Higher education as class commitment

In a previous post, I argued that Bryan Caplan’s signaling theory isn’t a good explanation for why college graduates get higher-paying jobs. Instead, I claimed, understanding the role of higher education in the modern West requires sociological explanations. In this post I argue more specifically that getting an undergraduate degree serves as an initiation into a class of cultural elites, variously called the bourgeois bohemian (bobo) class, the professional-managerial class (PMC), the Blue Tribe, globalists, symbolic analysts, or class X. I think of each of these labels as grasping one part of the elephant, but I haven’t yet pinned down a unified description; I’ll mainly use the “PMC” terminology in this post, for reasons I’ll explain in the next section. Under this explanation, college is the same kind of thing as a fraternity hazing process, or a military boot camp: it demarcates members of a group, via a process which reorients new members’ motivational systems to favor the group they’re joining. College graduates therefore benefit from the nepotism of existing members of their class, which they perpetuate when they gain the ability to make hiring decisions. This lines up well with Bourdieu’s hypothesis that the primary purpose of modern education is to reproduce existing class structures via “consecration” of graduates by academic authorities. However, today’s class dynamics are very different from those of the mid-1900s. The modern PMC is very politically skewed, and implements class nepotism on a visceral emotional level: for example, via deep contempt for populists (e.g. Brexit voters or MAGA supporters); disgust for challenges to modern feminism (e.g. from Scott Aaronson or Robin Hanson); and fear of falling off the elite career ladder. There’s a way in which my hypothesis is just common sense: of course attending Harvard is a path into the American (and indeed global) elite, and of course employers who strongly prefer Harvard students are tracking some kind of status hierarchy. Meanwhile it’s obvious (e.g. in voting patterns) that there’s a significant cultural divide between those with and without college educations. Unfortunately, no major intellectual traditions have explored these dynamics very deeply. Academic sociologists are loath to characterize themselves as central members of an elite class (and have anyway abandoned the standards of rigor required for sustained intellectual progress). Other intellectual clusters (like the rationalist cluster I describe here) have developed a kind of “immune response” to vague sociological thinking, and therefore fall back on the closest hypotheses they can formulate in broadly economic language. However, as my previous post argued, this misses a lot. So the main goal of this post is to take a step towards more rigorous sociological explanations of higher education and many other phenomena, by characterizing class dynamics in terms of game-theoretic interactions between rational-ish agents. I start by drawing on Scott Alexander’s concept of a backscratcher’s club to explain the core benefit of class membership. However, it’s difficult to explain how long-term loyalty to a backscratcher’s club could be incentive-compatible for people who don’t terminally value it. So in the second section, I argue that college serves as a commitment mechanism by changing students’ identities. This is distinct from Caplan’s signaling explanation because signaling is a process of conveying information about existing traits, rather than changing those traits. (Note that I’m specifically avoiding talking about changes in students’ values, because a big part of what it means to be committed to a class is that you’ll defer to the class consensus over your own values. This makes students’ values something of a red herring.) In the final section, I characterize the resulting class as a “social equilibrium” which is able to propagate and defend itself. (I’ve previously discussed a related concept using the term “distributed agent”, e.g. in this talk, this post, and these slides.) I also give a case study of a (more extreme) historical example of this kind of social equilibrium—namely Chinese foot binding—and its analogies to higher education. College alumni as a backscratchers club I’ll start by discussing reciprocal favoritism at smaller scales, before moving on to class-level nepotism. One common-sense benefit of college attendance that I didn’t discuss in my previous post is forming a professional network. This need not be via traditional “networking”—simply making friends is sufficient. A friendship is (amongst other things) a reciprocal arrangement where you expect to favor each other. And the friends you make at university (especially a top university) are likely to be unusually successful. On an individual level, this can be very advantageous. However, it doesn’t explain why employers so strongly prefer to hire college graduates. When you’re a new grad, your network largely