In some nations, the dashed expectations sparked activist youth movements. Such was the case with the Arab Spring movement that swept across North Africa and the Middle East after 2010, the Occupy movement in the USA and Canada that attacked increasing inequality, and regional social and cultural protests against inequality and social injustice elsewhere in the world. Young adults in Greece, including those with and without university degrees, struggle with crushing rates of youth unemployment (around 50 percent officially) and declining wages. Not surprisingly, having been raised to expect better outcomes, many Greek youth joined the mass protests that spread across the country in the wake of Greece’s cataclysmic debt crisis in 2015.
Most unemployed and underemployed young adults did not become revolutionaries, or even protestors. They struggled with their realities, continued to search for work and—following closely on the ideological foundations of the modern university, which linked outcome to individual effort and ability—largely blamed themselves for their inability to find work. In some instances, they were right. Decent jobs could be found in non-urban places—remote Indigenous reservations (“reserves” in Canada), the pre-2015 oil fields in North Dakota and Wyoming, and certainly for trained professionals in the poorer districts of the major cities —but these were not always attractive to college graduates raised to expect a more comfortable middle-class life.
Suffice it to say that many college and university graduates struggled—and so did those who started along the degree path and opted out. Those with large student loans carried a major burden into an adult life of low wages and uncertain employment prospects. As if it were not already difficult enough to find work, many of the new jobs were part-time and often with few or no benefits.
The harsh truth is that colleges and universities have been grossly oversold—most notably by the institutions themselves. The result has been that for some time now the dream has been in danger of dying, although governments have largely ignored the mounting evidence and the public seems blissfully unaware of it. Colleges and universities continue to promote the supposed advantages of a post-secondary education, arguing that they are not job factories, but institutes of higher learning, and that intellectual improvement should not be connected to crass questions of employment. Meanwhile the system undergoes a massive reorientation of its programming toward professional and technical fields of study.
Opening universities and colleges to women, minorities, Indigenous peoples, children from working-class families, and the disabled brought many thousands of talented and capable people into the advanced educational system. The world has been surely blessed by the perspectives, abilities, and contributions of young adults who, in earlier times, would have been locked out of career advancement through college educations. The same holds in the developing world, where university degrees had, for generations, been the exclusive preserve of the wealthy, the well-connected, and the highly gifted. To a point—imprecise and never examined—the opening of the university floodgates served a valuable personal, national, and global purpose.
But at some stage a tipping point was reached. Universities let in too many students for the employment market to absorb. The overemphasis on personal choice allowed young adults to select their own fields of study, skewing the skills of those graduating in favour of the educational interests of seventeen- to twenty-one-year-olds. A world desperate for highly skilled engineers got more psychology graduates. An economy eager for people with advanced technical skills got thousands of wildlife biologists. A national workforce that had space for a few hundred fine arts graduates a year could not absorb thousands of them. University education still worked for many, but not all, and increasingly not even most, of the first-year students who ventured, bright-eyed and more or less eager, onto the world’s campuses each year.
Governments kept the floodgates open, and even expanded opportunities. American president Barack Obama urged more and more young people to go to college, apparently oblivious to the fact that sending more students into the system, not to mention weaker ones, watered down the quality of the country’s skilled workforce. There was method in this seeming madness. With the global economy in dramatic flux, with financial crises building on massive technological change, there were not enough unfilled jobs in the economy to absorb the large number of young people graduating from high school. Governments faced a seemingly obvious choice: let the students enrol in a partially subsidized university system for four or more years, keeping them out of the labour market while they developed some saleable skills. Or, on the other hand, let them join the ranks of the idle and unemployed. Colleges and universities, if they did nothing else, served as a holding pen for a large reserve labour force that, if economic growth occurred as hoped, could capitalize on future job opportunities.
The college degree did not stop working as a route to prosperity and career progress, which should, in any case, be measured more in terms of job and life satisfaction than annual income. But it worked for fewer and fewer students all the time. With national dropout rates ranging from under 10 percent in nations like Germany to over 50 percent in the United States, millions of university students left the system each year without attaining the desired credential. Many of these, of course, found their feet through entrepreneurship, personal effort, family connections, or specialized training. But large numbers bore the mark of failure, of falling off the twenty-first-century career train, left to fend for themselves, degreeless, in a world awash in equally unqualified young people.
Always remember, though, that for a lucky and skilled minority, the college or university degree worked brilliantly. Without the opportunity for advanced study, these students might not have been able to secure the stable, high-paying jobs that launched them on a comfortable and productive life. Note in passing that the evidence is strong that students from wealthy backgrounds are far more likely to end up wealthy themselves. Perhaps the most assured route to a high income is having high-income parents and a stable family background. “Power couples” conceive bright children and bring them up in stable homes—only 9 percent of college-educated mothers who give birth each year are unmarried, compared with 61 percent of high school dropouts. They stimulate their children relentlessly: children of professionals hear thirty-two million more words by the age of four than those of parents on welfare.[11] Recognize, too, that many who did not go to college or graduate from university can also do well economically, largely because of hard work, personal qualities, technical skills and training, risk-taking, family support, pure luck, or specialized talent—think Bill Gates, LeBron James, and Taylor Swift. There are plumbers, pipefitters, real estate entrepreneurs, dealers at top casinos and hotels, franchise operators, building contractors, high-quality hairdressers, long-haul truckers, and many other working-class and technical personnel who earn upwards of $75,000 a year—or more than teachers in most states. In other words, not going to university can also be quite remunerative and personally satisfying, something that too many educators and politicians forget or ignore.
But here is the kicker. Americans spend billions each year on the world’s largest and most impressive college and university system, with over several thousand degree-granting institutions. It’s hard to say exactly how many billions of dollars are involved, but an article in The Atlantic estimated that the US federal government spent $69 billion in 2013 just on various grant programs to universities and colleges, not including loans.[12] Total outstanding student loans have now passed $1 trillion. Families spend billions each year, incurring sizable debts to capitalize on the perceived opportunities for their children. Young people devote at least four years and as much as a quarter of a million dollars in the hope that they will be able to convert their studies into a decent career. This is a staggering investment, one now being replicated around the world, based on uncertain and unspecified returns. This is gambling of the highest order.
Weighing Personal Qualities Against Credentials
There is a grand statistical debate taking place about the actual earnings of college and university graduates. On average, college graduates earn significantly more than non-college