Cover
Dream Factories
Note that the words “university” and “college” are used interchangeably in this book to refer to degree-granting institutions of higher learning.
Preface
During the first 2015 Democratic presidential debate, Senators Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders struggled to outdo each other with grandiose visions for free public university and greatly enhanced loans and bursaries for students from poor families. On October 21, 2015, Joe Biden, vice-president of the United States, outlined his devotion to college education, while announcing his decision not to run for the presidency. North of the border, Justin Trudeau, during his successful campaign to become prime minister of Canada, extolled the virtues of expanding access to universities. If there is consensus about anything in North America, it is that a college or university education is a “good thing” for contemporary youth.
Indeed, heading off to college is one of North America’s signature rites of passage. Everyone knows the routine: evaluating colleges, cramming to get the high-school grades necessary to get into the best universities, waiting for the admission (or rejection) letters, tearful farewells for those leaving, and move-in day at the college residence. And then the studying begins.
What happens after that is also well known: four or five years of college (with the bright ones staying on for graduate school or a professional degree), the stress of job applications, the choice of employer, and settling into a career. Traditionally, the career-work continuum is followed by marriage, house purchase, and children.
This new American Dream is founded on a firm belief in the efficacy of a Learning = Earning formula where the number of years of post-secondary study provide an assurance of an ever-higher income. It appears to be a worthy successor to the dreams of earlier generations who built their futures and fortunes on agriculture, industrial labour, entrepreneurship, or the combination of unionized and government work that propelled prosperity in the post–World War II era.
But what if this belief is not true? What if the formula is wrong? What if the actual experience of North American students deviates dramatically from the image that has sustained the optimism and dreams of young people for the past three generations? For those who have saved for years to pay for a college education, who have pinned their hopes on the career potential of a university degree, the formula is intensely personal. What if Learning does not equal Earning?
Rumblings are getting louder that all is not well in college-land. Sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa have provided an invaluable service to the research-based understanding of contemporary post-secondary education in their provocative studies of the actual experiences of American college students. Their first book on this theme, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, examined how much students actually took away, intellectually, from the college experience. Their depressing study argued that most students showed surprisingly little gain, even after they had completed their degrees.
In Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates, Arum and Roksa looked at the employment experiences of a group of university students who graduated in 2009, a time of serious economic difficulty in America. The book observed that college graduates did much better than those without a college education, but also documented the severe challenges facing young adults. The researchers found that for those unemployed at the time of the spring 2011 survey, 40 percent had been unemployed for six months or more. Almost a quarter of the respondents who were unemployed in 2011 had also been unemployed when surveyed in the spring of 2010. Others were underemployed, with 4 percent working fewer than twenty hours per week. The remaining 89 percent of graduates had found either full-time employment or close to it, but many were in low-paid jobs. Fifteen percent of college graduates were in full-time positions that paid less than $20,000 per year, and 15 percent were in positions that paid between $20,000 and $30,000 per year. Considered as a whole, 53 percent of the college graduates who had not re-enrolled full-time in school were unemployed, employed part-time, or employed in full-time jobs that paid less than $30,000 annually.
College and university has never been one thing or a single kind of institution. In his excellent and affectionate commentary on the American college, called simply College, Andrew Delbanco, a Columbia University professor, observed:
For a relatively few students, college remains the sort of place that Andrew Kronman, former dean of Yale Law School, recalls from his days at Williams, where his favorite class took place at the home of a philosophy professor whose two golden retrievers slept on either side of the fireplace “like bookends beside the hearth” while the sunset lit the Berkshire Hills “in scarlet and gold.” For many more students, college means the anxious pursuit of marketable skills in overcrowded, under-resourced institutions, where little attention is paid to that elusive entity sometimes call the “whole person.” For still others, it means travelling by night to a fluorescent office building or to a “virtual classroom” that exists only in cyberspace. It is a pipe dream to imagine that every student can have the sort of experience that our richest colleges, at their best, provide. But it is a nightmare society that affords the chance to learn and grow only to the wealthy, brilliant, or lucky few. Many remarkable teachers in America’s community colleges, unsung private colleges, and underfunded public colleges live this truth every day, working to keep the ideal of democratic education alive.[1]
But the actual outcomes should give us pause. Consider the following information. These figures are for the state of Missouri, admittedly not the economically strongest part of the United States. For every hundred students who enter high school, seventy-eight will graduate, of whom forty-seven will enter college. Of these, only sixteen will earn a Bachelor’s degree, with another six earning an associate degree. Unless you read the statistics, you would never guess that only about a third of those entering college would reach the Holy Grail of a degree in a timely fashion.
But, as the TV pitchmen say, there’s more. Among college graduates in the United States, with the number varying according to the vagaries of the national and global economy, around 10 percent cannot immediately find work at all. And it gets worse from there. Go back to our sixteen college graduates. Of these, fully a third will end up underemployed, meaning that they will have a job that does not require a four-year degree to hold down the position.
Of one hundred high school graduates, only sixteen will finish a first degree and only eleven will be employed in a job appropriate to their college education. Think about it. From a hundred high school graduates, we are down to eleven young men and women who completed their degrees in a timely fashion, moved into the workforce, and found a job commensurate with their education and experience.
Look for depressing statistics like these ones in the recruitment and promotional literature for a college or university close to you. Look really hard. You will rarely find them. Show us the political platform that proudly proclaims that the world’s largest, most comprehensive, and best post-secondary education system produces a positive outcome for as many as a third of those who attend it. Sounds a little underwhelming, doesn’t it? The Canadian results are better, in part because of a strong high school system and a lower participation rate. But the general direction is much the same.
Of course, this being contemporary North America, opportunity and outcomes are not equally shared. The percentage of students at elite universities who experience desired outcomes—quick passage through college and a shift into paid employment in a decent job—is much higher, probably in the order of 60 percent or more of the total. (Following the Missouri example, if a hundred high school graduates go to an elite institution, at least ninety will complete