The university degree is widely believed to be that golden ticket. Within two generations or so, universities have been transformed from largely Western, elite, and male-dominated institutions into truly global, multicultural, gender-neutral, and increasingly open-access platforms for personal growth and exploration. It seems that China is building universities as fast as the United States once opened McDonald’s franchises. India’s aggressively mediocre university system expands apace, relying more on unchecked private-sector growth than quality-focused public-sector expansion. Nigeria, with one of the most undependable university systems in the world, has seen its undergraduate population grow from seventeen thousand in 1970 to 1.7 million in 2012—a one-hundred-fold increase—before starting to slide in the face of demoralizing career results for graduates.[1] Even the United States, which is watching century-old private, rural, religious, and liberal-arts colleges close for lack of students, is supporting a rapid expansion of its highly variable and questionable for-profit university system.
Every generation needs and wants a focus for its dreams. And universities are perfect for this. Given enough money, there is, in theory, a university seat for every student who wants one, without, of course, any reference to intellectual ability or scholarly interest. There are grand schools, with impeccable pedigrees, that cater to the truly talented. Others are places for the offspring of the nouveau riche or the socially ambitious. Still others, with failure rates that defy belief, accept all comers and watch them be thrown onto the intellectual and career junk heap, degreeless and branded as failures. Even worse are those places all over the world, public and private, that move all tuition-paying students through their studies, granting degrees to individuals of minimal achievement who have severe deficiencies in their basic skills. Worse still is the distressingly extensive culture of lying, academic fraud, cheating, and fabrication of transcripts that increasingly mars the credibility of the global university system.
Like all of the grand dreams that have driven global affairs, modern universities display a mix of achievement and failure. There’s plenty of the former, but plenty of the latter too. Much as a goldfield produces a handful of rich deposits and thousands of empty shafts and the high-tech incubator generates two successful companies for every hundred that enter, universities produce a small percentage of winners. Some universities produce graduates of world-changing potential. Many others—including some of the famous as well as the obscure campuses—generate degree holders who work as taxi drivers, waiters, and retail clerks, hardly the stuff of parental dreams and childhood ambition. The odds are better than in a lottery, but nowhere near the slam-dunk of common belief.
For young adults, their families, and countries around the world, the Dream Factories have become a central solution to the uncertainties of the twenty-first century. While there are many examples of university graduates going on to great careers and productive lives, there is also ample evidence that the global system has grown too fast. There are only so many people with the talent to succeed at university. There are only so many jobs and opportunities that benefit from a university degree. And yet these institutions continue to be built by governments, private-sector speculators, and well-meaning philanthropists, all of whom embrace the belief in the unlimited absorptive capacity of the modern economy for university graduates. And they are embraced by young people and parents, eager to escape from physical or outside work, people who believe that universities hold the key to success.
Universities continue to be touted as the flagship opportunity-producing machines of the twenty-first century, but in reality they fall far short of delivering what they promise. There is nothing inherently wrong with them. For smart, motivated, and attentive students, a university degree can bring a wonderful education, a life-changing social experience, and the foundation for a highly successful career. The problem lies with two things: the uneven quality of the university experience and the global disconnect between the mass production of university graduates and the needs of the modern economy.
So here is the reality that is rarely discussed. Across the United States and Western Europe, there are huge numbers of unemployed and underemployed university graduates. In Asia, thousands of graduate degree holders, even those in the so-called career-ready fields of engineering, computer science, and mathematics, find a tight if not closed job market. Nigerian university graduates actually earn average salaries below those of high school graduates, so flawed is that country’s university system. And the Arab Spring was, researchers have discovered, an uprising driven significantly by the unrealized dreams of thousands of university graduates who could not find work in the stalled Middle Eastern economies.
The global university system needs a reset, as do the expectations of young people, their families, and governments. Governments need to stop expanding the system. Universities need to change their focus from the production of more graduates to a greater concentration on the quality of the system. Employers need to speak clearly to universities, young people, parents, and governments about their medium- and long-term employment needs. Young people and their parents must look far more carefully at the abilities of young adults and the realities of the twenty-first century economy. The system can be fixed, although the self-interest and autonomy of most institutions militate against responsiveness. The harsh truth is that universities will reform only when governments change their policies, and, even more rapidly, when young people pursue other means of preparing themselves for the future.
But here is the greater challenge. The young need a new dream, because the old one that has served for the past fifty or sixty years no longer works. The global population of young people is higher than ever. The technological and competitive transitions in the world economy have rarely been greater. Millennials, looking forward, are bewildered by the new realities. Their parents, scared about the prospects for their children and even for themselves, turn back to what worked in the past, namely university degrees. If every generation needs a dream, the tragedy of the twenty-first century is that young adults have had to borrow the vision of opportunity that sustained their parents. The Dream Factories are proving to be more ephemeral and less real than anyone thought. Dealing with this reality may well be the transformative challenge of our time.
1
The Dream Factories
The world’s universities and colleges are in turmoil. In a little over a generation, they have been transformed from training grounds for professionals, the curious, the gifted, and the wealthy into expensive extensions of high schools, designed to educate a broad range of people and prepare them for stable middle-class opportunities. The transformation has its roots in the post–World War II era, starting in the USA with opportunities for returned servicemen, then growing there and elsewhere during the 1950s and 1960s with the “space race” and the search for sustained economic growth.
The dream of universities as the guaranteed road to prosperity—an idea that grew first and fastest in North America—delivered on what it promised, at least at the beginning. An expanding professional and scientific economy produced many opportunities for young adults, who found that a college degree provided a reliable and useful ticket to the middle class. The convergence between post-secondary studies and employment opportunities, while not ideal, was nonetheless impressive and, for those intellectually and financially able to consider college, rewarding. But the result has been an institutional sea-change. Universities, once “ivory towers,” have increasingly become Dream Factories, educational institutions dependent for their revenues and thus their existence on selling their product—their dream—to an ever-wider