THE COLLEGE RAT RACE

The six right-wing Justices on the Supreme Court have managed in just a bit over one year to attack several segments of the American population which, taken together, constitute a winning coalition for the Democrats in the 2024 election. First, they took away rights and protections on which women had been depending for half a century, then they snatched back one of the last marginal advantages that minority young people had in the struggle for good jobs by declaring affirmative action in colleges and universities against the law, then they attacked the effort by LGBTQ Americans to win something resembling equal protection under the law, and finally, having nothing better to do, they took back at the last moment debt forgiveness on which millions of young Americans had depended. It is at moments like this that I sincerely regret not believing in eternal damnation.

 

Today I want to talk about the affirmative-action decision, but not in the usual fashion. Rather, I want to look at the role that college degrees play in the American job world today and then suggest ways in which one could circumvent the Court’s decision. My analysis will be grounded, I hope, in reality but my proposals will be wildly and hopelessly unrealistic. There is not the slightest chance that any of them would ever be embraced or acted upon in the America of today. But then, that is the story of my intellectual life.

 

Let me start by going back, as I like to do, to 1950 when I went off to college as a 16-year-old boy. At that time, the American economy was booming. Unemployment was low, economic growth was steady, large corporations dominated the economic landscape as they do now.  And Nineteen out of twenty adult Americans did not have college degrees. Let me repeat that in a slightly different way: only 5% of adult Americans held four-year bachelor’s degrees from colleges or universities. One needed a college degree to be a doctor or lawyer or college professor or dentist, but one did not need a college degree to enter a management training program or become a president or vice president or regional director of a great corporation, and one certainly did not need an MBA (which, I think, had not yet been invented.)

 

So few young people went on from high school to college that in big cities like New York where I grew up children entered first grade twice a year, in September or January, depending on when they were born and graduated from high school 12 years later in June or December. The handful of high school graduates who, like myself, intended to go on to college and yet had been born in December had to either wait six months before starting their college careers or else go through high school in 3 ½ years, as I did, to avoid losing the half year.

 

The economy then was extremely unequal. The job world was steeply pyramidal, with a small number of good jobs at the top and many more lower down. The good jobs paid salaries by the month or even the year and offered retirement benefits and other perks. At the bottom of the pyramid, the jobs paid by the hour or the day and had few or no benefits. The slang expression “suits or shirts” captured the difference.

 

In the intervening three quarters of a century, the situation has changed dramatically. Sixty percent or more of young people go on to college and roughly 55% of them graduate, so these days 1/3 or more of adults have college degrees. There are four and a half thousand colleges and university campuses in the United States that offer four-year degrees, and even those who graduate from the least prestigious of them are among the privileged one third for whom the good jobs are at least theoretically open. These days, one cannot be a high school teacher or middle school teacher or elementary school teacher without a college degree. One cannot get into a management training program without a college degree. One cannot be an FBI agent without a college degree and in most big-city police departments, one cannot be a police officer without a college degree. If the Walmart website is correct, it is marginally possible but not very likely ever to become a Walmart store manager without a college degree. By way of contrast, my first father-in-law, who never went to college and I think may not actually have graduated from high school ended up as a vice president of Sears, Roebuck.

 

The competition to get into the “elite” colleges has become notoriously ferocious. The year that I went to Harvard, 75% of those who applied were admitted. When I tell students at UNC Chapel Hill this simple fact their eyes roll up and they find it hard to believe. The education I got at Harvard was at least as good as the education students now get at Harvard but the cost in constant dollars has soared. My tuition during all three years I was an undergraduate was $600 a year, which in today’s terms is about $7500. That is roughly 1/7 of what students are charged today. To be sure, Harvard is so rich that it can offer substantial financial aid to students who come from “middle-class” families, which is to say families that have only managed to rise to the top 20% or 15% of American households. But the year I went to college, everyone paid the same tuition, even Teddy Kennedy, the youngest of the Kennedy boys, whose father, old Joe Kennedy, was extremely rich.

 

One might imagine that the dramatic increase in the number of adult Americans holding college degrees would have somewhat flattened the pyramid of wages and salaries by making less unequal techniques of production available to capitalists, but of course one would be wrong. In fact, the only change in the pyramid is that it has gotten significantly steeper.

 

Of course, in the intervening three quarters of a century, the work world has changed but if we are honest, we will admit that most of what students study in college is in no way required as preparation for the jobs they go on to hold. If students were required to take courses in calligraphy, as Chinese bureaucrats were in the old days, or if they were encouraged to write poetry, as students were in Marx’s day, the effect would be the same. My favorite example of this comes from MIT, where my first wife taught literature starting in 1980. Apparently, MIT had been churning out superbly trained electrical engineers for many years and placing them in first-rate jobs in American industry but word got back to the deans at MIT that roughly 10 years or so after their graduates started their careers, they rose to a level at which they were eligible for managerial or administrative positions. At that point, it seemed, the MIT graduates were disadvantaged in relation to the graduates of the elite Ivy League institutions, because they lacked the culture and polish that those institutions had conferred upon their students. Not only did the engineers carry their pens around in little nerd packs in their shirt pockets (to avoid ink stains), they also were unable to make polite cocktail party conversation about Plato’s Republic or Jean-Paul Sartre or Emily Dickinson. The MIT administration decided to take steps, so they went out and bought themselves some humanists and social scientists to polish their undergraduates. And being MIT, they bought themselves Noam Chomsky and Paul Samuelson. But MIT had no illusions about why they were doing it. Nobody thought that the engineers would be better engineers for having read Moby Dick.

 

Because the pyramidal structure of compensation in the American economy (and in other capitalist economies, but I am not talking about them now) is so steep, with so few really good jobs and so many poor jobs, and because so many more young people are actually capable of doing the well compensated jobs than there are jobs available for them, some way must be found to decide who gets the good jobs and who gets stuck with the bad ones. For a variety of reasons, educational credentials have come to perform this function, and so we get the rat race to win the admissions lottery and get into a “good” college.  Let me repeat: when I applied to Harvard in 1950, 75% of the applicants were admitted. By 1960, I heard McGeorge Bundy, then the Dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, say that they received 5000 applicants a year, 1000 of whom were clearly admits, 1000 of whom were clear rejects, and the other 3000 of whom were certainly admissible but had in some way to be sorted out. Now, as I understand it, only 4% of the applicants to Harvard are offered admission. Nothing has changed educationally in the past 75 years, of course.  All that has changed is that mobility in the society has diminished while the payoff to those at the top has increased, with the result that young people are ever more desperate.

 

What can be done about this? Two things. First, a reasonable but not excessively high standard must be set for admission to college. Anyone who meets that standard becomes part of the pool of those who can go to college, and admission to any particular institution is then determined by random assignment of those who apply.  Second, the cost of tertiary education, like that of primary and secondary education, should be socialized so that no one graduates from college with a loan debt, any more than one graduates from high school or middle school or elementary school with a loan debt. 

Fat chance.