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Helen Rollins
07 July 2025
Original publication: https://alfiesbown.wixstudio.com/mysite/post/surplus-education-part-2
This essay is extracted and adapted from an extended article called Notes From the Private Tutoring Industry, to be published by GCAS later in 2025. It tackles the proletarianising process caused by the neo-liberalisaton of education, as opposed to its necessary socialisation, from the perspective of a tutor and the encounter with her clients over the course of ten years. The article looks particularly at the tendency of the rate of profit to decline in the wider capitalist economy and how education has been weaponised as a commodity to mitigate against this tendency. The effects that this has wrought have been extremely damaging: upon the university and in terms of value extraction from students and workers. The article analyses the condition of education relative to her clients’ class position across a broad spectrum: from students taken on pro bono, to the children of high-net-worth families. In this section, the article looks at this extremely wealthy group, a cohort that has replaced more middle-class families amongst her client base, as the value of education as a commodity was gradually undermined and the willingness of middle-class individuals to invest in the promise of the commodity waned. It concludes with the conditions of the ‘surplus graduate’ class and the effects of their sacrifice via education (appropriated by the market) upon their subjectivity and upon collective politics.
Just as the clientele of the average UK-based private tutor has shifted in character from in-country parents to international ones, their economic position has also changed. As the economy has become increasingly unequal — accelerated again in recent years by the policies of the COVID pandemic — the clients of private tutors are often becoming increasingly ‘elite’. The middle classes are getting poorer and have had to cut back. Fewer are motivated to make sacrifices for the promise of a university education that is becoming more hollow as job prospects and salaries have contracted.
On the other hand, ultra-high-net-worth families often have so much wealth that they can buy their children out of the system education altogether, in terms of their attendance at both public and private schools. Still, however — though not for long, perhaps — they must abide by the law, which dictates that their children must be educated. In these instances, they employ private tutors on a full-time basis. These tutors live with their extremely wealthy employers and often travel with them around the globe.
Within some ultra-rich environments, the quality and direction of education differs substantially compared to the kind of teaching a tutor will do with other, more middle-class or working-class students. Billionaires are so rich that there is often now no motivation at all for them to send their children to even the most elite institutions for university; their position is so rarified that cultural recognition by the masses is worthless and their children, their children’s children and their children’s children’s children will never need to be qualified to earn a living. The extreme volumes of money the billionaire class has in its possession have become a protective barrier against a confrontation with the dialectical subjectivity of the masses, in a dynamic analogous to the building of emergency bunkers or the flight to Mars for the few. The extremely wealthy no longer need the cultural recognition of the many precisely because they are so rich.
The compounding processes that inequality is having on the economy (the more unequal the society, the more asset prices increase, the more poor and middle class people are impoverished because they need to sell off their assets to survive, which puts more money in the pockets of the rich, which leads them to buy more assets, pushing up assets prices further) has meant that a new elite class has solidified itself very quickly. Inequality seems to have reached a point of escape velocity since the rise of tech utopianism has ideologically mystified what has gone on and since the global rate of profit has neared zero (because of automation), leading to more extreme attempts to extract value from the masses. Fantasies that tech will magically resolve the intractable contradictions of capitalism (and all life on this planet) have led governments to permit previously illegal business practices that have been rebranded as liberatory. Capital mobility has permitted the avoidance of tax, which has had the second-order consequence that corporations and billionaires are in the ascendency over governments, who are themselves going bankrupt and, in a last ditch attempt at ‘job creation’, go to these wealthy entities cap in hand with offers of further tax breaks and grants, to their own further detriment, lest the corporations move their business interests elsewhere. Misguided policies of austerity have further impoverished citizens of increasingly impecunious states who can no longer raise sufficient money from the only sector of society that still pays tax: normal people.
Because of the rapid ascent and solidification of the new rich, their cultural character differs greatly from the old feudal elite and the legacy aristocracy, which eventually dwindled through post-war social democracy. The values of these latter groups spoke to the historic nature of their wealth. The values of the new tech and oligarchical elite speaks to the novelty of theirs. ‘Noblesse oblige’, for example, was a strong ideological foil for the wealth of the aristocracy, which was not justified by a ‘meritocratic’ earning of money (as billionaires who have come to wealth via their own ‘entrepreneurial nous’ may claim is the source of theirs). Historically, social order was ‘god-given’, unearned and required some level of earthly penance, for example the participation in civic life, which often required an education. In some ways, the ideology of noblesse oblige contributed to the end of the aristocracy itself under capitalism.
There were further cultural reasons for legacy elites under earlier modes of capitalism to value education. At one time, having wealth meant that one was spared the necessity of participating in trade and making conscious shows of being in such a position was of cultural importance. Since education had yet to be incorporated into the auspices of capitalism, one was educated precisely because it revealed that one had time and resources to pursue activities less immediately tied to survival than labour. Since education has been commoditised, learning is labour: value is generated both by student debt and by rises in educational standards, appropriated via the capitalist class who exploit workers that are much more qualified than in past decades and who do not have to pay for on-the-job education. Education, in a contemporary sense, is ‘beneath’ those who can abstract themselves from the obligation to generate surplus value via studying and to compete for grades.
Today, the nouveau riche have often made their money in roles that do not require elite education (enterprise, investments, tax evasion and ‘influencing’, for example) and thus may not value it as a cultural artefact. Tutors are often employed solely to meet a legal requirement or to entertain their children. Whereas, in recent years, the credentials of a tutor could may have been valued by the rich as a show of wealth (‘my child’s tutor went to Harvard’; ‘mine has a PhD from Yale’), the rapid impoverishment of the tutor relative to billionaire parents means that the relation is becoming one no longer marked by the same levels of transference and respect that still marks that between the tutor and the international aspirant parent, or the historically middle-class British parents, who value (or valued) the ‘power’ the tutor may have to improve their child’s material condition, and it is often therefore difficult for the tutor to motivate the ultra-high-net-worth student to learn.
Overall, therefore, the nature of quantum wealth in the 21st century has devalued education. Analogously, education’s commodification via the promise that it could mitigate against the collapsing capitalist economy — already identifiable at the turn of the century — has undermined its value for those who are less wealthy, though in slightly different ways.
Particularised, divided, entrapped by market forces — the masses have no clear route to challenge the accumulative drive that abstracts the wealthy from communal life. In an economy where unemployment is high and job security is scarce, traditional strikes lose their effectiveness because fewer people are employed and thus cannot leverage their collective power to control supply chains and the means of production. Without jobs, workers lack the bargaining power to influence employers or to demand better conditions. Because of graduates’ indebtedness, their proliferation and their position in a ‘holding pen’ ... employers are able to offer graduates lower salaries; the capitalist class has the market advantage.
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Helen Rollins is a writer and filmmaker interested in the intersection between art and philosophy. She has written, directed and produced several short films that have played in festivals throughout the world. She is the author of Psychocinema.
Helen's Everyday Analysis pamphlet, Babyface, is available here.