Skool's Out Forever

I've reposted my post on a college education becoming more worthless the more expensive it gets HERE so many times I'm almost embarrassed to do it again, but then Bruce "The Boss" Springsteen doesn't get ashamed when he has to roll out Born to Run night after night, so.

And earlier this week The Wonk Room HERE echoed my point:

...at the same time that America’s educational attainment has been falling, the cost of higher education has been consistently rising.

Included in their incredibly depressing post is a link to Bill Clinton's piece on "higher education institutions pricing themselves into America's decline."

And now HERE we find another level of Educational Suckahs: The MFA/Writer's Workshop student:

MFA programs themselves are so lax and laissez-faire as to have a shockingly small impact on students' work—especially shocking if you're the student and paying $80,000 for the privilege. Staffed by writer-professors preoccupied with their own work or their failure to produce any; freed from pedagogical urgency by the tenuousness of the link between fiction writing and employment; and populated by ever younger, often immediately postcollegiate students, MFA programs today serve less as hotbeds of fierce stylistic inculcation, or finishing schools for almost-ready writers (in the way of, say, Iowa in the '70s), and more as an ingenious partial solution to an eminent American problem: how to extend our already protracted adolescence past 22 and toward 30, in order to cope with an oversupplied labor market.

A further look shows us that the MFA/Writer's workshop ("There were 79 degree-granting programs in creative writing in 1975; today, there are 854!") holding pattern has actually spawned it's own industry to create "writers," aka  teachers/public speakers who put out a book on university presses that nobody ever reads, but gives them the cred to go on speaking tours/giving workshops about writing, thanks to their networking with other workshop friends throughout the country.  Meanwhile, the other "school," ie New York City, finds the writer having to try to actually write a book for his or her livelihood.

The NYC writer has to earn money by writing (or else consider herself a failure in her own terms), which gives her a certain enlarged dignity and ambition. It also imposes certain strictures. First off, as already mentioned, it demands that the writer write novels.

Second, and perhaps most important, to be an NYC writer means to submit to an unconscious yet powerful pressure toward readability.

On one hand, it's admirable that "those who can't do, teach" have carved out an entire industry for themselves, thanks to being able to wildly overpay for an education under pretenses that nobody seems to take seriously, including the professors. On the other hand, it feels like masturbation. On the other hand, I love masturbating, and if I could be paid for it I'd prolly be the richest motherfucker on the planet. So.