This preoccupation with academic study leading to a career is nothing new, much as advocates for post-secondary education like to think higher education is primarily for expanding the mind, improving public discourse, and celebrating the world of ideas. The growth of colleges in all countries has been tied to the economy since the end of World War II. Companies and the public sector, the argument goes, need highly qualified personnel—mostly college graduates. Governments want a strong, modern economy, which most authorities see as tied to the training of young people and the creation of intellectual prosperity in the laboratories and field stations of research-intensive institutions. Eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds desire careers freed from physical labour—jobs that are often called “meaningful” by student advocates and the politicians of the left. Globally, it can be argued that this generation is the softest generation of all, desperate to escape from agrarian or low-end industrial futures and eager for white-collar opportunities or, for the tiny creative elite, for entrepreneurial activities. Students in China, India, and Vietnam tackle their studies with a ferocity and competitiveness that most Western students find alarming; but then, for American and European students, the rice paddy or the sweatshop is not the alternative to a college education. From South Africa to Thailand, Finland to Bulgaria, the most-motivated and hardest-working young people are determined to find brain work and to avoid physical labour. The test of the college system, then, is the degree to which opportunities for graduates match with graduates’ abilities and expectations.
In rich countries, these young adults—often poorly prepared for the choices they now must make—face a bewildering set of options. If they possess extraordinary abilities or if their parents have money, they can select from several world-class universities, believed to be fast-tracks to prosperity and career success. If they come from poor families or are of average intelligence or ability, their options will be more limited: Oxford, Harvard, and the Sorbonne are not likely possibilities for them. But even here, a long list of universities, colleges, for-profit institutions, and the like compete for their attention and tuition dollars.
Their counterparts in the developing world have fewer choices. Here, the decision is a harsher one, often amounting to education or a life of factory work or subsistence agriculture. But here, too, the dream is very much alive. Children of the wealthy or well-connected, prodigies, or those educated in elite private schools have significant options, many outside their home countries. For the children of ambitious middle-class or working-class parents, the best opportunities lie overseas, where post-secondary education may lead to immigration to a more prosperous nation. For the rest, village agriculture or industrial labour beckons.
Earlier generations, too, had their dreams, but they did not often involve universities. Centuries ago, these institutions had a very narrow focus—they served mostly as training places for jobs that required a high degree of literacy: the clergy and, to a lesser degree, the law. Young adults (until late in the nineteenth century they were almost always male) would have scoffed at the idea that universities were the best road to a successful career of any kind. Of the great “robber barons” of the early American industrial age—Astor, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan—only the last had a university education, and that was because his father was wealthy. Even law and medicine were not professionalized until the late 1800s. It was quite possible to become a lawyer by apprenticing yourself in your teens to a practising lawyer—John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada, did that, and Abraham Lincoln read law books after a day’s work—or to become a doctor by spending a short time at some more or less respectable medical academy.
Many young people tried to escape the dead-end drudgery of rural life by taking factory work in cities, but this often did not improve their lives, only substituting one kind of proletarian existence for another. Emigration provided better opportunities for those who dreamt of religious freedom, social liberation, private land, or economic opportunity in North America, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. America, launched in part as a “city on the hill” for religious dissenters, became a global magnet for people seeking prosperity and better prospects. For young men in countries with empires, the dream often involved military or administrative service in the colonies or working in an institution such as the East India Company.
Rapid post–World War II industrialization created a new set of dreams, offered to eager families in the form of secure factory jobs, suburban tract homes, and the domestic tranquility of the consumer age. These were times of simpler dreams, supported by widespread prosperity and growing economic opportunity. It was possible to fulfill one’s dream while working for a company such as General Motors, Ford, or Chrysler, which, mostly thanks to trade unionization, provided middle-class opportunities for working people. Universities were for those heading for the learned professions, for those with sufficient family money to spend four years in a pleasant finishing school, and for those—always a minority—who were genuinely fired with a thirst for academic knowledge. Today’s world is much more muddled, with far greater returns for those who chose the right track, and serious career dangers for those who choose unwisely. For young people and their parents around the world, the dream of personal opportunity and well-being is focused, obsessively, we argue, on university and college education.
It was during this postwar era that the universities began to grow into Dream Factories, first with the influx of war veterans, and then with the tsunami of baby boomers that descended on them after 1960. They began to position themselves as the logical, and increasingly the only, or at least the preferred, route to prosperity. More and more it became clear to young people that universities, not the shop floor and certainly not striking out on their own for new lands or distant opportunities, held the key to their dreams.
An example of this process is the professionalization of school teachers, particularly at the elementary level. Before World War II few teachers in the lower grades went to university. At most they went to a “Normal School,” as teachers’ colleges were sometimes called, for a year’s course. Often those who taught in the one-room country schools had only a high school education. This is why it was common to see classrooms in these schools presided over by teachers, often women, who were twenty years old or even younger. Then, partly as a means of raising salaries, elementary education became “professionalized,” to the point where five years or more of post-secondary education is now required to teach the basics to six-year-olds. Today, if your dream is to be a teacher, there is only one path to achieve it (although some American schools, particularly in poorer districts, are so desperate to find teachers that they are fudging this requirement).
At the same time, the earlier paths to success gradually began to fade. Immigrating to America remains something of a global fantasy, but not for all those who once dreamt of it. Elsewhere, the cities in the developing world hold out hope for the desperate and the ambitious. The “arrival cities” in the sprawling slums around the major cities in the developing world are one of the most important phenomena of our generation, but the prospects for immediate improvement are minimal and uncertain, as any visit to Lagos, Mumbai, or Cairo will attest. Industrial labour, strengthened by a long run of union empowerment, has crumbled, largely due to the unique blend of global competition and technological transformation. There are fewer entry points and fewer opportunities each year.
Where, then, do the dreamers look? Where do people seek opportunity and the promise of well-being and wealth? What do you say to teenagers about their future? That the world is full of endless opportunities? That they can be anything they want to be? That the twists and turns of the global economy have created more uncertainty than we have seen in decades? That they will have a brighter and richer future than their parents? That the lives of today’s adults are no roadmap for the future? It is hard to know how to arm young people for prosperity, opportunities, and a high quality of life in the midst of the constant economic and technological turmoil that engulfs the modern world. For many people, the answer is simple: universities.