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Comment by fallingknife | Hacker News Reader

Universities are the main gatekeepers of the class based oppressive system you complain about. The current bureaucratic governing structure of the US has been created by the liberals during the period from the New Deal through the early 90s when Democrats had almost unbroken control of congress. So, regardless of whether conservative complaints are valid, liberals are the correct people to complain about if you are unhappy with the current system because they are the ones who built it.

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Employers, not universities. Employers were the ones who decided that most good jobs require a college degree. And then they sent administrators as their minions to take over the universities. Americans often call their universities colleges, which implies an organizational structure where the senior professionals doing the actual work are in charge. And that's how things used to work. But somehow that got turned around, with the administrators in charge and business interests treating universities as vocational schools.

One way to look at this is through different motivations to studying: internal (you want to learn things), external (you want to be successful at whatever is being measured), and pragmatic (you want to pass the classes, get the degree, and move on). Universities prefer internally motivated students – those who study to learn rather than for jobs and career success. They can try to educate people with other motivations, but what those students want is inherently in conflict with what the professors want.

I think you are defining 'liberal' as 'whatever was favored in that time period' or the now popular 'not contemporary far right populists'. The White House, however, was controlled by Republicans, for example, from 1968-1992 with one four year break.

> Universities are the main gatekeepers of the class based oppressive system you complain about.

How so? Before Republicans cut funding, universities were widely available, especially public ones. Many like NYC's city colleges were free. Once you got a degree, you were in a different socioeconomic class, but degrees were available to those who could get them. The number of people with degrees grew considerably, including through programs like the GI Bill. That's substantial opportunity and class mobility.

Now whether you get into college depends, most of all, on the class you're born into. US social mobility has dropped significantly.

I'm using "liberal" very loosely here as the prevailing political establishment from the 1930s to 1990s when the Republicans started splitting off from that coalition. Though you could even argue that Bush II was a continuation of the same. You can cherry-pick dates if you like, but even in that cherry-picked 24 year range Democrats controlled the senate 18-6 and the house 24-0 and the Democrats had unified control of congress and the presidency for 4 years to 0 for the Republicans. The Democratic party was dominant in US politics from 1932 to 1992 and that is not really arguable. The modern US administrative state was build by primarily liberal Democrats with plenty of cooperation from moderate Republicans (who don't really exist anymore) and with opposition from segregationist southern Democrats (who also don't exist anymore). You can argue that they did a good job (and I would argue that for a lot of it they did), but you can't claim that they didn't do it and that they aren't the political establishment of the modern America state.

> Once you got a degree, you were in a different socioeconomic class,

Yeah, maybe in 1960 when 8% of Americans had a degree, but not today when 40% do: https://educationdata.org/education-attainment-statistics

A degree can either be a ticket to a high status job or common. It can't be both. As a society we have resolved this contradiction by making a tiered system where people nominally have the same degree, but actually only the ones from exclusive, high status schools count. And somehow the low status degrees cost almost as much as the high status ones even though they have a fraction of the value. But apparently a lot of people didn't get the memo and still think their low status degree is a ticket to a high status job.

> but degrees were available to those who could get them

So you are saying that degrees are less available now even though the number of people who have them has gone up 5x since 1960? Citation needed, because that fundamentally makes no sense.

> Now whether you get into college depends, most of all, on the class you're born into.

So you are telling me that in 1960 when 8% of people had a college degree, those 8% were a meritocratic sampling of all classes of society, but today when 40% of people have a degree, that 40% is somehow only the upper middle class? Again, citation needed, because that fundamentally makes no sense.

> I'm using "liberal" very loosely here as the prevailing political establishment from the 1930s to 1990s when the Republicans started splitting off from that coalition.

It becomes meaningless. You just rewrote history - the GOP was apparently liberal all that time. Who knew? The actual liberals sure didn't; they despised Nixon and Reagan. You're just saying that the modern rightward lurch is somehow the reality of the century before it happened.

> A degree can either be a ticket to a high status job or common.

You still are framing it around jobs.

> only the ones from exclusive, high status schools count

The overall average income for people with college degrees is much higher. That can't be because of the few who went to elite schools.

> So you are telling me that in 1960 when 8% of people had a college degree, those 8% were a meritocratic sampling of all classes of society, but today when 40% of people have a degree, that 40% is somehow only the upper middle class?

The leading predictor of college education now is your parents' income.

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