Vocabulary lessons: how I was taught to talk about church and school.

The price of college is rising eight times faster than wages. The average cost of college has increased 3,000 percent over the past fifty years. In-state tuition rates have grown the most (more on this in a second).

Students graduate with (an average of) $37,000 dollars in debt. The official four year graduation rate for students attending a public university is 33.3 %. About one in three students who enroll in college never earn a degree.

Read that last paragraph again.

As of 2019, over five million borrowers had defaulted on their loans. The terms of those loans obviously vary, but the consequences of defaulting do not. A lot of people are having trouble keeping up with the average monthly student loan payment of $200 to $300 dollars. Some studies suggest 1 in 4 Americans default on their student loans.

Again, the terms of these loans and lender considerations vary based on several factors, but federal student loan interest rates for the 2019–2020 school year range from 4.53% to 7.08%.

The APR on my home loan is lower than the average rate of federal student loans. The APR on my used car loan is too.

Whatever the operating basis is (public, for-profit, or non-profit) it’s clear that college is a service most people can’t afford. It’s clear people are financing this service, and it’s clear there is a strong relationship between graduation rates and default rates. If you’re going to borrow for school, you’d better finish school.

This has naturally led to questions about value. Value is a tricky word for some people. Especially people who bristle at words like: job placement, career earnings, and financial value and prefer words like post structuralism, phallogocentrism, and surplus value. Nevertheless, whatever the academic or financial value of higher education actually is, one in four college graduates earns no more than the average high-school graduate. Two thirds of American employees regret their degrees.

To quote NYU Stern Professor of Marketing Scott Galloway, “A sector’s vulnerability is a function of price increases relative to inflation and increases in innovation. Education is ripe to be disrupted.” Let’s consider this.

A sector’s vulnerability is a function of price increases relative to inflation.

College isn’t affordable for most people, and the government makes money (4.53%>average rate of inflation) on the most affordable loans available to most people.

A sector’s vulnerability is a function of price increases relative to increases in innovation.

As a graduate student, I taught several sections of multiple English courses. I had no prior teaching experience, was paid $1,800/month (plus tuition), and wrote on a chalkboard a lot. The most forefront technological advancement in almost every one of my classrooms was an overhead projector.

Education is ripe to be disrupted.

Let us qualify, clarify, and not stop there. Higher Education is a service. Most people can’t pay for the service. A lot of people can’t complete the service. And a majority of people regret having used the service. Higher education is indeed ripe for disruption.

I spent over twelve years in academia; four as an undergraduate, almost three as a graduate student and five as a non-teaching staff member at a shrinking, mid-sized public university. Over time, I learned that people I sat under (in graduate school) and worked alongside (through the halls of my small academic college and then my non-academic support department) usually had strong opinions. Those opinions extended, like the Arm of God, as far as the East is from the West, over everyone and everything.

I didn’t have the emotional intelligence nor capital to care so much about so many things at one time. Moreover, because I couldn’t speak to the particulars of many early graduate school discussions (e.g. what was typically being evaluated: a theory, an argument, an assignment or an author) I focused on how the discussions were being started and framed (e.g. linguistic choices, rhetorical patterns and maneuvers, how personally invested or emotionally charged a thing was…)

Eventually it became easier to understand and appreciate several people from my humanities department. I understood some of them like I eventually came to understand true believers within a local instance of Pentecostalism.

I used to be a junk sick evangelical. The folks I knew traveled in packs, looked the same and sounded the same. A lot of our beliefs were effectively clothes hung from always-moving rail racks, waiting to be picked up and used. We’d find people to wear them, and they’d bring more clothes back to us to be cleaned up and emptied out.

As an example, we talked about money and framed it well. We framed it in order to garner the broadest support. We understood Old Testament first fruits as the tithing (10 %)of your best crops (gross income as opposed to net). And we understood New Testament generosity, as a feeling compelled less by numerical value or expressed percentages and more about a true desire to give. The Old Testament people were happy. The New Testament people were happy. Either way, you laid some money down.

But the real transaction, the giving and borrowing of beliefs which put you on the perpetually moving rail racks of the institution came at a different cost. That price was paid in individual personage. We wanted to create a faceless army. In order to do that, we scrubbed beliefs so pure we made the people attached to them disappear.

The more clothes we cleaned and eventually hung up on the conveyor, the fewer people we had to deal with.

Receipt of purchase usually surfaced in how you came out of the church. What you looked like, your mannerisms. How you came out talking, and the words you used to describe certain things. We assigned language, and we shaped vocabularies. Every institution has a culture, and part of that culture is a shared language.

Now there wasn’t anything too clever about us because we were the monolithic composite of someone else’s ideas — a cover band. But (this is very important) we had a uniform formula and (this is even more important) we were willing to travel. Man, we were willing to travel.

The goal, our mission, was to reproduce our belief system in order to replicate our culture in order to reproduce our belief system in order to replicate our culture in order to reproduce our belief system…ad infinitum.

Typically, we were informed by words like election, atonement, intercessory, sufficiency, etc. A bunch of fancy stuff that could get clunky. But, for the less well-versed among us, you know, the lesser musicians, we had some simple chords.

Here’s a look into the glossary:

“If you catch them, you clean them…” meant, if you take the clothes in, you have to clean them up before we hang them up.

“Let’s do life together…” meant, give us a seat of authority to exercise over every single part of the sum of your life — from your cable television bill, to the car you drive, to how much time you spend with your kids.

“That sounds hard…” meant, we don’t know what to say here, because we’re not the best with words.

“You need faith for this…” meant, we’re not good with words, and there might not be a good reason to do this, but reason stands in opposition to faith so believe harder. Ask us no questions and we’ll tell you no lies.

“I feel like God is saying…” meant, ok, man, listen. I believe in God, and I believe I can hear him, and I believe he’s talking through me, to you, which makes me — well we don’t believe in literal prophets here, though that makes me pretty high priestly, and…and all that sounds pretty crazy. So I’m going to hedge it right quick, okay? It’s a feeling. Not, like, An Actual Thing God Said. But wait! Unless it is! So, listen!

“It’s hard to lead you…” meant, you’re not doing what I want you to do.

Now, never mind that “God said…” and “I feel…” should never together form the basis of a cogent thought, much less the contents of any prescription you ought to fill. What I’m saying is, if you didn’t come to us, we came to you. We were very focused and we pursued you with the shared language of a subjugate people.

When things went wrong, we typically blamed the devil because it probably wasn’t God’s fault and it definitely wasn’t ours.

The College of Liberal Arts (CoLa) was also fascinated with subjugate people; power dynamics too. We talked a lot about heteronormativity, deconstruciton, structural inequality and privileging. We wanted to understand things like intersectional oppression and systemic oppression.

I’ll spare you a second glossary of terms here because if I told you (for example) that white privilege is real, pervasive and strong I’d only lose a few of you. But if I told you, “Check your privilege” was the rhetorical equivalent of kazoo music, used by a lot of stupid people to frame a lot of stupid things, I’d probably lose a lot of you. We’ll save that for another day.

To be clear, though, our goal was to fortify a belief system in order to ostensibly get a job teaching and re-teaching the glossary of terms. But, also, our goal was to, through this fortified belief system, fix every wrong thing about the world.

When things went wrong, we typically blamed people in charge. Disagreement and struggle were so central, so in service to our worldview, and the mistrust of power was so necessary for us, that someone or something had to be cause for revolution. To be clear, we wrote the part of resistance fighters for ourselves. To be really clear, the revolution part is our part, so, uh— fuck you if you’re not okay with that. Check your privilege.

The American model of higher education is fundamentally broken and it is breaking people. Most people I know refuse these premises and frame issues within higher education to the support of their politics, positions, and paychecks. Typically they use shared language to do it. In my experience, the church folks used fewer syllables than the school folks did, but it all amounted to a defense of religious or political discipleship.

I left each institution when I stopped sharing their respective languages and my true belief thus became a lesser belief in their respective mission, efficacy, and (finally) intent.

And I question the intent of any one defending the current model of American higher education as an essential public good and necessary service. But more than that, I’m listening to how they describe what is good and who it is necessarily serving.