>use college as a means of reproducing class position
>the unwashed masses desire college to escape their precarious lifestyle
>market forces dictate that the colleges spring into existence to profit off of them
>devise a system to sort out our colleges from their colleges
>use college as a means of reproducing class position
land grant colleges largely existing as a means of greatly expanding the development of military technology and labor. who's funding a grad student to study materials science in bumfuck nowhere in Iowa? the goddamn DOD and Lockheed Martin, that's who.
Rich people have invented a way to make sure that even the stupidest failchild can get a fake job to stay rich.
This is basically how the latter-day French Monarchical State worked, as I recall.
> do academia too hard
> you get in the door
> oh no, there was never any merit to begin with, all of these people are either incompetent rubes with a confidence boner or fellow impostors trying not to call the AI self-harm line
:doomjak:
It's almost like the education price tag is to keep the poors away.
And unpaid internships under false pretenses, and so on and so on :zizek-fuck:
I was floored when it was pointed out unpaid internships weren't supposed to be some hardship position for people who wanted it badly enough, they were to sort out people who had family wealth and didn't have money. Since the internships are a road to elite positions later on in life, only the select are allowed in the door.
I think we have to be careful not to overstate our case here, because that can easily raise skepticism and libs love to nitpick shit like that.
It's not really that unpaid internships are intended to function that way (most of the time) -- companies just don't want to pay workers -- it's that they end up functioning that way. The end result is the same but the difference in intent matters, the same way the difference between bumping into someone vs. shoving them matters.
It's just a club. They don't let in the 8th grader because they don't want to go out after work and do a line of coke off a stripper's tits with an 8th grader.
Especially if the 8th grader is :us-foreign-policy:
I figured out as I advanced my career, the more you make, the less you do.
Imo this isn't about bullshit jobs in the traditional sense so much as class reproduction for the high-end labor aristocracy
Still a bullshit job in some sense, but basically as a front for credentialized moneylaundering
There’s gotta be so many people who on paper make most of their money from wages, but their wages are super inflated and that inflation is reserved for jobs for people with a certain class character. They’re just owning class people with their wealth laundered through low-impact labor.
The question then, is how self conscious is it. Hoe does the actual network work. Are they consciously hiring other upper class people just on thr off chance that a connection will form. Do they need petty work done and they want someone they can identify with to do it? Do they have a dorecrifr set by someone that they have to take care of each other?
It is probably a mix of those forces but that that knowledge is withheld is aggravating
I used to work at a retail place where the boss had a couple of floor staff (who were all his friends) were getting paid as managers.
He wasn't the big boss, he had just enough power to give a couple people 60k incomes for retail.
I assume it's sort of a formalization of that
It is.
It's a mix of fealty and class consciousness. I've spent enough time in boardrooms to know the only prerequisite to sitting at the table is being born on third base. Basically the boss needs their immediate advisors to only do what's necessary (which usually ain't much), not bite the hand that feeds while doing it, and all of them have to understand they're all part of the non-poor club who get paid because the suckers below them put in a hard day's work.
I think also part of it is simply people being more willing to empathize with someone they see as "their own". People tend to intuit that a full-time job should pay a person a living wage, and so if they're employing people that are in their social circle they'll give that to them (adjusted for the sky high inflation of living in the wealthy areas they live), but with someone from outside that circle it's a lot easier to compartmentalize and pay them less than that.
I suspect that it is mostly unconscious. There's no deliberate attempt to keep the proles out, which is also why they let a few people from the outside into the elite once Ia while. Instead you get hired for those kind of jobs based on "qualifications" that includes graduating from prestige institutions, having good chemistry with the posh people doing the hiring and then of course good old fashioned nepotism/networking. Even a thing like confidently acting like you are a very important person deserving a very important job, something you learn if you grow up posh, helps make you look like a good match.
The scholarship students get in because they realize their inbreeding produces incompetent people, and to keep the system healthy they need to allow certain handpicked people of high talent in. Of course they get indoctrinated and become part of them, and there are never too many that they get out of control.
I am sure, however from the bit behind the curtain we cna see from like people sharing more than they should okay social media there is at least a part that is self conscious about it. Parts like royalty fans that can only be in on the fact that they are running a scam and winning. But I am sure even like some chirpy finance bros are aware they only got saved from being a poor by luck and mean to keep it going.
It's a culture fit. They'll talk about "vibes" or similar language, but what it really means is "with a 5 minute conversation I can figure out if you're similar enough to me culturally and if you aren't, there's no way I want to be anywhere near you."
I've literally been rejected from roles for this exact reason before. I can't get rid of my working class realism, thinking in terms of physical movement of things. They want an abstracted cheery gogetter who can smile with their vocal chords.
Well there’s a cost to diversifying your workforce when it’s culturally homogenous. Communication barriers are in place and it’s easier to blame the outsider who’s targeted by them than it is to remove them, so “culture fit” is often a very practical concern that can literally just be boiled down to, “they would be hard to work with” in the minds of interviewers. For truly upper class environments, it’s somewhat reliable to talk to someone about whether they do freshwater fishing or deep sea fishing and take that class marker as an indicator of fit. (At least I think those are the class-differentiates types of fishing. I’m not wealthy enough to own a boat either way)
The word meritocracy was coined as a satire of the class-based British education system. It is more fitting for what's happening than the people using it unironically would like to think.
Yeah neither my communication or hard skills developed much from the time I was ~14 operating pirate sites.
Man, if I'd had accelerated statistical tools like PyTorch back then I wouldn't have spent so much time calculating who was cheating their ratios...
Eh I think front end web development requires you to know aesthetically pleasing designs. (not saying you need a degree for that). Just knowing html and css isn't enough.
A frontend developer doesn't normally do design work. Instead they implement other people's designs. To do that they have to know HTML and CSS but most of the job is knowing how to build efficient JavaScript applications. It's a real skill that you have to learn.
Yeah, it's a real job, for sure. Maybe he meant the wage was too high, IDK. Is Bloomberg known for overpaying techbros?
