Go to school to go to school, not to get a job.

I think this is bullshit.

I think professional education and business school is seriously dangerous. Think about it: a bunch of privileged young folks spend 4 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to obtain specialized degrees and then taking on high levels of personal debt makes a critical engagement with status quo politics nearly impossible. This type of education creates two types of debt: financial and ideological.

First, financial: a costly professional education means that acquiring high paying jobs becomes not only desirable but absolutely necessary. College debt straightjackets your personal finances, and requires that the debtor almost immediately pursue a job amenable to the financial powers that be. The time-dependent nature of repaying loans means that students must immediately enter the workforce, often to the point of becoming un-/under- paid, vaguely indentured labor during college as interns in the professional arena or servers in the service economy. The most useful things college does for its students is allow critical reflection on existence, a product borne of free, unstructured time and exposure to ideas that run counter to established wisdom. Forcing financial debt onto students also forces the professionalization and routinization of thought by requiring that students immediately enter the workforce, undermining the most useful products of higher education: radical criticism.

Second, ideological: the financial costs and dependence of students on their degrees for personal advancement means they are forced into defending the means by which they acquired their degree from critical challenge. During a group meeting on strategy for how to cajole NYU into disclosing its operating budget and endowment, one student spoke up to say that he thought we should avoid tarnishing the name of NYU on the whole (a perhaps necessary step to reform a deeply troubled institution). The upshot being that students in many ways must defend their school, and teachers from ideological attack, fostering an unreflexive, unbending commitment to the schools they attend. Becoming financially committed to an institution fosters a particular type of intellectual commitment; a dangerous move as schools transform themselves into corporate, increasingly removed and elities entities with narrow profit oriented goals.