What "The Squid Game" can teach us about US Higher Education
How the dystopian Netflix show provides insight into the conundrums of college students
The Squid Game is currently the #1 most watched show in the world on Netflix. If you haven’t yet indulged, here is the basic premise. (Only minor spoilers ahead; everything in this synopsis is revealed within the first two episodes.)
In modern-day Seoul, South Korea, a mysterious organization runs an immersive contest for working class people who are deep in debt. The source of these debts is varied: gambling debts, childcare, immigration issues, crime, business losses, medical care, as well as generalized poverty and unemployment. The organization offers each debtor 100 million won (about $85,000 USD) if they can make it through a gauntlet of game-like contests— but if they fail in any contest, they die. Moreover, for every contestant who is killed, their prize money is added to the overall prize for survivors, such that any survivor is promised their share of 45 billion won ($37mm USD). One of the core concepts of the show is that everyday life for the impoverished is so ‘hellish’ that the game is preferable to the real world, so much so that the debtors actively volunteer for the opportunity to compete.
The Squid Game has getting its share of hot takes, everything from New York Times story about how the show is a metaphor for the economic insecurity of modern Korea to GQ’s observation about the show’s impact on fashion.
To me, the show awakened my inner Ryan Craig, and a different metaphor came to mind. The Squid Game could be read an analogue for the state of American higher education, especially with regards to how it operates for working class students.
Let’s dive in:
1. As in The Squid Game, in higher ed, earnings and debt are at the core of major life decisions
In The Squid Game, the contestants’ prize money is literally handing over their heads in a huge transparent piggy bank. In our analogy, the piggy bank can be seen as a stand-in for the ‘college wage premium’ - the promise of increased wages associated with completing a degree, especially a bachelor’s degree.
A 2018 Strada/Gallup paper (n= 86,000+) is one of many surveys that have shown that career outcomes are the primary reason why most students attend college:
“Results confirm that work outcomes are the main reason most people chose higher education, with 58% reporting job and career outcomes as their primary motivation. This is true across all higher education pathways and demographic subgroups. Work outcomes are also more than double the next-most prevalent reason, with 23% reporting a general motivation to learn more and gain knowledge without linking it to work or career aspirations.”
The $84,000 per person on offer in The Squid Game is roughly comparable to the $60,000 per year that college students expect from their first job after graduation, according to a 2019 LendEDU/College Pulse survey. It’s even closer to the $78,000 average wage for BA holders, according to a NY Fed report in 2019:
At heart, The Squid Game is a story of debt. And in the US, the story of debt is increasingly the story of student debt.
Student loans are by far the largest source of debt for young people aged 18-29, ahead of (rising) auto payments and credit card payments. US students carry $1.73 trillion in student debt in 2021, with over $1 trillion owed by the 18-29 demographic alone. The average debt of $28,950 per student is nearly 7.5 times larger than the average credit card debt.
Student debt is associated with increased stress, anxiety, shame and suicidal ideation as well as the delay of homeownership and child-bearing (source). There are 9 million borrowers in default.
In a very real way, student debt is directly creating the ‘hellish’ society that The Squid Game portrays.
Moreover, aspiring students, especially low-income students, are increasingly making choices that try to avoid massive student debt, which lead them into educational environments that still don’t support their career goals.
Here’s bankruptcy scholar Jodie Adams Kirshner on the particular plight of low-income students:
“…a majority of talented students from low-income families do not even bother to apply to competitive colleges. In fact, most low-income students enroll in community colleges, often because they have the cheapest list prices, even though the majority of those students fail to earn any credential there within six years.”
This brings us nicely to our next point…
2. As in The Squid Game, success in higher education is an all-or-nothing proposition
In the Squid Game, contestants must survive a series of six contests to receive the prize money; there is no way to walk away with any ‘partial credit’.
The same is true for higher education. Completing one class, or one year of education accrues very little economic benefit. It has been well documented that the college premium accrues disproportionately to those who complete degrees- specifically, bachelor’s degrees.
The returns on ‘some college’ or an associate’s degree is worth about $100 a week in earnings, while completing a Bachelor’s is worth on average (an additional) $500 a week. Over a working lifetime of 2000+ weeks, this is what comprises the huge college premium.
To education reformers, the ‘four years’ (or ‘120 credits’) required to complete a BA is as arbitrary as the ‘six games’ required to complete The Squid Game.
Some note that European and Indian Universities typically require only three years to complete. Others call out the simple fact that, given the massive differences between university curricula and majors, as well as accrediting bodies, there is simply no way that 120 credits bears any direct relationship to career preparedness or the state of ‘being educated’.
For those in edtech, this is the primary reason behind the ever-increasing interest in ‘stackable’ credentials; if college students could walk away after a year or two with viable career skills and a meaningful employment. The need for faster, cheaper and more flexible alternatives to the all-or-nothing system also underlie the competency-based education movement and the push to provide credit for work experience, all of which should be applauded.
Others point out that only 12 credits a semester are required to receive maximum Pell Grants, which is less than the 15 credits a semester required to actually graduate in four years, setting high need students up for failure right out of the gate.
This failure rate brings us to our next analogy:
3. As in The Squid Game, many who enter US higher education will not make it through
In The Squid Game, the games that contestants must undertake are devious and often zero-sum, designed to weed out many contestants. Faceless administrators provide opaque rules, and nobody is quite sure how what it will take to survive.
Of course, the higher ed analogue here is graduation rates. In 2019, the four-year graduation rate was 41%, but educators typically use the more forgiving ‘six-year graduation rate’ metric, which refers to the chance that a students who starts at one institution will graduate from the same institution within six years. The overall average six-year graduation rate for 2020 is 60.1%, which is already pretty weak, but it obscures what is really going on behind the scenes at different types of colleges.
The National Student Clearinghouse’s 2020 Completing College Report breaks down graduation rates by type of institution.
The two types of colleges which surpass the average are those that serve higher-income learners, while the graduation rate at insititutions that serve lower-income learners are far behind.
Public two year colleges (roughly synonymous with community college) and private for-profit four year institutions (colleges not funded by states, which tend to cost more, with an average tuition cost of $37,650) have average six-year graduation rates below 50%.
In other words, a student who enrolls at a community college or a for-profit four-year private university is more likely to not complete their education than to complete it.
Tressie McMillam Cottom’s Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy examines the sales tactics used by colleges specifically to recruit low-income students and the federal aid they represent.
Race and SES in Graduation Rates
South Korea has changed its policies to invite more immigration over the last decade, and several Squid Game contestants represent immigrant or minority status (such as a Pakistani immigrant laborer and a North Korean refugee).
It’s been well documented that in higher education, the race and socioeconomic status of the students also significantly affects the chance of graduation. The two largest minorities in the US, Black and Hispanic/Latinx students, are far more likely to enroll in low-graduation rate institutions, and are less likely to graduate overall:
Although there are a handful of professional class contestants (a doctor accused of malpractice, an embezzling businessman), the majority of Squid Game contestants are distinctly working class. In the US, students from higher socioeconomic status are far more likely both to attend high-status and high-graduation rate institutions and to graduate within six years.
A 2019 NCES report, as reported by Paul Fain in Inside Higher Ed, showed that those from the highest quintile of socioeconomic status (parental education and occupations and family income), compared to the lowest quintile of SES, were:
50 percentage points more likely to be enrolled in college six years later
More than twice as likely to pursue a Bachelor’s Degree
Five times more likely to enroll at a highly selective college (which have the highest graduation rates)
Much more likely to attend public four year institutions (58% vs 24%), or a four year private university (26% vs. 8%)
Three times less likely to attend a community college (18% vs. 51%) and six times less likely to attend a for-profit university (2% vs. 13%), which have the lowest graduation rates.
These statistical swirls can be head-spinning, but the takeaway should be this: for minority or low-SES students in the US Higher Education system, the likelihood of completing college is significantly reduced.
Which brings us to our final point, and perhaps the most painful of all:
4. As in The Squid Game, everyday life for the (less educated) working class has become increasingly ‘hellish’
One of the core tenets of the show is that everyday life for many working class South Koreans can be “Hell”; characters suffer from inoperable brain tumors, loneliness, depression, diabetes, loss of health insurance, bitter divorce, impending prison sentences, predatory lenders, immigration issues, and the loss of child custody, earned wages and respect.
In fact, the show claims, modern life is so bad that the characters opt into the deadly game just for the chance to pull themselves out of the morass.
So in our metaphor… is life really that bad for those outside of the higher education system in America?
Well, the relationship between higher education and a successful modern life is a book-length topic. Luckily, that book has already been written.
Here is the plight of Americans without a BA, according to Princeton Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton:
Americans without a BA have seen rising mortality from drugs, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease—deaths of despair. The reduction in deaths from cardiovascular disease which was the driving force of mortality reduction in the last third of the last century has slowed for everyone but has stopped and reversed among those without a 4-y degree. Deaths from smoking-related diseases continue to be important especially among White women without a BA. Similar divergence can be seen in morbidity—pain of all kinds, disability, difficulty socializing, and self-rated health—and in marriage, churchgoing, life evaluation, money, and in jobs. Here too, the big differences are between those with and without a 4-y degree; people with some college do better than those with only a high school degree, but the biggest step is between some college and a 4-y degree…
…Good jobs have become increasingly rare for workers without a college diploma, many of whom have lost their jobs to globalization and automation and for whom the cost of employer-provided healthcare has increasingly priced them out of the high-quality labor market. For them, real wages have fallen as has participation in the labor force…
For Americans without a college diploma, it is increasingly difficult to build a meaningful and successful life…
Their pioneering work provides our final graph of all, about the falling life expectancy for those without a BA; perhaps the best visualization of the life and death stakes of higher education:
And to add insult to injury, the uneducated in America, very much like the characters in The Squid Game, are routinely discriminated against and treated terribly.
Harvard professor Michael Sandel has made the case that ‘credentialism’ is the ‘last acceptable prejudice in America, and in America, where 2/3 of citizens do not hold BAs, “The credentialed few govern the uncredentialed many.” Matt Taibbi, in his excellent recent essay, “Does America Hate the Poorly Uneducated,” adds that “…despite the fact that universities are more diverse with regard to race and gender than ever, from a class perspective they remain symbols of iron exclusivity.”
Final Thoughts
Dear readers- this has been a pretty depressing article to research and write, and I imagine it may have been a bit depressing to read as well. Whether or not you agreed on the central metaphor, hopefully you found some of the statistics eye-opening.
On a happier note, the dystopian vision of education portrayed in this article is by no means the end of the story.
There are still thousands of higher ed success stories every day, including those of first-generation students, students from low-SES backgrounds, and minority students. In fact, the college-going population is more diverse than ever before, including at elite universities (with high graduation rates).
It’s also not meant to be read as an attack on the individuals who work within the higher education system. Personally, I’ve never met anyone who works in higher ed who doesn’t want to decrease student debt, increase graduation rates, and democratize access. The list of scholarships, programs, mental health programs, work-study programs, and other systems designed to help students succeed is far too long to list.
There are also brilliant minds at work at all levels within higher ed, and many education policy analysts, non-profits, reformers, journalists, politicians, startup founders and government officials are doing incredible work every day to improve the educational outcomes of working class Americans (which, by the way, may or may not mean increasing college-going rates, but that’s another story).
Leaders are paying attention. Student debt forgiveness and free community college have become mainstream positions for some politicians, while cost-effective higher education and skills-based hiring are championed by others. Some higher education leaders are moving to reduce student debt in the short term and build income-based repayment schedules.
The Squid Game might, sadly, be a potent metaphor for where the higher ed system finds itself in 2021, but with our dedicated work and support, we can build a brighter future.