The Educated Underclass

Gary Roth

ISBN 10: 0745339220 / ISBN 13: 9780745339221

Published by Pluto Press, GB, 2019

About this Item

We live in a world with too many graduates fighting for too few jobs; where Deliveroo and FedEx drivers have advanced degrees. The Educated Underclass offers a much-needed look at this societal restructuring from the perspective of students. Gary Roth examines the way that universities often reproduce traditional class hierarchies, the mechanisms that enable upward and downward social mobility, and how the 'overproduction of intelligence' hinders students, calling for a realignment of how social classes function today.The dream of social mobility is dying. Where previous generations where expected to surpass their parents' level of economic success, prospects for today's graduates are increasingly bleak.

Seller Inventory # LU-9780745339221

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Educated Underclass
• Publisher: Pluto Press, GB
• Publication Date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0745339220
• ISBN 13: 9780745339221
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

"The waste of human capacity Roth describes is phenomenal. But his major point is that it is not new. The millennials are feeling the worst of it, perhaps, but only the worst so far."—Inside High Ed
 
The dream of social mobility is dying. Where previous generations routinely expected to surpass their parents' level of economic success, prospects for today's young people are increasingly bleak.  What role does higher education play in the process? An essential and frightening one, according to author Gary Roth.           
 
The Educated Underclass reveals the structural problems that are helping to create this problem. Gary Roth shows how universities—touted as the best way up the economic ladder for young people—actually reproduce traditional class hierarchies. And as more graduates emerge every year into economies that are no longer creating a steady stream of stable jobs, the odds of landing one decrease—and over-educated people end up scrapping for poorly compensated positions for which they're overqualified. Chapters include:
 
*Higher education and class
*The overproduction of intelligence
*Class in transition: historical background
*Underemployment through the decades
*Class status and economic instability
*And more!
 
Roth writes in his Introduction, “Education has become an intermediary institution between a social system that habitually sputters and declines while ever-greater amounts of consumer products are dangled in front of the system’s workforce. The result: a dynamic fraught with all sort of negative possibilities, both socially and psychotically.” 
 
A broadside against the failures of our education system and our economy, Gary Roth’s The Educated Underclass aims to startle us out of our complacency and wake us up to action.  
 

About the Author

Gary Roth is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Rutgers University. He is the author of Marxism in a Lost Century: A Biography of Paul Mattick.