Why Students Would Thrive In A Marxist Society

In his TED Talk, How College Loans Exploit Students For Profit, Sajay Samuel (2016) uses a number of statistics and examples to show that because of the way things are set up in societies that don’t have publicly-funded post-secondary education, specifically America, people feel the need to pursue post-secondary education even though it may not make sense for them economically to do so (Samuel, 2016).  

He points out that since post-secondary education is treated as a “consumer product” by economists and the educational institutions, it promotes aggressive competition and marketing tactics by these institutions  (Samuel, 2016).  In this way, diplomas are solely about brand-image: most schools only care about making diplomas sound prestigious, leading to high-paying jobs, rather than focusing on the experience students can have while earning them (Samuel, 2016). 

Samuel (2016) also illustrates that post-secondary institutions take advantage of the pressure society puts on people to get further education as well as the fact that it is getting harder for them to pay for it, by making big profits not only on tuition, but also off their students’ debt from investing in student loan securities (Samuel, 2016). He also points out the only reason any economic incentive to get an undergraduate degree exists at all is that high school graduates are generally being underpaid in America (Samuel, 2016). 

The solution Samuel (2016) proposes to all this, is to encourage students to act like typical consumers who make informed choices, and to require the tuition institutions charge to be based off of the income the students are expected to earn once they graduate to force them to manage their costs better, get rid of unauthorized subsidization of certain programs from other students’ tuition and ultimately lessen the financial burden of getting post-secondary education so people can study what they want to (Samuel, 2016).

This solution that Samuel (2016) proposes, to me seems to be more of a reform liberalist solution than a marxist solution but does relate to some of Karl Marx’s criticisms of capitalism. Imposing restrictions on tuition prices but still making students pay for their education based on what they make after they graduate, would be an example of a government providing welfare typical of reform liberalism, in that people’s lives would be improved by the government’s actions because more people would be able to afford going into debt while studying what they want (Romkey, 2018a).  

This would help to lessen the “surplus value” that the “bourgeoisie”, in this case the college institutions or corporations, gain from the exuberant tuition costs and investments in debt paid by the students which one could consider to be the “proletariats” since they are practically forced to be there to invest in themselves, and support themselves in the future like workers in a factory who are only doing their jobs to support themselves financially but whose work is really being exploited for the profit of the owners of the factory (Romkey, 2018b).

Marx’s solution to the problems brought forward by Samuel (2016), would be to make post-secondary education free and accessible to all and to have the amount of income one receives be universal, no matter what type of job you have (Romkey, 2018b). One of the main points of Marx’s doctrine is that he wants all people to be able to engage in productive work, “work that makes your ‘heart sing’” so this is something he would want to be possible for all people, starting with students pursuing higher education (Romkey, 2018b).

If students didn’t have to worry about whether their passion would lead them to a job that would be able to provide for their needs and that whatever they decided to pursue they wouldn’t have to worry about being burdened by tuition fees and the resulting endless debt, if diplomas weren’t always marketed to them as prestigious or more valuable than others, and if this kind of mindset wasn’t ingrained in their culture, students may “rediscover their curiosity, [...] their love of learning -- begin to study what they love, love what they study, follow their passion…” (Samuel, 2016).  

In my opinion at this point in my learning and life, this can only truly be possible in a communist society as proposed by Marx.