“Unconquered,” a 1947 Cecil B. DeMille Technicolor epic, may very well be the only major Hollywood movie having indentured servitude as a central element of its plot. It was set in pre-Revolutionary America with the French and Indian War as background.
The stars were Gary Cooper and Paulette Goddard and the movie portrayed the adventures of the former’s attemps to rescue the latter from her previous owner. That malefactor sold her to the smitten Cooper but subsequently reneged on the deal and abducted her.
Ms. Goddard’s character could be legally bought and sold because she was a convicted felon who, in the custom of the times, was offered a choice of either immediate execution or indentured servitude.
Indentured servitude was essentially a contract to supply labor for a fixed period of time in exchange for money — to pay off debts (and avoid debtor’s prison), to avoid execution, or to obtain what was then a very expensive passage to the American colonies for a fresh start in life.
Indentured servitude was not uncommon in pre-Revolutionary American history. In fact, during one decade historians estimate that almost half the European immigrants arriving were indentured. That was a time when passage to America was unaffordable for most people and rural conditions in Europe seemed hopeless. It died out, though, as trans-Atlantic voyages became more frequent and less expensive.
By 1864, when the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was signed in order to end slavery in all states — extending the Emancipation Proclamation which had ended slavery in the Confederate states — voluntary indentured servitude was not even mentioned.
The history of indentured servitude is important because the same economic environment that nurtured it back in our Colonial days is reappearing in today’s higher education market. In fact, if we were to call higher education a passage to opportunity we can visualize the demand for a market structure like indentured servitude that offered a way to pay for it.
Right now, at over $1.5 trillion in outstanding loans, the dominant supplier meeting that demand is the Student Loan Program. There are others, such as academic and athletic scholarships, but their aggregate dollar volume is dwarfed by student loans.
There are signs, though, that the appeal of student loans is flagging, or at least changing. A greater number of these loans are being taken out by parents, for example, and while the motivation for this shift isn’t clear yet, it may reflect a growing realization of the constraints that a debt burden imposes on young people starting out in life. In effect, they are already locked into indentured servitude to the government or other lending institutions.
At the same time, there are growing shortages of workers with higher education or specialized technical skills training. As manufacturing and service industries shift to artificial intelligence, for example, the need for workers who can lead and function well in that fast-changing environment already exceeds the supply. That gap is projected to worsen if something doesn’t change on the supply — that is, education — side.
Two areas — rural doctors and airline pilots — share top billing on the list of acute shortages of qualified individuals.
The rural doctor shortage and indentured servitude as one solution, were the platform for launching a TV series, “Northern Exposure,” which ran for five years in the 1990s. The plot began with a newly graduated doctor whose medical school expenses had been paid by the state of Alaska in exchange for his practicing medicine there.
The airline pilot shortage and possible indentured servitude solution has not yet been the subject of a Hollywood movie or TV series, but don’t rule it out. Current estimates show that an Airline Transport Pilot certification training costs total over $100,000. And we need thousands of them.
The “Northern Exposure” version of indenture has been used successfully in real life to fill gaps in the distribution of physicians. The U.S. military has also successfully used indenture-like programs both in medical-dental school training and in its ROTC scholarships.
The two biggest obstacles to a significant expansion of indentured servitude are the name — to many ears it sounds like some form of slavery — and the bias held by businesses against expenditures on education and training. Many executives see that as “training workers for our competitors to recruit.”
The growing demand, and pile of unfilled positions, will make quick work of the bias obstacle. And Congress could be very helpful in defining terms and limits for the enforcement of voluntary contracts of this type.
At bottom, then, it is a matter of urgent demand. If we don’t do something genuinely effective, the shortages of doctors, pilots, and workers with needed technical skills and higher education, will bite down on us really hard.
James McCusker is a Bothell economist, educator and consultant.
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