Thanks, always, for reading and subscribing to per esempio. I’ve added a paid subscription option– $5/month or $55/year–for readers interested in supporting this project. (Mom, your subscription is on me). I’m still working out where to install the paywall. I imagine paid subscribers will be granted access to exclusive newsletters, audio features, and the full archive as it takes shape. Everyone can expect an essay on The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton’s novel and Martin Scorsese’s film, soon. -Carrley
"It was certainly a strange quarter to have settled in. Small dress-makers, bird-stuffers, and 'people who wrote' were her nearest neighbours; and further down the dishevelled street Archer recognised a delapidated wooden house, at the end of a paved path, in which a writer and journalist called Winsett, whom he used to come across now and then, had mentioned that he lived. Winsett did not invite people to his house; but he had once pointed it out to Archer in the course of a nocturnal stroll, and the latter had asked himself, with a little shiver, if the humanities were so meanly housed in other capitals." -Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, 66-67
This week, the Supreme Court announced that Biden’s student loan forgiveness program will remain blocked pending a decision they expect to make next summer. The frenetic discourse surrounding loan forgiveness is one thread in a more existential conversation about the role of university education in America. What does one have to show for four years in college, if not six-figure debt?
Frederick M. Hess and J. Grant Addison put the problem rather darkly in “Busting the College-Industrial Complex,” insisting, "For too many Americans, the truth is that post-secondary education is principally a toll: an ever-more-expensive, increasingly mandatory, two-, four-, or, more accurately, six-year pit stop on the way to remuneration." They cite a 2017 report from Harvard Business School on "degree inflation," or the imposition by hiring staffs of a degree requirement where there wasn’t one. This means that a job historically performed by graduates and non-graduates alike can become suddenly inaccessible to the latter, even without any change in the job description. Trends like this add an air of logical fallacy to any insistence that a university education is the natural entryway to adulthood and financial freedom. The truth is, of course, more complicated.
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