Ivory Tower – directed by Andrew Rossi – is the most
important documentary film of the year. It’s dealing with an often-brushed
aside issue: the soaring costs of higher education and the decline of education's value. Peter Thiel – the cofounder of Paypal and
the creator of a $100,000 scholarship which encourages students to drop out and
start a business – presents to us the problem in a nutshell: “Twenty years ago
we would have said all the kids who weren’t going to college were the victims.
Now we’re saying that it’s the kids who are going to college who are the
victims. It’s like a sub-prime mortgage broker who ripped you off and talked
you into buying a house you couldn’t afford. Education is in some ways more
insidious than housing.” Costs are out of control. The cost of educating our
kids, proportioned to healthcare and food, has quadrupled in the last decade. The costs are not borne by tax-payers – they are borne by students and
their parents. Debt leaves young people immobile. It prevents them from achieving their
dreams. The ivory-tower institutions are not blameless in this - they are hiding something, contributing to the problem in unforgivable ways.The majority of students don’t study more than five hours a week. Liberal-leaning professors – people who students look up to as examples – are immersed in credential-culture, writing books nobody reads to get promoted and teach our kids things society find meaningless. They decry capitalism yet profit from it immensely. They are the ‘Ivory Tower’ – immersed in an abstract world of their own, asserting their knowledge as important when, in reality, regular working-class individuals could care less about what they know.
Yet college is supposed to be the way we climb the social ladder. But the Ivory Tower also tells us a liberal-arts education is priceless: but is it worth going $100,000 into debt? Is it worth the $1 trillion deficit our country is running on student loans? Colleges have embraced a business-model while clouding their intentions in the rhetoric of the liberal-arts. Romantic high-school students – ready to leave high-school (a broken institution as well) – are eager to find a place where they can grow up, feel independent, take charge of what they want to learn. Personally, I’ve romanticized college probably from the time I was 12 years old. And what the Ivory Tower is laying out for you is that the higher education bubble is bursting, that the goals of the liberal arts – to foster citizenship and civic responsibility – are being sold out in favor a profit-maximizing model.
Many parents don’t want to deny their kids what they were given – that opportunity to have the “college experience,” – but what is the college experience really? It differs amongst individuals and institutions. Race and class divides our attitudes towards higher learning: wealthier people are more likely value it as a right of passage into their comfortable lives while poorer people treat education as a necessity to survive in the job-market and achieve some sort of financial stability. Harvard is seen as the gold-standard – they are one of the 1.25% of universities in the country to offer full need-based aid. Ivory Tower does a great job - not only of criticizing this system - but exemplifying its values as well: a black student goes from being homeless, from barely surviving in the worst neighborhood in Cincinnati, to getting a full scholarship to attend Harvard. He’s having trouble – but he’s succeeding where he once thought he couldn’t.
That’s the beauty of college – it has a way of telling our most marginalized citizens that they matter. Rossi navigates between Harvard – the pinnacle, the gold-standard - and Arizona State, a school which is infamously known as one of the top party schools in the country. These institutions make their fortune off of attracting out-of-state students – who will pay full tuition, go to the football games (sports correlates with higher tuition) and party hard. They bring down the quality of the education, standards become lower and kids leave college knowing nothing. These schools cost more to attend than an institution like Harvard yet they are overcrowded, de-value professors and students and allow many to cruise by. Degrees are becoming inflated – they don’t mean anything anymore because everyone who can afford one can buy it.
But the social
function colleges provide are important and the documentary doesn't fail to acknowledge this. Spelman College – a historically
black, all-female school – historically has helped empower and embolden black women. Spelman serves
an academic and a social function –
but, while costs continue to rise throughout the country, can we justify this social gain with this grave fiscal cost?
And now bastions of socialist education are falling prey to the capitalist vision. Cooper Union – a New York school which prided itself on historically not charging tuition – has started as of Fall 2014. It prompted a 65-day protest in president Jamshed Bharucha’s office. During the commencement ceremony, as he delivers the address, the students turned their backs on on the man who invested the school’s financial resources into hedge-funds and drove the school into bankruptcy. He is not held accountable. This teaches us one thing: that the men and women who are running these institutions – who are all making over $500,000 a year – contribute to this damaging privatization, which allows the tuitions costs of universities to keep increasing.
And now bastions of socialist education are falling prey to the capitalist vision. Cooper Union – a New York school which prided itself on historically not charging tuition – has started as of Fall 2014. It prompted a 65-day protest in president Jamshed Bharucha’s office. During the commencement ceremony, as he delivers the address, the students turned their backs on on the man who invested the school’s financial resources into hedge-funds and drove the school into bankruptcy. He is not held accountable. This teaches us one thing: that the men and women who are running these institutions – who are all making over $500,000 a year – contribute to this damaging privatization, which allows the tuitions costs of universities to keep increasing.
San Jose State University is bankrupt as well, and – in the documentary – partners with Udacity, a low-cost, online remedial course system. But the students fail. The system fails them. Replacing professors with computers are also not the answer to cut costs. Rossi has one message: no simple answer to solving the higher education dilemma exists.
And then we have Silicon Valley techies trying to hack the system of higher learning, creating apps to replace this lurching ‘Ivory Tower’. They’re just another example of the many alternatives higher education is forcing us to entertain.
In actuality, Rossi treats his subject with very little depth. The point-of-view feels scattered because there is no simple solution. Schools - in this marketplace - are struggling to survive so they increase costs. Students - believing that an "liberal-arts education" - are going to take out the loans to get it.
The truth is that our parents have no idea how to criticize the system – they’ll blame us for demanding an education in the liberal arts before they’ll look at how the government has failed us. We privatized education in the same way we privatized healthcare – and now we’re left with a system that is fundamentally failing our kids. It’s become about schools surviving whilst making money – it’s no longer an experience tailored to the student. And those that are - is it worth the cost? The rising debt? The crashing of this bubble? It’s up to us – with our parents and our children – to have a real conversation about this and do what the Ivory Tower doesn’t want us to: think critically about what we’re paying for and what the costs of higher education are. The idea of college holds a certain allure – but we need to examine the system with a critical eye. Ronald Reagan, in 1985, said the following quote:
"Education is not the means of showing people how to get what they want. Education is an exercise by means of which enough men, it is hoped, will learn to want what is worth having."
He contributed to this privatization; as governor of California, he cut funding for California-state schools. As president, he cut federal funding for public universities. He asks us in this quote to learn what is worth having. How can our kids even know what they want? Who knew what they wanted to 21? The only thing a young kid deserves is the remote freedom to not be burdened by astronomical debt, to receive a degree which matters less and less as the bubble of debt increase. Our kids incur the cost; our government profits off of their ignorance. It's time to think critically about higher education - they sure don't want us to.