In an age of egregiously spoiled children—one outcome of small family size and two-career families—it’s hardly surprising that parents devote a great deal of effort to the admissions process. But there are deeper issues at play here. While the reality is less impressive than the myth, most wealthy parents buy into some variant of the double-dipper myth of university attendance. The first, and widely shared, element is that a university degree creates job opportunities and therefore a steady adult income, and even a rewarding career, although that is becoming secondary. Second, there is the belief that attendance at the “right” university will bring prestigious opportunities, through personal connections (maybe your son will marry the daughter of a billionaire or your daughter’s roommate will become a senior executive at Procter & Gamble) and the glamour of the degree. That 40 percent of the graduating class from Yale University found work in the financial industry—despite the moral bankruptcy of the sector in the last decade—is a clarion call to parents: “Get your kids into Yale and they will be rich!”
Other countries offer variations on the same theme. Attendance at a top Japanese school is often a precondition for a great job in the civil service, where power rests in Japan. In India, graduating from an IIT produces a badge of honour that the individual and the extended family carry for life. Every country has its institutional hierarchy, which in the minds of parents relates far more to career opportunities and income forecasts than the universities would like to believe; their commitment is to the ideal of high education, world-class research, and a stimulating intellectual environment. The Times Higher Education Supplement produces a widely distributed annual ranking of the top four hundred universities in the world. Grabbing a spot near the top—“the 400” represents about half of one percent of the world’s universities—pushes an institution to the forefront of parents’ minds. The rankings, won by academic success and determined by peer reviews, have their primary value in recruiting students (and donors) to the institution. In much the same way, the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings industry shapes and distorts institutional expenditures and planning, all with a view to making the universities more attractive to students and their parents.
The Rationale for Investing in Higher Education
Accept, if you will, that there are parents who truly wish their students to have a challenging intellectual experience, to study at the feet of the masters, and to graduate from universities with a well-developed world view and a broad understanding of the human condition and/or the natural world. Recognize that these parents are in the minority. Parents are prepared to invest very heavily—up to $60,000 a year for a top American private university and $20,000 a year for a high-ranked public institution, when living costs are factored in.
Why do they pay so much? Because they want their children to get a job and earn a high income. (Or, to be frank, if the family is truly wealthy and the teenagers will never have to work for a living, the goal is largely pride and bragging rights.) They have sipped the university Kool-Aid for decades and perhaps benefited from university attendance themselves, when participation rates were much lower and the job market much more favourable. Or sometimes they ante up because they can see no other alternative. We live in an age that prioritizes white-collar office work and that unwittingly deprecates blue collar or physical labour, even if such work produces higher and steadier incomes. Finally, parents are willing to pay up because they know that few children have the entrepreneurial spirit and drive to produce their own jobs and careers. So, in an age of rampant credentialism, when a university degree is a prerequisite for the most basic, entry-level jobs—rental-car clerk, telephone operator, and the like—when they are bombarded by promises about the knowledge economy, when government leaders speak about the high value attached to post-secondary education, and when everyone is encouraged to enrol in university, they do the obvious thing.
Politicians reinforce these parental obsessions when they speak in boosterish terms about the “knowledge economy” and the open-ended opportunities that lie before college and university graduates. As companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, Sun Computer Systems, DoCoMo, Samsung, Alibaba, Nokia, and thousands of others displaced the big industrial firms at the top of the corporate order, it seemed that new technologies and their applications would define the evolving global economy. The global expansion of university education, both domestically and in terms of the annual migration of millions of international students, has been tied to the assumption that the high-tech economy of the twenty-first century would easily absorb all of the graduates from the world’s universities. This is proving to be only partly true.
Diversity in Size, Diversity in Quality
Savour for a moment the diversity of these Dream Factories. Universities are to cities, regions, and countries what a degree is to the student: a promise of prosperity and opportunity. There are more than thirty thousand degree-granting universities operating around the world, not counting a growing and unknown number of private-sector, for-profit institutions. These universities range in size from tiny specialist religious universities in the United States, such as the City University in Kansas City, Missouri, which has twelve students, to massive online universities in the developing world. Indira Gandhi National Open University, based in Delhi, India, enrolls 3.5 million students. They vary just as widely in quality, with Harvard University, Oxford University, and the University of Tokyo emerging from the same academic tradition as the New England Institution of Art (rated as the worst college in the United States by Washington Monthly and ranked poorly in terms of student satisfaction). These thirty thousand institutions are all universities, in the legal and technical definition of the term, but they are as different from one another as soccer is from roller derby.
The transformation that has occurred in higher education during the last five or six decades has been almost universally viewed as a positive social change. Universities have evolved from what they once were—reclusive places of intellectual contemplation—into modern institutions. Yet some have also become degree mills that are destroying the reputation of university education around the world. Discovering that the transition is, in numerical terms, largely a function of the last sixty years and, in quality and impact, the last twenty years, should be reason to pause. In less than a century, universities have emerged from their impressive foundation in North America and Western Europe, beyond the toehold created in Asia and the European colonies, into global ubiquity.
Once elite, aloof, and unique, universities are now democratic, accessible, and commonplace. Every town and city of substantial size—and many unsubstantial places—expects to have a publicly funded university. Universities emerged, with little fanfare, as one of the central instruments of state educational, economic, and social planning and have become a major force for change around the globe.
Celebrated as a universal “good thing,” universities are reshaping pathways to careers and adulthood for hundreds of millions of young people. Their presence transforms communities and changes the way that employers recruit, train, and hire young people. More importantly, they have become repositories for the dreams of millions of young adults, their parents, their communities, and their nations. The world has embraced these institutions in a remarkable, uncritical, and highly enthusiastic way. Now the young, their families, and their countries are slowly discovering that these dreams are compromised, that the promise of personal and collective opportunity has been seriously exaggerated, and that the unchecked and ill-managed growth of the university system has developed without much reference to the job market or the global economy. But they sure are popular.
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Awakening from the Dream
The Italian university graduate, visiting North America as a volunteer