Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

education—steering students away from democratically controlled community colleges and toward for-profit “technical” trade schools, led by DeVry, a private academy franchise cofounded by triode inventor Lee de Forest as a training school for radio repairmen. If students paid to attend a technical school, the thinking went, rather than going to community college for free, they would value their education and feel compelled to seek a return on their investment. Companies opened their own proprietary training institutes, in which they got to tailor the curriculum and charge tuition.viii The next Bobby Seale could train for a tech or an aerospace job, as Seale first intended, without running into political distractions. Free of public control, these schools only taught skills for which there was a private demand, ensuring the best use of the country’s human capital, according to the market’s transindividual superintelligence. Apparently the market approved, launching DeVry stock from $10 to $24 a share on its first day of public trading in 1991.30 Now capitalists could not only get their workers to train themselves, they could also make them pay for the privilege. To keep up, the community colleges invited tech companies to take over class periods and even set the curriculum for publicly financed courses.