Are We Seeing the Beginning of the End of College as We Know It?

It is difficult to speak frankly and substantively about the "higher learning in America" for many reasons, the one that seems to me to matter the most is the piety that surrounds "education" in this country, and because of the numerous other subjects with which it is linked that are even more taboo--like economic inequality, and social class. Nevertheless, I will try to do that anyway here, starting with the matter of just what college is generally understood to be for--why it is that young people are expected to sacrifice childhood and adolescence to getting "good grades" and other little tokens of academic achievement (or at least, conformity to societal expectations) not merely for admission to a college, but an admission to the so-called "best" college available to them; why they are expected to suffer through the stupidity that is the "college search," pouring enormous energy and passion into making ill-informed and irrational selections from among the available schools, and suffering the cumbersome and expensive and unbearably pretentious application process many, many times over; why they are expected to sell themselves into latterday "debt slavery" to pay for the schooling they undertake at the end of the whole process. This is not a desire for intellectual improvement or cultural enrichment or the making of "well-rounded individuals" or any of the other sorts of things to which college presidents grubbily seeking handouts from big donors speak so pompously in their speeches, but rather the belief that a college degree is the best guarantee that a young person can have of a "middle class" life, permitting them an existence with a measure of security and comfort and respectability that they would not otherwise have.

Of course, as my description of the process suggests, the effort required to get the degree has gone up immensely (a reality Mark Ames, among others, has described well)--but not so the reward, which seems to be declining. Certainly Americans, while loving to toss around the word "middle class," have long been fuzzy about what being middle class actually entails--in part because this is convenient for those looking to promote a politically convenient myth of nearly universal middle classness. However, if one does not lower the bar from what it appeared to be at that mid-century point which has been so formative for contemporary expectations--the ability to support an average-sized family (two adults, two to three children) with a minimum of "pecuniary decency" (e.g. a three-bedroom+ house, two cars, health insurance, college for the kids, retirement for mom and dad, with enough left over to get through rainy days and have some little pleasures) on one income (not two, one), then it may be that less than a tenth of the country is really "middle class," maybe much less, given how much more expensive many of the requirements (housing, health insurance, college, retirement) have become. (The children of truly middle class people finish their schooling--even if that means graduate or professional school--debt free. How many do that these days?)

By contrast some forty percent of adults have at least a bachelor's degree, while over a tenth have graduate or professional degrees.

The obvious conclusion is that only a small minority of those with a B.A. are really middle class; and that even many who have graduate and professional degrees, whom one would expect to do still better, and on average actually do have higher incomes than the B.A.-holders , still fall short of that level.

The result is that, in stark contradiction of the conventional wisdom, a college degree does not equal middle classness, and while some might make arguments about too many people studying the wrong things, and so forth, the fact remains that people looking to get more money and told to get more education got the education--but not the money.

The disconnect between "investment" and "return" here would naturally be expected to change people's behavior, especially if that disconnect becomes as extreme as it has--and indeed many in the press, even before the added disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic bemoaned declining college attendance (with the events of the last three years, of course, deepening the decline). The conventional view of that trend has been that it is "the kids" who are in the wrong here--that they need to be persuaded to see that college is really worth their while and that they should make the required sacrifices of time and money.

But the hard reality that college is not the "path to the middle class" they are told it is may mean that they are only responding rationally to a situation of rising costs and declining benefits--and that it is the generally comfortable older people who lived in another time where the cost-benefit ratio was different who should be rethinking the situation.

Rather than insisting that all young people must plan their whole lives around the prospect of a college education we might be asking about that connection between college and middle classness and whether there might not be other ways of achieving a high-productivity, high-wage economy than the current educational system--and possibly better ways, less brutal for the individual, and more cost-effective for society as a whole.

Personally I am not optimistic that we will see very much such questioning very soon. After all, there is the fact that the mainstream political spectrum is virtually defined by its regarding any deep discussion of society and its problems as illegitimate--regarding people as needing to accommodate themselves to the existing conditions rather than ever wondering if the system might be changed, even where that means doing much more for much less--especially where to speak of anything else would offend a politically weighty interest (this, in the end, is what the term "centrism" really means).

This is all the more the case given who is suffering here, and at the same time, who actually has the power here.

After all, if it is the case that the cost of college is rising, and posing growing obstacles in the process, many welcome the fact, not particularly wanting entry into their corner of the world of work to be easier and cheaper. (As described by one character in George Bernard Shaw's classic The Doctor's Dilemma, every profession is a "conspiracy against the laity," and there is always room for the argument that a good many barriers to admission are first and foremost about keeping outsiders out, the number of practitioners down, the remuneration high for those already in the club, with the high price of college, graduate, professional school contributing to that.)

There is the reality that there is a vast institutional investment in sending everyone to college--extending far beyond those who have jobs in higher education to investors in for-profit schools, the equally for-profit apparatus of testing and testing, the "college placement" industry, the vast financial machinery revolving around the over one trillion dollars in student loans on the books. (They securitize student loans just like they do mortgages, after all.)

And there is the reality that the old generally lack empathy, sympathy and respect for the grievances of the young ("Back in my day . . ." they always say), and that this is especially the case when what the young want seems to them like an easier life than they had at the same age (which they tend to begrudge them). And just as this makes a difference when we discuss a matter like Universal Basic Income (UBI), it makes one when we discuss the cost of schooling.

Still, in spite of the exceedingly formidable obstacle it does seem to me possible that, with young people turning away from college; with colleges increasingly facing a situation where fewer people are paying fees or justifying their claims on government support, when they are already hard-pressed financially (as the changing age structure of the population itself makes for that many fewer attendees); with college graduates wondering at the value of the degrees for which they strove so hard as their debts weigh ever more heavily on them in a positive shambles of a job market that may get much worse than it is even now; we will get to a point where people will look back and realize that college has simply lost its old place the center of young lives, and that "peak college attendance" is well behind us.