Unemployment and Higher Education - A different view

The 1980s and 1990s saw massive restructuring of the economy and, particularly, of industry with large numbers of redundancies. From the early eighties, onwards, for working class people, the route into employment changed radically. For example, in in Middlesbrough in 1971, most school-leavers had no qualifications but got relatively well-paid jobs. In 1974, 55 per cent of Teesside's school-leaver’s went into jobs, now the number has all but ceased as even manual workers have to go through some post-compulsory education. Entrance to work is now mediated by a host of training and educational programmes that involve working class people in being culturally processed by institutions whose possibility relies on the income they bring with them.

We might ask, therefore, what role further and higher education have played during this period. Clearly, without the extension of ‘access’ to education, we would have massive unemployment. We might see this extension as part of the statistical sleight of hand that allows societies like the United States and Britain to ‘achieve’ full employment. How many of those aged between eighteen and twenty-three, effectively share jobs in retail because they are ‘students’ needing to afford to fund their own study? What the extension of education does is mask a key feature of the neoliberal economy: massive competition in an economy in which jobs have become ever more precarious, resulting in a permanent insecurity affecting an increasing proportion of the population.

There is profound demoralization among those who suffer this insecurity, a kind of reduction to an economic struggle that places a huge burden of misery on the least endowed with any forms of capital. The words of one nineteen year old put it succinctly, “Ah just 'ope this [an attempt at a business] teks off 'cos yer look rahnd at us, wi' all on us knees, wi all brock, Ah've bin fo' a new job today, fuckin' five pahnd twenty-five an 'our. What the fuck can yer du wi' that?”

The extension of education results in credential inflation which benefits the traditional middle classes who embody the interpersonal forms that are required to solicit contact within education which becomes ever more important an aspect governing access to the economy as credentials lose whatever value they once had and selection criteria move onto the marks of belonging manifest on CVs which allow those making selection to ensure they are recruiting their own, who they perceive as manifesting a more ‘rounded’ CV, experience and person intuitively better able to cope with social situations constituted by middle class people.

Moreover, we must always remember that students from the working class are rarely representative of their class of origin because the university experience is still one that they endure often alone, separating them from their age cohort, meaning that they often share few characteristics in common with their category of origin so that the classes, socially, appear closer to one another than they in fact are and the experience of working class students who are carefully selected because they can manifest suitability for middle class selectors, does not really count as a counter-example to what we are arguing here.

The over-production of graduates ensures that there is surplus labour throughout the occupational hierarchy as well as ever more debt and chronic insecurity. Today’s graduates are too haunted by debt and economic need, in a situation in which they risk having their debt increased, monthly, if they fail to secure a job paying sufficient to pay back their debt, to ever begin to organise. They can’t even fully access the labour market, as the words of one person with a first class degree manifest: “…Ah din’t get that job at council, shi rang mi frid’y afternoon, Ah wo’ supposed to be ringin ‘er back to find out why Ah din’t get it but Ah din’t bother, so Ah went straight up to Meader’all, got someaht at Lacoste, it’s minimum wage…late nights, it shuts at ten till twentieth ‘r January, but then, if Ah w’k a late, Ah dun’t ‘ave to get up early, so it’s not that bad, Ah’ll end up workin’ Sat’d’y’s an’ Sund’y’s fo’ ova-time, but beggars can’t bi choosers, an’ Ah feel like a beggar. So, Ah’m w’kin’ thi’ty-five ‘ours on minimum wage, that’s ‘undred an’ seventy-three quid, it’ll cost me twenny quid in transport, but thing is, Ah need’ money. Ah shall keep on lookin’ fo’ someaht better but trouble is, when yer w’kin’ full time, yer ‘an’t got time to gu to post office in’ day”.

The extension of education, then, spreads insecurity upwards throughout the occupational structure, by producing ‘trained’ people for every level, access to employment in the institutions of cultural production and diffusion -- education, journalism, the media, etc., are restructured meaning that the newly educationally ‘enfranchised’ are directly responsible for the devaluation that results from the proliferation of degrees and degree-holders, meaning that the new arrivals are its first victims. These students are over-educated for the employment that is actually available and this becomes a major problem to their access to the economy, as one graduate reported, “Ah was let go, last night, thi’ said that after two weeks thi’ can let mi go, so manager, who earns less than fifteen grahnd, calls me in an’ ses “I’d been lettin’ mi thoughts known to the other staff and it was bad for morale”…So thi’ let mi gu”.

The whole experience of study, for those working class people who entered the field of higher education after 1980, has been one in which the sanctions of the institutions’ themselves led them to give up the academic and social aspirations the system itself inspired in them, condemning them, often in isolation, to drag themselves through an education that they know has no future. As one twenty-seven year old put it, “It had no bearing on mi getting’ a job, I just wasted four years of ma life, that’s how I see it, Ah wo’ sayin’ to Y [wife] there’s no way I’m goin’ to push W [son] to university, it’s a waste of time, mate, Ah’m gunna se’ to ‘im, get yerseln’ aht the’er get a trade, a little van and yer can work when you want”.

Within the space of one generation, the working class have seen through the nature of what their inclusion in university was meant to realise, chronic structural insecurity and a cheapening of working conditions and pay that is well captured by the following Asian man, “...yer know yer go in Netto, it's all immigrants, ahr 'r your gonna compete with them? The're 'appy on lowest level, thi' come ova minimum wage, the're like robots, thi' up, aht, w'k, come back, drink in 'ouse, the're 'appy like that. Thi' like Asians a generation agu, thi live four families in an' 'ouse. Wi' strugglin' against 'em, Ahr 'r y'r gunna cope, your've no organisation, all unions 'ave gone, your’r just cheap labour, thi's country's fucked, wages are fallin', it's more ruthless, violence levels 'ave gone up, knifin' last weekend…Things are gunna get worse an' w'se, ma kids 've got to survive in this, 'cos thing 'is people are so up against it, thi' can't see system, thi' stuck in the daily survival, so when thi' blow, it's not middle classes, they've got their comfort zone, it's who's in front on 'em, (S: Us), it's anybody who's different, it's anybody t' mek 'emselves feel better”. What this links is the effects of mass competition in a low wage economy to changes in the nature of the social fabric of the civil realm, as people’s exchanges become fraught with an un-civility forced on them by chronic competition in an economy in which one can survive only at another’s expense.

What is clear, is that one of the foundations of the present economic and social order is massive, hidden, unemployment and the threat this implies for all those who still have a job. Student-hood, now, is a way of getting people to take out a mortgage on a job, people are trying to purchase their means of access to the labour market and this condition, as it has been restructured by governments whose members had the best that English society could offer, who lives well on decent incomes in universities that could house them through three years and furnish them with the means, like Gordon Brown, to spend the summer in foreign universities, now introduces the young working poor to the habit of debt-bound consumption while halving the number of workers competing for part-time jobs.

The extension of higher education is a key instrument of the casualisation of labour in a neoliberal economic order. Moreover, if we look at the experience of education that the least possessed of economic capital have, we find that it is of a relentlessly impersonal relegation to the lowest levels of the educational hierarchy, even if that includes, Oxbridge, as working class people are processed by institutions interpersonally organised by resolutely middle class people. It is not education, but a form of institutional processing that consigns working class students to a fate and debt that is all the more stigmatising for their having been seen, especially, by their families, to have had their chance. It is an experience well expressed in the following, “Ma Mum gets on at me…Shi thinks Ah’ve not tried, shi’ sees what Ah’m doin’ as not what proper work for a graduate, so shi’ thinks Ah’ve teken easy route, even though what Ah do’s ‘ard, she sees it Ah should bi tryin’ fo’ a proper graduate job Ah se’, yer don’t see all applications Ah’ve done, Ah did so many before Ah got this, yer just give up, so Ah settled fo’ what Ah’m doin’ nahr”.

Their economic consignment to the jobs that they would have done anyway (the jobs the middle class students ensure they have the CVs to avoid) arises from their institutional processing in a system in which students are administered through degrees in accord with the capital they bring into the institution. The personal experience of working class students is like much of their social experience, impersonal and impoverished. They get little personal contact with staff or students and the form of their education is routinised. As one student explained, talking of staff, “The’re not approachable, yer gu in an’ it’s all “Well yer an’t done this, yer an’t done that”…Ah wo gunna do Psychology but Ah din’t ‘ave ‘ead fo’ it, it fucks yer ‘ead up, then Ah wo’ gunna do Sociology, but that wo’ too ‘ard. So Ah’m doin’ this thing on Sport an’ media”.

One of the most interesting aspects of this is the fact that this student never manages to constitute what he is studying, except through negations that mirror the way that educational ‘choices’ are derived from successive failures until one finds something that one is able ‘to do’ by a process of continuous negation as those of us not clever enough to do anything worthwhile or valorised find our way onto the lowest educational level of courses in departments that nobody who had any choices would study in. In the face of this dual experience of mistreatment under the guise of pedagogic concern as tutors try to force students to fulfil assessment criteria that are necessary to the students’ continuation on the degree and the continuation of a relationship that is purely financial, and a life of facing the drizzle of indifference from students, there can be little wonder that working class students constitute themselves in terms of a worthy contempt for the institutions ‘educating’ them.

Looking at this man’s words, one gets the impression, that, for whatever reason, his educational experience is one of routinised assessment and not of learning. What is striking, is this man’s complete confusion over what degree he is doing and the manner of his speech. So little had been imparted to him that he seemed incapable of even articulating the problems he had, had in studying Psychology and Sociology, “Ah din’t ‘ave ‘ead fo’ it, it fucks thi’ ‘ead up”. Asking someone else what “design Management” was, she replied, “I don’t know really. It was one of these new degrees. I went in to the Poly to enroll and they kind of advised me to do that.”

This is common because the use of people who have no clue about what a university degree is, and who can be co-opted to pay for the space of positions within the universities, is now a common experience because we cannot, as a society, accept that we have too many people who would otherwise be useless and this is a convenient way to fund the life-styles the middle classes need to not get too un-ruly. Exploit the bottom and pay for the middle, it is a good way to maintain social stability and guarantee a re-supply of ever cheaper, skilled, labour.