I return in today's post
to a subject on which I have commented
in the past, and which continues to interest me, namely the distribution of
educational credentials in the American population, and the implications of
that distribution for American politics.
As always, I shall try to make connections between my own experience and
larger social trends.
My father attended Boy's
High School in Manhattan, achieving a grade average of 65 [a fact which, when I
discovered it as an adult, gave me a good deal of retrospective satisfaction,
inasmuch as my sister and I had been under considerable pressure to get high
grades.] In 1919, when he graduated from
Boy's High [after being suspended for a bit for making inflammatory political
speeches], roughly 12-15% of his age cohort earned a high school diploma. In 1923, when he earned a Bachelor's Degree
from City College, only a tiny fraction of his age group [perhaps 2-3%] rose to
that level of educational attainment.
By the time I graduated
from Forest Hills High School in 1950, well over half of my age mates were
earning high school diplomas, but when I received my Bachelor's Degree three
years later, even though a generation had passed since my father's days at
CCNY, it was still the case that only about one in twelve Americans twenty-five
or older held a first college degree. Everyone
I knew was going to college, so it simply never occurred to me that I and my
fellow college students were, in American society, very rare birds indeed.
The G. I. Bill and the
explosive post-war growth of public institutions of higher education are
usually credited with dramatically changing the educational landscape in
America, and so they did. By 1970, the
cohort of Americans 25 to 29 years of age holding a first college degree had
tripled, and by the late 1970's the number of young Americans who had completed
a college degree was five times what it had been at the end of the Second World
War.
The impression soon
became widespread that college was the new normal. There was obsessive public attention to the
growing difficulty of gaining admission to the elite colleges and universities,
but it was more or less taken for granted that everyone who had the slightest
interest in doing so could get some
sort of college degree. [Once again, my
personal experience throws light on the changes taking place. When I applied to Harvard College in 1950,
somewhat more than 1900 young men made application. Of those 1900, 1650 were admitted, and 1250
actually showed up in September to enroll.
Your chances nowadays of getting into UMass Amherst are very considerably
worse.]
However, a look at the
statistics for 2011, the most recent available, give us a very different picture. Briefly, 87.58% of Americans 25 and older
were, in 2011, high school graduates.
Roughly 57% of that same group had some post-secondary education. But only a bit more than 30% held Bachelor's
Degrees. This is, of course, a dramatic
change from the situation when I attended college -- a six-fold increase. But it
remains true today that seven in ten adult Americans do not hold college degrees.
Note, by the way, that the 57% of adults who have had some
post-secondary education include those who have taken a single course at a
local Community College.
You might think that this
statistic is in a way misleading, because of the unusually high percentage of
older Americans who do not have a college degree, but that is not the
case. The percentage of Americans 25 to
29 holding college degrees is only 32%, barely higher than the percentage for
the adult population as a whole.
Simply inverting the
statistics gives us an insight into the American population that is radically
at odds with the common impression created by the discourse in the public
media. Almost seven in ten adult
Americans do not have a college
degree, and more than four in ten have never taken so much as a single course beyond
high school. Let me repeat what I wrote
earlier, in order to emphasize what I consider to be an extremely important fact
about American society. A college degree
is required in America for a wide range of jobs that no one in the media would
consider elite, and indeed which the people who offer commentary on talk shows
would not dream of taking themselves.
You need a college degree
to be a high school teacher. You need a
college degree to be an elementary school teacher. You need a college degree to be a management
trainee, to be a staff psychologist in a corporation, to be a Walmart store
manager, to be an FBI agent [indeed, you pretty well need a law degree for that
job]. This means that seventy percent of
Americans cannot even aspire to be grade school teachers!
Think about these simple
facts in relation to the two-part Meditation that I have posted in the past few
days. If we on the left are serious
about working to move American society in a progressive direction, then we need
to start not on college campuses but in the workplaces and even, though I
cringe to say it, in the churches of this country. We need to devise organizing methods and
policy proposals the aim at the seventy percent rather than at some sub-segment
of the thirty percent.
I would welcome comments
from readers about how we might go about doing this.
2 comments:
In-state tuition and fees at the state university of Massachusetts is now over $13,000/yr. Any assessment of the role of higher education in this society today can begin by taking into account facts like that.
Quite correct. I have written about this in the past. The rise in the cost of higher education, even allowing for inflation, has placed severe contraints on the life chances and possible career trajectories of today's graduates. In this meditation, however, I wanted to focus on the majority of Americans who do not earn a college degree.
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