The steady and even growing enrolments belie the notion that there is a crisis in graduate school attendance. After all, if the number of people pursuing law degrees holds steady or dips only slightly, then surely that is an indication that the market has not yet discounted these degrees in any substantial way. But law is a good example. Changing technologies and the shift toward paralegals and outsourced research has reduced the demand for new lawyers. In many jurisdictions, finding a career-launching articling position has become a formidable challenge. Imagine completing a four-year undergraduate degree, fighting to get into a good law school, finishing a two- or three-year program, and then running into a brick wall when searching for the crucial first job.
Here, however, the signs of market awareness are becoming evident. The number of law school applications has indeed started to fall, particularly in the United States, where several small law schools have closed. But the law schools that remain need students to fill the classes and pay the bills. Faced with fewer applications for a fixed number of positions, the law schools simply go down the scale a little further—effectively lowering their standards of admission—in order to complete the incoming class. Lower-quality students likely mean higher failure rates, poorer performance at the bar examinations, and less-effective lawyers in the profession. This is hardly the outcome any country would want.
Even here there are some oddities. The rush to graduate schools does not hold, incidentally, in the highest-demand areas, like engineering, the sciences, and accounting, where undergraduate-degree holders can usually still find good jobs. In these cases, international students make up the lion’s share of the graduate enrolments, perhaps because of the lower math and science skills of domestic students. Some of these degrees are of value mostly to the incomes of those who hold them. The best example is the growth in Master of Education and PhD/Doctorate in Education programs. Most of these graduate students are practising teachers; the main attraction of the graduate programs is contractually fixed salary increases tied to the completion of an additional degree, even if the degree is not connected to their teaching duties. For the United States, the salary bill for these extra—and often irrelevant—degrees adds more than $5 billion a year to the education system’s budget.
Paying the Bills
In order to manage student debt, some undergraduates have gone so far as to pay for their education by selling companionship and sex to older men. The usual income for “sugaring,” as it’s called, is between $3,000 and $5,000 a month, according to a Miami firm called “Sugardaddie.” Allison, a twenty-three-old “sugar baby” in New York state, whose online name is Barbiewithabrain, has earned that much and more over the past five years from three successive sugar daddies.[15]
The situation in graduate schools raises the question about what else young adults can do in this job market to advance their interests and meet their aspirations. In the 1960s and 1970s, a high school diploma was sufficient to get the attention of most ordinary employers. By the 1980s and 1990s, an undergraduate degree was the key. By the 2000s and 2010s, the undergraduate degree, outside of specialized and technical programs, had started to run its course, providing access to entry-level jobs but rarely to desired careers. Now, graduate and professional degrees are deemed the key to entry into a successful economic future, although even here the shine has started to come off the advanced degrees. What a change this is from a generation or two earlier, when a college diploma was a sure ticket to the middle class.
The greater problem is that the doors are open so wide that the system is overwhelmed by students of minimal academic ability, motivation, and innate curiosity. Colleges and universities were not intended for the disengaged. Nor were they designed to be credential- and income-conferring organizations focused on students’ short-term career needs. But this is what governments want them to be, what parents demand that they be, and what a growing percentage of the students expect them to be.
Universities were once bastions of achievement and meritocracy, although nowhere near what faded memories suggest. That still holds for the elite institutions, but many more now wallow in mediocrity. Here is a statement, alarming but true, that you won’t hear from any government or university bureaucrat:
For many of the world’s university students, their attempts to get a degree will result in academic failure. Graduates may experience minimal career benefits, be burdened with debt, will not have the expected job opportunities and income and may find they are not prepared for a successful career. For a minority—ironically largely in academic fields where the programs are regulated by outside professional agencies, like nursing, medicine, and engineering—university degrees produce superb career opportunities, high incomes, and a good chance at professional satisfaction. For many (but not all) of the rest, disappointment awaits.
Colleges and universities have never been perfect. Student thirst for learning was never as intense as nostalgia would have it, although we suggest (and experience reinforces) that it was demonstrably better than at present. The career outcomes for graduates were never perfect, but again better than at present. In over two generations, colleges have gone from being places to learn, as well as to mature and socialize, to places to prepare for a career. The tragedy of the Dream Factories is that, for a significant majority of the students in North America, they are also failing in this new role. What’s more, with the surge of attempts to regulate sexual behaviour and freedom of speech, struggles over on-campus drinking, criticisms of college athletics, high levels of student debt, and many other expanding challenges, the colleges and universities in North America are slowly losing their special status as places to socialize, have fun, and discover one’s future.
What conclusions can we draw from the many transformations of the past fifty or so years? First, there are career benefits, particularly for those who graduate. While much of this is accounted for by non-institutional elements, college graduates generally do reasonably well in the contemporary workforce. Second, there is still a college premium evident in the workforce,[16] and in most countries university graduates have considerably lower unemployment rates than those who do not have a degree. Our point, from the outset, is not to argue that there are no employment benefits from a college degree. Rather, we have emphasized the growing reality that colleges, which lose many of their admitted students enroute to graduation, produce uneven results that are not consistent with the promotional rhetoric and realities of the contemporary workforce.
While it is reassuring to note that college graduates usually do find work, it is depressing for many of them to discover that the work is insecure, low paid, and not connected to their expectations and what they feel are the promises of governments, institutions, and parents. Moreover, the college and university sector does not hold back in celebrating the accomplishments of their top graduates, using recruiting and promotional tactics that are more akin to late-night television weight-loss and hair-replacement advertisements than a realistic assessment of how college might change a young person’s life.
But broader societal forces are at play as well, a fact that helps explain parental paranoia and youth anxiety about the future. Robert Putnam, an eminent American sociologist, documented the surge in inequality in the USA and described the rapid collapse of the American Dream. He put it bluntly:
The causes of this increase in inequality during the past three to four decades are much debated—globalization, technological change and the consequent increase in “returns to education,” deunionization, superstar compensation, changing social norms, and post-Reagan public policy—though the basic shift toward inequality occurred under both Republican and Democratic administrations. No serious observer doubts that the past 40 years have witnessed an almost unprecedented growth in inequality in America. Ordinary Americans, too, have gradually become aware of rising inequality, though they underestimate the extent of the shift.[17]
Putnam argued that unequal access to high-quality education is a significant contributor