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 the 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. Nor is generalizing from “Harvard graduates” to “all graduates” a very big leap. Unfortunately, no major intellectual traditions have internalized this idea well enough to build on it. Academic sociologists are willing to point at class dynamics everywhere else, but can’t grapple with the ones they themselves are implementing (in part because they’ve abandoned any me...

From economics to sociopolitics

From economics to sociopolitics