Who deserves what types of entitlements? On what grounds? In this moment of rampant and structural joblessness, there is an increasing critique of universities for their failure to create appropriate routes to employment for their graduates who are borrowing increasing sums of money to attend. Do these good students, who make, what President Obama has dubbed “good choices,” deserve jobs? If so, why only them? Or, with the extreme wealth of the U.S., should these good students, along with the bad, and everyone else, be entitled to a job or income? And what do employment rates for undergraduates have to do with the university anyway?
Articles by David Stein
\David Stein is completing his PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California where he studies working-class history, African-American studies, policing and imprisonment, and the history of capitalism. His dissertation, “Fearing Inflation, Inflating Fears: The End of Full Employment and the Rise of the Carceral State,” focuses on Black freedom movements that sought to eradicate structural unemployment and examines contests over governmental responses to people who were disemployed due to automation and globalization from the 1930s-1980s. He wishes to acknowledge Shana Agid, Jon Free, Craig Gilmore, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Sarah Haley, Sora Han, Gillian Harkins, Erica Meiners, Jake Peters, and Rebecca Popuch for their generative influence on his essay. Website: http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ase/student_display.cfm?Person_ID=1015681.\