To briefly review, for this blog series I am using an analogy drawn from the world of family systems theory as talked about in Part 1. Specifically, I am using the concept of the identified patient to frame the DEI movement (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion). I argue that the DEI movement reaches back to such U.S. historical events as slavery, and the displacement and disenfranchisement of Native Americans. This “reaching back” allows the DEI movement to coalesce an identity, a process that is talked about in depth in the 2023 book entitled We Don’t Speak of Fear: Large-Group Identity, Societal Conflict, and Collective Trauma. Psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan and his colleagues talk about how countries will reach back centuries to conflicts from the past that have the ability to coalesce a sense of identity in the present. In many respects these conflicts from the past become an identitfied patient around which a narrative of unity can be built. I would suggest that this is what we are looking at with respect to the DEI movement. The identified patients are slavery and the displacement of Native Americans. If my suspicions are correct, then the next step in this “therapeutic process” is to look for the issues or problems in the present that are hidden from view. In my last post I looked at automation and how economist Jeremy Rifkin frames automation as essentially a new form of slavery, one associated with widespread economic displacement. In this post I will look at the “hidden patient” of money.
It should come as no surprise that student debt is one of the most pressing economic issues facing students and their families here in the U.S. LendingTree.com[1] reports that “Americans owe $1.74 trillion in federal and private student loan debt as of the second quarter of 2024.” It’s not uncommon for students who complete a four-year undergraduate degree to walk away from campus with a $25,000 loan amount. Tack on another two to three years of grad school and loan amounts can push 50K. You do not want to know what kind of debt a medical student could potentially rack up. It can be in the middle six figures as Dr. Casey Means revealed in an interview recently. (We’ll look at Dr. Means’ work and her book Good Energy in the next post on Health and Care.) How have we gotten to this place? I’m sure there are many different roads to these astronomical levels of student debt that now surround us. In the rest of this post I’d like to tell you the story I am most familiar with.
Back in January of 2018, I wrote the following in a blog post entitled COMMENT: Health Care, Tuition & Housing: Have You Become a Bubble Pawn?[2]
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It used to be that the government (both state and federal) made block grants to public colleges and universities so that they could provide education at affordable levels. In 2013 I received a newsletter from my alma mater the University of Texas at Dallas. This newsletter contained an article by the then president of UTD, Dr. David E. Daniel. Dr. Daniel talks about the rising cost of tuition. He reveals that in the early 1980s (when I was at UTD) for every dollar of tuition, the state and federal government kicked in about forty cents. Today (in 2013) that amount is down to about four cents. Dr. Daniel goes on to wonder if “public education” is still an appropriate term given that there is so little public support. Good question.
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Block grants allowed publicly-supported colleges and universities to defray the cost of tuition, provide scholarship support in ways that made programatic sense, fund research, and otherwise control their “brand” or academic reputation. In this way, certain schools are known for their law, medicine, business, political science, and, yes, even geoscience programs. UT Dallas back in the 1980s was known for its geophysics program mainly because UT Dallas got its start as the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest (GRCSW) with funds provided by Texas Instruments in support of their interest in creating geophysical instruments and survey techniques. We know Texas Instruments for being pioneers in the world of handheld calculators. However, TI started out as Geophysical Services Inc. Soon after GRCSW was created, the Atmospheric and Space Science Division was added. Many of the test instruments that have been sent into space over the years were developed at the Atmospheric and Space Science Division. A group of us were crowded around a TV for the launch of the Challenger space shuttle because it was carrying test instruments designed at the Atmospheric and Space Science Division. It was a tragic day that none of us will forget.
I digress, but only to make the point that during the block grant days, public colleges and universities had their own locally cultivated academic programs and reputations. The move to what I would call a “scholarship by scholarship” or “research grant by research grant” era (“publish or perish” transmogrified into “get grants or perish”[3]) has turned higher education into a rather bland and generic landscape dominated by online or distance learning courses taught by associate professors sitting in kitchens in God knows where locations. I’ve taken a couple of these distance learning courses. Compared to traditional brick-and-mortar methods, they are stultifying mainly because they are divorced from location, community, and history, like that of UT Dallas Geosciences.
Why would state and federal governments do such a thing? Money. As a financial adviser to our Foundation commented a number of years ago when we were looking at starting a scholarship program (and I paraphrase), “Student loans are one of the few places where the feds are making money.” And student loans are one of the few forms of indebtedness that one cannot get out from under through personal bankruptcy. One needs to get a special and separate judgement for that level of debt forgiveness. Student loan indebtedness places a young person into a prison cell, one that often keeps them from building wealth, securing credit, buying a home or a car, and even getting married and having children. Our Foundation tried to tackle this most pressing issue of student debt back in the 2010s through our newly minted scholarship program, however, we quickly ran into two troubling road blocks. Allow me to explain.
The first roadblock goes by the name “scholarship displacement.” As a result of the shift from block grants to the era of “scholarship by scholarship,” the only way colleges and universities could get money is by looking at students as commodities, as pawns that have a scholarship hanging out of their pockets. Schools then attract students to get their scholarship money. And once they have the student’s scholarship money, they throw that money into a pool or slush fund if you will. Yes, that’s right, your scholarship money does not stay with you. So, rather than a block grant, schools created pools as a substitute. What we discovered is that if we made a scholarship grant to a student, it may in fact hurt that student’s financial support picture given that the school effectively says, “Oh great, you have outside scholarship money … we can now move your state or federal scholarship money around to someone else.” This is at the heart of scholarship displacement. And it gets grim in the case of student athletes. Schools can dangle big scholarship money out there to hook student athletes only to pull that money away in their sophmore year (especially if the student does not perform well). The same may be true of students in general. And, yes, departments of financial support bank on the fact that after a year or two, students will be very reluctant to leave and start over at another institution. The prison door of student debt slams. Because of scholarship displacement (which, by the way, penalizes student achievement and merit), we have never made one scholarship grant. We considered another route.
A Foundation adviser who helped put together our scholarship program suggested that we retire student debt after a student completes and receives their undergraduate degree. What a great idea! No go. The federal government will not allow foundations to retire student debt. If a foundation does so, two things will happen: 1) the grant will not qualify as a grant under IRS regulations and there may be penalties, and, 2) the grant will be considered to be ordinary income to the student, and the foundation and student will be responsible for income taxes. Foundations and philanthropy trade organizations have tried to get these restrictions lifted, but as far as I know, these efforts have been unsuccessful.
Let me end by talking about two things briefly: the liberal lottery ticket system, and disaster capitalism.
In his 2007 book entitled The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America, social commentator Daniel Brook points to the Clinton administration for the start of what he calls “the liberal lottery ticket system.” During his administration, President Clinton advised young people that because the economy was moving from “back work” to “brain work,” they should get a four year college degree. This move was in large part a response to the rise of automation talked about in the previous post. Brook calls college degrees in this new brain work era “lottery tickets” suggesting that you certainly do have to have a lottery ticket to win, however, very few will experience a payoff, just like in actual lotteries. The liberal lottery ticket system played a large role in turning college and university campuses into businesses. And, yes, students, with good reason mind you, demanded that if they pay their money and get their college degree lottery ticket, they want a payoff. Today many undergraduates find themselves with a bunch of debt and a college degree that is essentially worthless in terms of getting a job. Apparently this “lack of jobs” problem plagues other countries such as China.[4]
In many respects, the liberal lottery ticket system is part and parcel of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism” in her 2010 book entitled The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Klein argues that capitalism (here and elsewhere) has run its course as far as making money off of new and novel inventions and, as a result, has no other option but to make money off of disaster. As an example, Klein reports that literally days after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami devastated large swaths of coastal areas, resort real estate developers swooped in to claim these costal areas from indigenous populations who had lived there for generations. I have to admit, this reminds me of what DEI movement supporters point to: European settlers swooping in and displacing indigenous populations. And could the liberal lottery ticket system be framed as an example of disaster capitalism? I would say yes. It has created a very predatory economic system that imprisons young people and their families, especially those who do not get a payday after buying their college degree ticket. The scene is bleak for those who rack up student debt and, for whatever reason, do not receive a degree, who do not receive a lottery ticket. Where else can we see disaster capitalism at play? I would point to health and care in the U.S., hidden family system patients we will look at in the next post.
POSTSCRIPT: I’d be remiss if I did not point out that the DEI movement is not immune from money issues. In her March 2021 Harper’s Bazaar article entitled The Diversity and Inclusion Industry Has Lost Its Way, community activist and DEI consultant Kim Tran reveals that DEI is an $8 billion dollar industry. Apparently DEI consultants, many of whom are people of color, sell “insurance policies” to large companies and other concerns. As Tran puts it, “DEI is a corporate litigation shield meant to protect those in power from the people over whom they wield it.” In essence, if large corporations and other concerns in essence buy “DEI insurance” and incorporate the DEI guidelines consultants are pushing—into such things as hiring and enrollment policies—then they will not only be protected from the wrath of the DEI movement but also remain out of courtrooms. Tran makes it clear that DEI did not start out by selling insurance, but DEI is now at crossroads where it can select the road to the “penthouse” (as she puts it) or the one back to the people and the fight for justice, the same fight that motivated the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Interestingly, we are seeing company after company, like Tractor Supply and Harley Davidson, electing to in effect not renew their DEI insurance policies because of pushback from conservative groups. The DEI identified patient may be slavery and displaced Native Americans, however, there appears to be a lot happening today in the DEI family system that remains largely hidden. I make no apology. Psychotherapists (as well as investigative journalists) are trained to keep an ear out for what is not being said, not unlike Toto reveling the man behind the curtain pulling the levers of the dazzling Wizard of Oz display.
NOTES:
[1] – Here’s the link to the LendingTree article entitled Student Loan Debt Statistics:
https://www.lendingtree.com/student/student-loan-debt-statistics/
[2] – Here’s the link to my 2018 blog post:
[3] – For more on this theme of “get grants or perish,” see the 2023 article entitled Prosocial Motives Underlie Scientific Censorship By Scientists: A Perspective and Research Agenda. There are literally dozens of authors listed for this article. Therefore, allow me to give you a link to an Open Source online version of this article so you can read it for yourself:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2301642120#
[4] – See this August 2023 CNBC.com article by Evelyn Cheng entitled With Record Youth Unemployment, China’s Jobs Market Is Getting Tougher for New Graduates to Crack:
