation for the years ahead."

You might ask yourself, "From which scamblogs did she take those quotes?"  The truth is, I didn't take them from a scamblog.  In fact, when those passages were written, scamblogs--or, for that matter, blogs themselves--didn't exist. 

In fact, at the time those nuggets of truth were written, the Internet wasn't yet called the Internet, and nearly all computers were found in government agencies, very large corporations, the military and universities.

Those observations were writtten in 1975 by the late Caroline Bird.  They are from College Is A Waste Of Time And Money.   That essay was excerpted from her book, The Case Against College, which was both a best-seller and reviled after it was published.

Now, I grant that some of what she says to make her case is improbable.  For example, she talks about what would happen if someone's rich uncle gave him the $34,181 (!) it would have cost for four years of Princeton and, instead of attending that august institution, invested the money.  As we know, few people have rich uncles (or aunts) who would do such a thing.  Also, how many 18-year-olds have the mentality to invest the money in the way of the young man Bird invents?

However, her larger points are even more true today than they were three and a half decades ago.  First of all, as she says, far more young people go to college than have the aptitude or desire for it.  Second, parents and high-school guidance counselors (as well as other adults, like teachers, clergy members and counselors, who are significant in young people's lives) still, for a variety of reasons, preach the dogma that young people really should--no, must--attend college.  And, finally, she recognizes that college administrators as well as some faculty members exploit young people's insecurity about themselves, and their parents' and mentors' misconceptions and anxieties, to recruit said young people, not only into colleges and graduate and professional schools, but into particular programs in which placement and employment statistics are particularly grim.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, by the time Bird wrote her book, the job market for professors had already been in the tank for more than half a decade (and it's only gotten worse since then).  And the situation for lawyers was almost exactly as it is today.  Perhaps the most striking aspect of her essay, though, is her revelation that colleges market themselves as "fun" and "uplifting" experiences for students.  That, of course, is a tacit admission that most students wouldn't go to college if they didn't feel they "had" to go.

Another parallel between then and now is that the jobs students most often hoped to get after going to college (and, in many cases, graduate or professional school) are the ones for which demand has been shrinking or in industries that are collapsing.  And, then as now, there is surprisingly little difference in pay between those and the more routine, physically draining, jobs.  To be fair, some of the latter jobs--like those of assembly-line workers in automobile plants--are disappearing, at least in this country.  But the demand for tradespeople like plumbers was and is strong.

The only difference between the situation now and the one she describes is that the numbers--of students, tuition dollars and loan indebtedness, among other things--has grown exponentially larger. There are few, if any, signs that those trends will change, as those who are making money from them are making too much money to give up things as they are.  To be sure, the number of students taking the Law School Admissions test has dropped 25 percent in the past two years.  But it remains to be seen whether that drop will become a long-term trend that shrinks the number of law-school applicants and lawyers significantly.  And, even though some undergraduate institutions reported significant decreases in the number of applications they received, no one really knows whether that phenomenon will spread to other schools, or whether it will be sustained.


One can only hope that today's prospective college, law and graduate students are finally catching on to what Caroline Bird noted long before most of them were born.  Otherwise, as George Santayana said, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  That, unfortunately, is what too many of us did.