Separating elite education from privilege

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, November 11, 2022

As we know, elite universities recreate social inequality by giving the children of wealth and privilege a further credential for the private and public sectors. I promised to post a solution, so I’m posting.

My brilliant friend (the one who doesn’t like attention, so I won’t name him) suggests that the increase of non whites in elite universities is a solution. That may be true, but it’s not at all what I have in mind.

What I mean by separating elite education from privilege is providing an education that separates policy-makers from wealth-makers. Bringing non whites into the power elite does nothing to separate elite education from privilege, it just adds more ethnic ancestries to the power elite, just as workers’ cooperatives merely turn workers into capitalists, where the problems of capitalism remain or are made even worse — imagine all the employees of the oil industry not only having, as a collective, the wealth to influence public energy policy, but also a huge voter block as well directly invested in oil. Owners are always more likely to vote than those who perceive themselves as disempowered. You’ve traded the Koch Brothers for a vast voting brotherhood invested in offloading their externalities onto the rest of us. The tendency for profit to decline, moral hazard (too big to fail), and most of the problems associated with capital’s cycles remain, and worker solidarity with other collectives is lost in the market competition, potentially increasing social polarization. Workers’ collectives solve for extreme wealth inequality, but that’s about all.

One educational idea might be a requirement of all politicians that they have a post-Ph.D.-level credential in political science including a deep background in global history, economics, anthropology, statistics and hands-on experience with a variety of workplaces including lower and higher education, manual labor, social work, finance and commerce and travel & living experience in both industrial and developing nations across diverse cultures. IOW, our administrators should be the most diversely knowledgeable. That’s a high bar and a long educational process — probably as long as a medical degree. So they should be paid well. But wealth-makers should be barred. 

Pie in the sky, but that’s where I’d like to see us head towards — separating the wealth-makers from the policy-makers, starting from the educational system.