Education Quote by Barnaby C. Keeney

A razor-edged joke aimed at the prestige panic that turns higher education into a kind of rationed luxury good. Keeney flips the usual moral framing: college is supposed to be the place you endure for the sake of learning, but here learning becomes the punchline, the unwanted side effect of a deeper transaction. The line works because it treats “education” not as the product being sold but as an inconvenience attached to the real prize - admission itself, with all the status, security, and sorting power that comes with it.

The intent is satirical, but not unserious. Keeney is skewering a system where demand is inflated by fear: fear of downward mobility, fear of missing the credential that signals competence, fear of being locked out of the professional class. In that environment, students become astonishingly compliant consumers. They will tolerate bureaucratic absurdities, performative extracurriculars, test-prep arms races, and even institutional hypocrisy, because the gate matters more than what’s behind it.

The subtext also cuts at colleges: when selectivity becomes the brand, institutions can grow complacent about the actual classroom experience. If applicants are desperate enough, the campus can offer mediocre teaching, crowded lectures, or curricular drift and still be rewarded with applications, donations, and deference.

Contextually, it’s a mid-century warning that feels uncomfortably current: the more college functions as a sorting mechanism in an unequal economy, the more “getting in” eclipses “what you learn.” Keeney’s sting is that the most educated society can still treat education as incidental.