Back to School

Thought about it some more and I'd like to revise and extend my remarks.

If your goal in life is to be a power player in the GOP machine, then you really need to get your degree. Not for reasons of learning, understanding, paideia or self-improvement — you can get by without all that. But you will need that degree.

As a GOP power player you will frequently be required to inform your listeners/readers/constituents/dittoheads that poverty is purely and solely a matter of personal responsibility. Poor people are lazy, stupid and immoral — that's the general idea, although it's best not to state it so bluntly, but just to hint at it with meritocratic mythmaking.

In order to make this claim, you'll also need to be able to claim that your own wealth and ascent to power is the result of hard work and education. Your wealth and power may, in fact, be wholly an accident of inheritance, connections and cronyism. Or it may be the result of an obsequious willingness to say only what others with such IC&C want you to say. In either case, a college degree — preferably from a Good School — will allow you to maintain a plausible deniability. Why else do you think George W. Bush had to get an MBA from Harvard Business School? Considering his track record as a businessman (Arbusto, Harken), it clearly wasn't to learn about business.

By Good School, of course, we mean one that is "exclusive," which is to say really, really, really expensive. Too expensive for almost anyone not blessed with your inheritance, connections and cronyism. But even the most prohibitively expensive of these Good Schools recognizes the importance of meritocratic mythmaking, and they will help to preserve that myth by reserving a handful of slots for students who cannot otherwise afford their ticket prices. (These students must be portrayed as exceptionally gifted and exceptionally hard-working, but not as "exceptions," because they are the evidence that proves that anybody can get into a Good School.)

So I guess if you really want to be a GOP power player, you should forget all that idealistic mumbo-jumbo about "getting an education" and just focus on getting a degree. You're not going back to school for the same reasons as Shaquille O'Neal, or even the same reasons as Thornton Melon, you just need the sheepskin and the line on your resume.

Fortunately for you, most colleges and universities — even the Good Schools — are designed to accommodate "students" just like you.

Which brings us again to the most revealing fact about American higher education: the cost of auditing a class. It varies slightly from school to school, but the general rule of thumb is that the cost of auditing a class is about a third the cost of taking that class for credit. This tells you everything you need to know about how these schools perceive what it is they're selling. You can learn everything they have to teach for 1/3 the price because education isn't the main product. The main product is credit. That's what you're paying for when you go to college.