So, how does one make sense of this statistical jumble? First, it is obvious that, on average, a college education carries real financial benefits. On average, college and university graduates do significantly better than nongraduates. Second, it is equally obvious that the field of study matters. The average income and career earnings of medical doctors greatly exceed those of film studies graduates, and electrical engineers make more money than wildlife biologists. Third, many of the career achievements are associated with the personal characteristics of the graduates. Before a single day at college, university students have set themselves apart from their high school classmates by being, on average, smarter, harder-working, more dependable, adaptable, and determined, as well as being significantly wealthier (in terms of family income). But heavy-duty mechanics and oil drillers can make more money than film studies graduates too.
What hangs over all of the averages and statistics is that they do not predict the outcomes for individual students. A mediocre high school graduate, attending a fourth-tier college, can soar to the top and become fabulously successful. A class valedictorian, accepted at all the top-five universities she applied to, can run into an intellectual brick wall during her first year at Harvard and skulk home in abject failure. An engineering graduate, entering the job market in the economic doldrums, can end up waiting on tables, just as a psychology student could turn into a world-class journalist and succeed magnificently. Students and parents plan for post-secondary education based on averages and stories of great successes, believing that each young woman or man can or will be the one who will achieve phenomenal results. Such is the naïveté of our age that people equate averages with individual outcomes, a risky venture at the best of times—and these are not the best of times.
Anecdotes do not pay the bills. College websites often have examples of Arts and Science graduates who went on to do great things. (See Yale’s, for example.[13] ) These stories—and some are truly inspirational—do not tell you what happens to an incoming high school graduate. The incoming student may be the next Steve Jobs, drop out quickly, and become a world-changing billionaire. He may be the next Malcolm Gladwell and become a truly impressive writer. She may follow in the footsteps of Oprah Winfrey (who did not quite finish her degree at Tennessee State University). But these are real longshots, offered up as part of the “You can be anything you want to be” mantra that dominates modern parenting in North America. While the individual stories are impressive—Kim Coates of raunchy Sons of Anarchy fame did graduate in drama from the University of Saskatchewan—but that in no way means that all USask drama graduates will follow his path from the Canadian prairie to Hollywood.
Nor, at the same time, do average incomes of university graduates tell incoming students what their employment and career outcomes will be, in large measure because all the statistics are backward-looking. Basing plans for an eighteen-year-old’s future today on the basis of the career experiences of university graduates in the 1980s or even the 1990s is suspect at best. After all, the fundamental economic uncertainties attached to globalization and technological change have made predicting the future a mug’s game.
The Dream Factories live on. There are thousands of stories each year of young people, including many from disadvantaged backgrounds, who make their way through university and launch themselves into wonderful jobs and enviable lifestyles. Modern society is populated by doctors, nurses, economists, university professors, accountants, financial officers, engineers, computer scientists, microbiologists, and many others who could not do their jobs without a high-quality advanced education, often requiring two or more degrees after high school. For many more, particularly those from poorer or marginalized populations, colleges and universities convert dreams into reality. These are the system’s success stories and they deserve to be heard.
But colleges and universities also produce poor results, the numbers varying, based on the quality of the input (admission standards), the rigour of the programs (academic standards), and the nature of the field of study (professional standards). How often do these institutions publish accounts of the devastation of student and family dreams when young people are forced to withdraw because they lack the intellectual ability to complete an undergraduate degree? Do we hear about the international students with limited English-language ability, whose families saved for years and struggled to get them into a third-tier American or Canadian university only to have them fail to graduate and head home in despair, having used up the family’s money? And is there much coverage, beyond the occasional obligatory story about English-literature graduates serving coffee at Starbucks, about the system-wide experiences with unemployment and underemployment? For many university students—no one knows the percentage, but it’s much too high—the Dream Factories produce unhappiness. For a growing number, these factories produce outright nightmares.
There is a silver lining in this story. Many employers do favour college graduates, even if it is for work that does not require an advanced education, such a hotel clerk, rental-car sales associate, retail clerk, or the like. Fairly or not, many employers use the completion of an undergraduate degree as a sign of commitment to task, work ethic, and basic ability, and not any longer as a sign of excellence in such previously fundamental areas as writing and mathematical ability, basic understanding of political and legal systems, and general education. In other words, if you are hiring car-rental desk clerks, and of two hundred applicants, half have college degrees, there’s no reason not to give them preference. So, in an economy with too few jobs of any variety, college and university graduates can usually find some sort of employment.
Using twenty-first century survival skills—marked by moving back in with their parents, getting regular contributions from Mum and Dad, sharing living accommodations with friends, holding down two or more jobs, postponing major life choices (marriage, children, buying a home), and getting by with less—young college graduates are generally making do. They may not enjoy the lives of the leisured and well-financed middle class that they and their parents anticipated, but neither are they on the streets. While aspiring to the upper middle class and beyond, many thousands of college graduates are settling into lives in the lower middle class, often enjoying lower standards of living than their parents and coping with ongoing uncertainty about the future. This, for the vast majority of young people in North America, was not the dream that they had been sold.
Upgrading Skills and Credentials
So, what are young people and their families doing about the growing crisis in the employment of university graduates? They are doing just what the Dream Factories and their government supporters want them to do: they are doubling down on their investments and continuing their studies in order to obtain a second or third degree. If graduates with a BA cannot find a job, continuing on to graduate school to obtain a MA should surely give them an advantage over the competition. To top it off, the best schools offer graduate stipends, research assistantships, and other support to help defray the cost of attending. There is not a great deal of evidence, however, that these educational gambles pay off in a major way. Less than a quarter of PhD holders end up with full-time faculty teaching positions. Instead, many wind up on short-term contracts. We won’t get into the horrors of teaching at universities as an adjunct or sessional professor, but it’s tough to argue that it’s worth the cost in money and years that it takes to get a PhD. And, as in other fields, the production of MAs in Political Science, MScs in Biology, PhDs in English Literature, or Doctorates in Education is in no systematic way tied to evident market demand.
Crisis in the Law Schools
The USA is experiencing a decline in law school applicants, with 20% fewer applications this