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 [...]

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Outline:

(04:20) College alumni as a backscratchers club

(09:13) Initiation rituals as commitment mechanisms

(20:32) Moving beyond individual rationality

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
September 3rd, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4nEagtMyCgS97T6zG/higher-education-as-class-commitment

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Higher education as class commitment” by Richard_Ngo

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Higher education as class commitment” by Richard_Ngo