Learning to love accumulation by dispossession: How US university students value paying tuition and an elitist social order

How do people value extraction through having extraction exercised upon them? Accumulation by dispossession (ABD) defines the neoliberal economy – extraction rather than exploitation, rent seeking rather than profit, taking rather than making. Most research emphasizes that people consent to this elitist neoliberal order because it is obscured as freedom-enabling market competition. This, however, begs the question: how do people consent to ABD through the very process of having ABD exercised upon them? Asking this of higher education, I found a discourse in which students’ particular beliefs about the roles and functions of paying tuition got them to embrace a highly unequal elitist society based on extraction. Rather than the neoliberal ideology of competition enhancing quality, students embraced having their wealth extracted through tuition because they believed the paywall of tuition both protected them from competition and made degrees scarce and thus valuable. That is, they saw college not as learning or acquiring skills but as gaining a rentier asset – their fetishized credential – that entitled them to excess wages, that enabled them to capture rents. Students thereby acquire a rentier sensibility in which they valued the processes of extraction and the highly unequal social order upon which such accumulation rests.