RISHON LEZION, Israel — The New York Times reports that higher education in the United States is increasingly an illusion for many Americans, especially if they are relying on parent college-loans:
The rising cost of college — even before the recession — threatens to put higher education out of reach for most Americans, according to the biennial report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.
Over all, the report found, published college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007 while median family income rose 147 percent. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade, and students from lower-income families, on average, get smaller grants from the colleges they attend than students from more affluent families.
Several years ago, in Boston, I was talking about student loans and the skyrocketing cost of homes in the city. My friend glumly sighed and responded, “I’m never going to have a home.” And he is not alone in that sentiment among people who are in their twenties and thirties.
Think about the significance of that statement. The American Dream always been to own a home with a white, picket fence, get married, have two cars, a dog, and two or three children. But many people our age are increasingly pessimistic that we will ever realize that dream. We fear that, for the first time in known memory, the current generation will be worse off than the prior one because of crushing debt from student loans and credit cards as well as an economy in which wages barely match inflation and is now facing a deep recession. Many of us are hoping — sometimes not so secretly — that the housing market will continue to crash so that we will be able to afford a home someday.
But the primary reason for my generation’s situation is a society that has constructed a faulty premise around higher education. As an anonymous professor writes in The Atlantic:
America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns.
Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it—try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.
For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.
Americans are indeed an idealistic people – sometimes to the point of being extremely naive. (Living in Israel – where most people are cynical, if not outright pessimistic – has made me understand this difference much more.) For decades, Americans have told their children and teenagers that they will be sure to succeed if they graduate from college and then work hard. Well, as we learn from the Mystery Professor, that does not always happen.
But many Americans believe that it does, and this is where the economic implications are enormous. It is simple supply-and-demand. If everyone wants to go to college, then the price will increase because there is a limit to the capacities of universities (especially when many foreign students want to study there as well). When demand rises and supply remains level or falls, then prices will also rise. The higher education sector, in effect, has a monopoly because people will pay whatever price they set, as long as it seems reasonable (and, as the Times article notes, it might not be soon). The demand for the product is extremely high.
The only way to reduce the cost — or at least slow the increase in the price — of higher education is to change the demand side of the equation. (It is impossible to build numerous universities quickly enough to increase the supply.) As I wrote in a prior post, more Americans are choosing to attend college in other countries. That is a good start. But the only significant measure to take is to encourage fewer people to pursue higher education.
As Professor X rightly notes, this idea seems classist. But it does not have to be. Many Americans wrongly believe that white-collar jobs are inherently superior to blue-collar ones. Hogwash! People who work at desk jobs all day sit in cubicles and stare at computers all day, and they can become overweight, stressed-out people with a permanent case of bloodshot eyes. On the other hand, mechanics, for example, get regular exercise, fresh air when the weather is warm, and knowledge of practical skills that many people do not know. Besides, local mechanics can never be outsourced. (Of course, fixing automobiles is not a walk in the park — but all jobs have their downsides. Well, except for beer testers in breweries.)
The United States needs to emulate many European countries and establish an education system with multiple tracks that can match a person’s abilities to a particular field. Some people would go to university to study liberal arts or something specific like law, business, or medicine; others would become the aforementioned mechanics. And there is nothing inherently wrong with either one. A lifelong mechanic has probably never read Plato’s Republic, but I have no idea how to change the oil in a car.
As I have learned by playing the Civilization computer game, societies need experts of all sorts to thrive. (Who says video games have nothing to teach?) The United States needs doctors, lawyers, ditch diggers, mechanics, authors, scientists, garbage men, teachers, plumbers, waiters, politicians, businessmen, and dishwashers, as well as every other industry that exists. But Americans subconsciously encourage people to pursue white-collar professions because they are viewed as superior. And that is what is classist. If everyone in the United States were a doctor, then garbage would pile up in the streets because there would be no one to remove it. Everyone profession is needed.
The optimism of Americans has been a source of inspiration since the founding of the country, but the U.S. education system now needs a dose of practical reality.
