The Problem of an Excess of Educated Men

Leo K, one of our regular readers, gave us a link which led to the Lenore O’Boyle paper “The Problem of an Excess of Educated Men in Western Europe, 1800-1850” in a comment to a post on excessive education. Following are some excerpts.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether there was in fact an overproduction of educated men in England, Germany, and France in the first half of the nineteenth century. The assumption that there was such overproduction is fairly commonly made and, as will be argued, probably correct, but there has been little attempt to bring together the evidence on the subject.

Educated men will be understood to include (a) members of all the learned professions, whether or not trained at a university; (b) all other persons who attended universities; (c) all persons who received an advanced (i.e., beyond the age of fourteen) secondary education of the traditional, classical sort.

I argue that it is indisputably true today that there are far too many educated people.

The word “overproduction” requires explanation. It is meaningless to say that there were too many trained men for the real needs of society; the mass of the population, for example, could have used far more doctors and teachers than were provided. What can be said is that too many men were educated for a small number of important and prestigious jobs, so that some men had to be content either with under-employment or with positions they considered below their capacities. There was a disparity between an individual’s estimate of his own worth and the rewards in money and status that his society accorded him.

This was the thesis of Eric Hoffer’s The Ordeal of Change, which might be phrased the jealousy and revenge of the scribes. It’s a bit like reporteritis: reporters cover important events and come to see themselves as important, and even necessary for the important events to occur. Only foolish civilizations allow this to happen.

The result was to emphasize the importance of education as an avenue to wealth and power; the diploma might do what a title of nobility had once done. At the same time higher education remained committed to the classical and literary disciplines which were regarded as the proper preparation for the older professions. These learned professions, moreover, retained all their traditional prestige. As a consequence, business pursuits and the new professions were neglected and undervalued while pressure remained constant or even increased in regard to the law, medicine, the churches, the military, and the bureaucracy…

Germans of high position were troubled by the situation. As early as 1809 Wilhelm von Humboldt was warning the king against training too many men and then finding that the state was under moral pressure to employ them as officials…

Many opponents of the prevailing Gymnasium curriculum argued that its emphasis on study of the classics was unwise since, by producing graduates unsuited for practical activity, it both retarded the country’s economic development and helped to increase the number of applicants for state positions. Thus the liberal educational reformer I. H. von Wessenberg wrote in 1835: “The crowding into the learned studies undoubtedly belongs to the most damaging of contemporary social circumstances, since on the one hand it removes many members from the productive classes, and on the other hand it fills society with people who make claims to positions in public service that cannot well be satisfied without disadvantage to the whole society because a great number of these claimants lack true capacity for office.”

It’s worse now because of racial, sex, and sexual proclivity quotas in awarding “degrees”, where the abilities of the quota people are on average less than those of others. Degrees are pieces of paper that, experience shows, tell the holder they are smarter and better than they are. When the rewards the degree-holders were told they were deserving of aren’t forthcoming, bad feelings arise.

Hoffer says that after the Black Death wiped out a goodly number of people, including half Europe’s priests, “There emerged a large group of non-clerical teachers, students, scholars, and writers who were not members of a clearly marked privileged class, and whose social usefulness was not self-evident.”

Power was still held by “men of action” and the “intellectual is treated as a poor relation who has to pick up the crumbs. Even “when his excellence…is…rewarded, he does not feel himself one of the elite.” That sting leads to lashing out. Which is why the intellectual “has pioneered every upheaval from the Reformation to the latest nationalist or socialist movement.” After the tumult, because intellectuals are rarely leaders, they are pushed out by other strong men and “left out in the cold.”

In Asia and Africa, too, the wider diffusion of literacy, due largely to Western influence, gave rise to numbers of unattached men of words. Their search for a weighty and useful life led them, as it did their counterparts in Europe, to the promotion of socialist and nationalist movements.

Hoffer shows how Hebrew scribes and scholars after having become supreme after the Babylonian captivity “flaunted their loathing for the masses. They made a word for the common folk, “am-ha-aretz” [deplorables?], a term of derision and scorn—even the gentle Hillel taught that ‘no am-ha-aretz can be pious’.” This isn’t only found in Hebrew culture, as modern events attest.

Intellectuals always see enchroachment into their territory by “the masses” as “a calamity.” Today the cry is against “populism”. The hate the intellectual elite have for ordinary people is, and must be, a function of the size of the intellectual class.

O’Boyle says the over-production of graduates resulted “Inevitably [in] frustration and resentment.”

The literary critic Hermann Marggraff described the younger generation in 1839 as being both more sophisticated and more demanding, and in consequence discontented, because “in the crowding of the young into the learned professions only a few can obtain an office suited to their demands and needs.”

University education then in Germany was cheap. This “cheapness meant that a poor boy with any brains and energy at all could usually obtain a higher education. The university thus became the great means of rising in the world. The result was that too many young men attended the university, and too many of them looked to the state for employment.”

Being credentialed means accepting a low or non-prestige job is painful, too painful for many. “Edwin Chadwick noted that at one time too many men had received a university education in Germany. They had ended in consequence either ruined or discontented, unfit for private service but unable to find positions in the public service.”

[The] surplus of educated men… points to the conclusion that their presence made for social and political instability…

The problem may well be a chronic one in any society with a large population and a relatively free market. The prestige and intrinsic interest of intellectual as opposed to manual occupations are perhaps enough in themselves to cause a permanent oversupply of trained talents.

Technical training can drain off some of this supply and put people working towards useful ends. But too many people receive STEM degrees that are only vaguely related to actual STEM. Like in “ecology studies” or whatever (anything with “studies” in it isn’t).

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