Considering College 2-Book Bundle: Dream Factories / What to Consider If You're Considering College

Note that the words university and college are used interchangeably in this book to refer to degree-granting institutions of higher learning.

Preface

During the first 2015 Democratic presidential debate, Senators Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders struggled to outdo each other with grandiose visions for free public university and greatly enhanced loans and bursaries for students from poor families. On October 21, 2015, Joe Biden, vice-president of the United States, outlined his devotion to college education, while announcing his decision not to run for the presidency. North of the border, Justin Trudeau, during his successful campaign to become prime minister of Canada, extolled the virtues of expanding access to universities. If there is consensus about anything in North America, it is that a college or university education is a good thing for contemporary youth.

Indeed, heading off to college is one of North America’s signature rites of passage. Everyone knows the routine: evaluating colleges, cramming to get the high-school grades necessary to get into the best universities, waiting for the admission (or rejection) letters, tearful farewells for those leaving, and move-in day at the college residence. And then the studying begins.

What happens after that is also well known: four or five years of college (with the bright ones staying on for graduate school or a professional degree), the stress of job applications, the choice of employer, and settling into a career. Traditionally, the career-work continuum is followed by marriage, house purchase, and children.

This new American Dream is founded on a firm belief in the efficacy of a Learning = Earning formula where the number of years of post-secondary study provide an assurance of an ever-higher income. It appears to be a worthy successor to the dreams of earlier generations who built their futures and fortunes on agriculture, industrial labour, entrepreneurship, or the combination of unionized and government work that propelled prosperity in the post–World War II era.

But what if this belief is not true? What if the formula is wrong? What if the actual experience of North American students deviates dramatically from the image that has sustained the optimism and dreams of young people for the past three generations? For those who have saved for years to pay for a college education, who have pinned their hopes on the career potential of a university degree, the formula is intensely personal. What if Learning does not equal Earning?

Rumblings are getting louder that all is not well in college-land. Sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa have provided an invaluable service to the research-based understanding of contemporary post-secondary education in their provocative studies of the actual experiences of American college students. Their first book on this theme, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, examined how much students actually took away, intellectually, from the college experience. Their depressing study argued that most students showed surprisingly little gain, even after they had completed their degrees.

In Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates, Arum and Roksa looked at the employment experiences of a group of university students who graduated in 2009, a time of serious economic difficulty in America. The book observed that college graduates did much better than those without a college education, but also documented the severe challenges facing young adults. The researchers found that for those unemployed at the time of the spring 2011 survey, 40 percent had been unemployed for six months or more. Almost a quarter of the respondents who were unemployed in 2011 had also been unemployed when surveyed in the spring of 2010. Others were underemployed, with 4 percent working fewer than twenty hours per week. The remaining 89 percent of graduates had found either full-time employment or close to it, but many were in low-paid jobs. Fifteen percent of college graduates were in full-time positions that paid less than $20,000 per year, and 15 percent were in positions that paid between $20,000 and $30,000 per year. Considered as a whole, 53 percent of the college graduates who had not re-enrolled full-time in school were unemployed, employed part-time, or employed in full-time jobs that paid less than $30,000 annually.

College and university has never been one thing or a single kind of institution. In his excellent and affectionate commentary on the American college, called simply College, Andrew Delbanco, a Columbia University professor, observed:

For a relatively few students, college remains the sort of place that Andrew Kronman, former dean of Yale Law School, recalls from his days at Williams, where his favorite class took place at the home of a philosophy professor whose two golden retrievers slept on either side of the fireplace like bookends beside the hearth while the sunset lit the Berkshire Hills in scarlet and gold. For many more students, college means the anxious pursuit of marketable skills in overcrowded, under-resourced institutions, where little attention is paid to that elusive entity sometimes call the whole person. For still others, it means travelling by night to a fluorescent office building or to a virtual classroom that exists only in cyberspace. It is a pipe dream to imagine that every student can have the sort of experience that our richest colleges, at their best, provide. But it is a nightmare society that affords the chance to learn and grow only to the wealthy, brilliant, or lucky few. Many remarkable teachers in America’s community colleges, unsung private colleges, and underfunded public colleges live this truth every day, working to keep the ideal of democratic education alive.[1]

But the actual outcomes should give us pause. Consider the following information. These figures are for the state of Missouri, admittedly not the economically strongest part of the United States. For every hundred students who enter high school, seventy-eight will graduate, of whom forty-seven will enter college. Of these, only sixteen will earn a Bachelor’s degree, with another six earning an associate degree. Unless you read the statistics, you would never guess that only about a third of those entering college would reach the Holy Grail of a degree in a timely fashion.

But, as the TV pitchmen say, there’s more. Among college graduates in the United States, with the number varying according to the vagaries of the national and global economy, around 10 percent cannot immediately find work at all. And it gets worse from there. Go back to our sixteen college graduates. Of these, fully a third will end up underemployed, meaning that they will have a job that does not require a four-year degree to hold down the position.

Of one hundred high school graduates, only sixteen will finish a first degree and only eleven will be employed in a job appropriate to their college education. Think about it. From a hundred high school graduates, we are down to eleven young men and women who completed their degrees in a timely fashion, moved into the workforce, and found a job commensurate with their education and experience.

Look for depressing statistics like these ones in the recruitment and promotional literature for a college or university close to you. Look really hard. You will rarely find them. Show us the political platform that proudly proclaims that the world’s largest, most comprehensive, and best post-secondary education system produces a positive outcome for as many as a third of those who attend it. Sounds a little underwhelming, doesn’t it? The Canadian results are better, in part because of a strong high school system and a lower participation rate. But the general direction is much the same.

Of course, this being contemporary North America, opportunity and outcomes are not equally shared. The percentage of students at elite universities who experience desired outcomes—quick passage through college and a shift into paid employment in a decent job—is much higher, probably in the order of 60 percent or more of the total. (Following the Missouri example, if a hundred high school graduates go to an elite institution, at least ninety will complete their first year, close to eighty will finish their degrees, and at least sixty will find promising work.)

The opposite is true at the weaker, open-entry institutions and many of the for-profit places. Here, dropout rates in the first year can reach 50 percent or more. In the worst examples, as few as 15 to 20 percent will actually complete a degree in institutions of this type. And these graduates are likely to have greater difficulty translating a degree from a little-known and low-ranked school into a stable career with a decent income. If 60 percent of elite students achieve the twenty-first-century version of the American Dream, it is probably less than half that at the much more numerous, lower-ranked institutions.

Colleges and universities have numbers of their own. For years, they have boasted that their graduates earn much more over the course of their careers than non-college graduates. There are serious problems with this assertion (which we will discuss later), some of them obvious, others less so. First, individual ability, family circumstances, and motivation account for a significant portion of the income differential between high school graduates and college graduates. Second, people with degrees are on the whole—but of course not always—smarter, harder-working, and more talented than those without them. Is it the degree that produces income, or is it the abilities of the individuals that matter most? It seems that income for college graduates is strongly correlated to parental income. Not only that, but it’s possible that rich people’s kids are actually smarter, as a study recently argued.[2] Ask the disadvantaged in North America. Will they be surprised that rich kids stay rich and even get richer?

Data put out by universities conveniently leave out those who start a college degree, but don’t finish it. (Remember that this accounts for about 10 to 40 percent of the total, depending on the institution.) In any other field of public policy evaluation, this is called cooking the books. Always remember that averages are just averages. They encompass the high earnings of doctors, Wall Street minions, a handful of millionaire professional football players, and a minority of lawyers. These numbers offset the hundreds of thousands of university graduates working for rental-car companies and retail stores. Average tells you what happens to a broad, diverse cohort and provides a vague guide for the individual student.

Ah, Canadians say with standard sanctimoniousness, the situation is better north of the border. And so it is, but only by a little, and mostly because the preoccupation with university is not as strong in Canada as in the United States, and not as high a percentage of the population goes to college, although the gap seems to be closing. Canadians at elite private schools and the best public schools share a passion for the top-ranked American colleges and universities and are well served at home by the country’s best schools. Canada also has an excellent set of polytechnics, or high-quality technical schools, which have strong connections to the major employers. But Canadians have little to boast about, and the same job dynamics hold in this country too.

College and university propaganda often fails to acknowledge the impact of additional training and education on the outcomes they so glowingly advertise. Some graduates stay in the academy and go on to either graduate school or professional studies programs, particularly in Education or Master of Business Administration. Others go back to a community college or a polytechnic to get a more career-oriented credential. When a student who failed to find a good job based on his BSc gets an electrical technician’s diploma at a community college, he shows up in the employment and income statistics as a success for the university credential. As always, statistics have to be read with great care.

Maybe institutions and governments consider these career outcomes to be acceptable. Perhaps the purpose of the university system in North America is to give people a chance to test their potential to see what they are capable of achieving. It is an awfully expensive way—for students, families, governments, and institutions—to indulge a young person’s over-estimation of his or her abilities, interests, and motivation. Our point is this: young adults and their parents rarely have this information in front of them when they consider college or university as an option. If they had it, perhaps they would make different choices.

Here’s another statistic that you won’t hear from American colleges and universities: of those who enter them, 53 percent don’t complete their degrees. Some countries do worse: the figure for Italy is 55 percent, while others, notably Japan at 10 percent, do better. The average for the OECD is 31 percent. What a sad result from the expenditure of all that hope and effort and money.[3]

The USA and Italy are real outliers, with Canada doing considerably better, but the university dropout rate in Canada is still close to three times the rate for Japan. (The data are not directly comparable, so precise comments are impossible.) Studies of the Canadian and American situations point to two main issues, one of which can be readily fixed and another that is more intractable. First, students admitted with low high school grades (under 75 percent) do poorly, with the dropout rate increasing as the entering grades fall. The solution to this problem is to raise entrance standards or create separate entry and/or remedial programs for students who have failed to perform at an acceptable level. Second, poorer students tend to drop out more often, in part because of financial difficulties and shortcomings in earlier education. The solution in this case is to improve the quality of high school education and provide more financial assistance for students from less-advantaged families.

The situation is, of course, very complicated. Some students drop out and then re-enter later, in a different program or at a different institution. Mobility is the hallmark of youth educational explorations.

These numbers bother us profoundly, and they should bother you as well. They should make us think seriously about the role and value of the modern university. College degrees are completely worthwhile if the goal of earning them is education, learning, and citizenship—and if students actually capitalize on the intellectual and social opportunities that are available to them. (Of course many don’t and didn’t, even in the legendary ivory-tower days of previous generations.) On the other hand, if university attendance is seen primarily as a ticket to middle-class prosperity and security, then its value has seriously weakened over the last decade or two. The problem is that the universities haven’t told this to their customers. That’s what this book is about. Like Paul Revere, we ride to shout an alert: colleges are increasingly turning into factories selling a dream that is disconnected from reality. Be warned!

Introduction

All people dream—of love, of fame, of wealth, of a happy life—and none more so than the young, who have yet to learn that not all things are possible in this world. This book deals with a dream that is almost universal among them: that they will grow into successful, self-sufficient, prosperous adults, independent of their parents, able to stand on their own. Throughout history people have found various ways to achieve this dream, most of which involved entering the workforce early, taking over the family farm, or learning the techniques of hunting or the family trade. Other avenues involved immigrating to new lands, rising in the church or the military, or engaging in some other adventure. Today, however, in the world’s urbanized society, the dream is increasingly focused on education in universities and colleges.

There are over 150 million students attending colleges, technical schools, and universities worldwide. They are part of a social revolution and an impressively risky social experiment: the democratization of university education in a manner comparable to the spread of mass elementary and secondary education throughout much of the world during the twentieth century. Going to college has been transformed during the past two generations from a privilege available only to the Western or Westernized elite into something that is almost viewed as a right. This movement and investment, this commitment of the young talent of so many nations to the classroom, represents one of the most profound transformations of the modern era.

In 1950, there were many fewer colleges in the world. The institutions currently in operation range from the oldest (Bologna in Italy and Oxford in England) to the hastily built research and technical institutions founded in the USA after World War II or created from polytechs in the United Kingdom in the late twentieth century. By 2000, there were more than twelve thousand colleges, with hundreds more under development, particularly in China, India, and the Middle East, and with for-profit institutions competing in ever-larger numbers with increasingly overcrowded publicly funded colleges.

Everywhere around the world, young adults—eighteen and nineteen years or older—stand on the precipice of adulthood, faced with decisions that will affect the rest of their lives. In the industrialized world, they must choose between joining the workforce, travel, attending a college or university, or entering a trade college or an apprenticeship program. Those who dropped out of high school have already made a different choice, one that has severely limited their options. For the rest, the pressure to make the right decision is intense.

This preoccupation with academic study leading to a career is nothing new, much as advocates for post-secondary education like to think higher education is primarily for expanding the mind, improving public discourse, and celebrating the world of ideas. The growth of colleges in all countries has been tied to the economy since the end of World War II. Companies and the public sector, the argument goes, need highly qualified personnel—mostly college graduates. Governments want a strong, modern economy, which most authorities see as tied to the training of young people and the creation of intellectual prosperity in the laboratories and field stations of research-intensive institutions. Eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds desire careers freed from physical labour—jobs that are often called meaningful by student advocates and the politicians of the left. Globally, it can be argued that this generation is the softest generation of all, desperate to escape from agrarian or low-end industrial futures and eager for white-collar opportunities or, for the tiny creative elite, for entrepreneurial activities. Students in China, India, and Vietnam tackle their studies with a ferocity and competitiveness that most Western students find alarming; but then, for American and European students, the rice paddy or the sweatshop is not the alternative to a college education. From South Africa to Thailand, Finland to Bulgaria, the most-motivated and hardest-working young people are determined to find brain work and to avoid physical labour. The test of the college system, then, is the degree to which opportunities for graduates match with graduates’ abilities and expectations.

In rich countries, these young adults—often poorly prepared for the choices they now must make—face a bewildering set of options. If they possess extraordinary abilities or if their parents have money, they can select from several world-class universities, believed to be fast-tracks to prosperity and career success. If they come from poor families or are of average intelligence or ability, their options will be more limited: Oxford, Harvard, and the Sorbonne are not likely possibilities for them. But even here, a long list of universities, colleges, for-profit institutions, and the like compete for their attention and tuition dollars.

Their counterparts in the developing world have fewer choices. Here, the decision is a harsher one, often amounting to education or a life of factory work or subsistence agriculture. But here, too, the dream is very much alive. Children of the wealthy or well-connected, prodigies, or those educated in elite private schools have significant options, many outside their home countries. For the children of ambitious middle-class or working-class parents, the best opportunities lie overseas, where post-secondary education may lead to immigration to a more prosperous nation. For the rest, village agriculture or industrial labour beckons.

Earlier generations, too, had their dreams, but they did not often involve universities. Centuries ago, these institutions had a very narrow focus—they served mostly as training places for jobs that required a high degree of literacy: the clergy and, to a lesser degree, the law. Young adults (until late in the nineteenth century they were almost always male) would have scoffed at the idea that universities were the best road to a successful career of any kind. Of the great robber barons of the early American industrial age—Astor, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan—only the last had a university education, and that was because his father was wealthy. Even law and medicine were not professionalized until the late 1800s. It was quite possible to become a lawyer by apprenticing yourself in your teens to a practising lawyer—John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada, did that, and Abraham Lincoln read law books after a day’s work—or to become a doctor by spending a short time at some more or less respectable medical academy.

Many young people tried to escape the dead-end drudgery of rural life by taking factory work in cities, but this often did not improve their lives, only substituting one kind of proletarian existence for another. Emigration provided better opportunities for those who dreamt of religious freedom, social liberation, private land, or economic opportunity in North America, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. America, launched in part as a city on the hill for religious dissenters, became a global magnet for people seeking prosperity and better prospects. For young men in countries with empires, the dream often involved military or administrative service in the colonies or working in an institution such as the East India Company.

Rapid post–World War II industrialization created a new set of dreams, offered to eager families in the form of secure factory jobs, suburban tract homes, and the domestic tranquility of the consumer age. These were times of simpler dreams, supported by widespread prosperity and growing economic opportunity. It was possible to fulfill one’s dream while working for a company such as General Motors, Ford, or Chrysler, which, mostly thanks to trade unionization, provided middle-class opportunities for working people. Universities were for those heading for the learned professions, for those with sufficient family money to spend four years in a pleasant finishing school, and for those—always a minority—who were genuinely fired with a thirst for academic knowledge. Today’s world is much more muddled, with far greater returns for those who chose the right track, and serious career dangers for those who choose unwisely. For young people and their parents around the world, the dream of personal opportunity and well-being is focused, obsessively, we argue, on university and college education.

It was during this postwar era that the universities began to grow into Dream Factories, first with the influx of war veterans, and then with the tsunami of baby boomers that descended on them after 1960. They began to position themselves as the logical, and increasingly the only, or at least the preferred, route to prosperity. More and more it became clear to young people that universities, not the shop floor and certainly not striking out on their own for new lands or distant opportunities, held the key to their dreams.

An example of this process is the professionalization of school teachers, particularly at the elementary level. Before World War II few teachers in the lower grades went to university. At most they went to a Normal School, as teachers’ colleges were sometimes called, for a year’s course. Often those who taught in the one-room country schools had only a high school education. This is why it was common to see classrooms in these schools presided over by teachers, often women, who were twenty years old or even younger. Then, partly as a means of raising salaries, elementary education became professionalized, to the point where five years or more of post-secondary education is now required to teach the basics to six-year-olds. Today, if your dream is to be a teacher, there is only one path to achieve it (although some American schools, particularly in poorer districts, are so desperate to find teachers that they are fudging this requirement).

At the same time, the earlier paths to success gradually began to fade. Immigrating to America remains something of a global fantasy, but not for all those who once dreamt of it. Elsewhere, the cities in the developing world hold out hope for the desperate and the ambitious. The arrival cities in the sprawling slums around the major cities in the developing world are one of the most important phenomena of our generation, but the prospects for immediate improvement are minimal and uncertain, as any visit to Lagos, Mumbai, or Cairo will attest. Industrial labour, strengthened by a long run of union empowerment, has crumbled, largely due to the unique blend of global competition and technological transformation. There are fewer entry points and fewer opportunities each year.

Where, then, do the dreamers look? Where do people seek opportunity and the promise of well-being and wealth? What do you say to teenagers about their future? That the world is full of endless opportunities? That they can be anything they want to be? That the twists and turns of the global economy have created more uncertainty than we have seen in decades? That they will have a brighter and richer future than their parents? That the lives of today’s adults are no roadmap for the future? It is hard to know how to arm young people for prosperity, opportunities, and a high quality of life in the midst of the constant economic and technological turmoil that engulfs the modern world. For many people, the answer is simple: universities.

To their proponents, universities are the Dream Factories of the twenty-first century, ideally suited to the desires of the current and future generations. This is the time of the knowledge economy, where innovation and human creativity seem to have replaced natural resources and industrial strength as the foundation for personal and national prosperity. This is the age where smart people rule, where companies like Google, Facebook, Rakuten, Skype, and Alibaba rise from obscurity into global prominence. This is the generation where national boundaries have declined in significance, where the mobility of labour is rushing to catch up with the mobility of news, celebrity, influence, and, most of all, capital. In the global swirl that wipes out old wealth and creates new with dazzling speed, young adults and their parents search for the golden ticket, the assured path forward, that will ensure their family’s place in the new economy.

The university degree is widely believed to be that golden ticket. Within two generations or so, universities have been transformed from largely Western, elite, and male-dominated institutions into truly global, multicultural, gender-neutral, and increasingly open-access platforms for personal growth and exploration. It seems that China is building universities as fast as the United States once opened McDonald’s franchises. India’s aggressively mediocre university system expands apace, relying more on unchecked private-sector growth than quality-focused public-sector expansion. Nigeria, with one of the most undependable university systems in the world, has seen its undergraduate population grow from seventeen thousand in 1970 to 1.7 million in 2012—a one-hundred-fold increase—before starting to slide in the face of demoralizing career results for graduates.[1] Even the United States, which is watching century-old private, rural, religious, and liberal-arts colleges close for lack of students, is supporting a rapid expansion of its highly variable and questionable for-profit university system.

Every generation needs and wants a focus for its dreams. And universities are perfect for this. Given enough money, there is, in theory, a university seat for every student who wants one, without, of course, any reference to intellectual ability or scholarly interest. There are grand schools, with impeccable pedigrees, that cater to the truly talented. Others are places for the offspring of the nouveau riche or the socially ambitious. Still others, with failure rates that defy belief, accept all comers and watch them be thrown onto the intellectual and career junk heap, degreeless and branded as failures. Even worse are those places all over the world, public and private, that move all tuition-paying students through their studies, granting degrees to individuals of minimal achievement who have severe deficiencies in their basic skills. Worse still is the distressingly extensive culture of lying, academic fraud, cheating, and fabrication of transcripts that increasingly mars the credibility of the global university system.

Like all of the grand dreams that have driven global affairs, modern universities display a mix of achievement and failure. There’s plenty of the former, but plenty of the latter too. Much as a goldfield produces a handful of rich deposits and thousands of empty shafts and the high-tech incubator generates two successful companies for every hundred that enter, universities produce a small percentage of winners. Some universities produce graduates of world-changing potential. Many others—including some of the famous as well as the obscure campuses—generate degree holders who work as taxi drivers, waiters, and retail clerks, hardly the stuff of parental dreams and childhood ambition. The odds are better than in a lottery, but nowhere near the slam-dunk of common belief.

For young adults, their families, and countries around the world, the Dream Factories have become a central solution to the uncertainties of the twenty-first century. While there are many examples of university graduates going on to great careers and productive lives, there is also ample evidence that the global system has grown too fast. There are only so many people with the talent to succeed at university. There are only so many jobs and opportunities that benefit from a university degree. And yet these institutions continue to be built by governments, private-sector speculators, and well-meaning philanthropists, all of whom embrace the belief in the unlimited absorptive capacity of the modern economy for university graduates. And they are embraced by young people and parents, eager to escape from physical or outside work, people who believe that universities hold the key to success.

Universities continue to be touted as the flagship opportunity-producing machines of the twenty-first century, but in reality they fall far short of delivering what they promise. There is nothing inherently wrong with them. For smart, motivated, and attentive students, a university degree can bring a wonderful education, a life-changing social experience, and the foundation for a highly successful career. The problem lies with two things: the uneven quality of the university experience and the global disconnect between the mass production of university graduates and the needs of the modern economy.

So here is the reality that is rarely discussed. Across the United States and Western Europe, there are huge numbers of unemployed and underemployed university graduates. In Asia, thousands of graduate degree holders, even those in the so-called career-ready fields of engineering, computer science, and mathematics, find a tight if not closed job market. Nigerian university graduates actually earn average salaries below those of high school graduates, so flawed is that country’s university system. And the Arab Spring was, researchers have discovered, an uprising driven significantly by the unrealized dreams of thousands of university graduates who could not find work in the stalled Middle Eastern economies.

The global university system needs a reset, as do the expectations of young people, their families, and governments. Governments need to stop expanding the system. Universities need to change their focus from the production of more graduates to a greater concentration on the quality of the system. Employers need to speak clearly to universities, young people, parents, and governments about their medium- and long-term employment needs. Young people and their parents must look far more carefully at the abilities of young adults and the realities of the twenty-first century economy. The system can be fixed, although the self-interest and autonomy of most institutions militate against responsiveness. The harsh truth is that universities will reform only when governments change their policies, and, even more rapidly, when young people pursue other means of preparing themselves for the future.

But here is the greater challenge. The young need a new dream, because the old one that has served for the past fifty or sixty years no longer works. The global population of young people is higher than ever. The technological and competitive transitions in the world economy have rarely been greater. Millennials, looking forward, are bewildered by the new realities. Their parents, scared about the prospects for their children and even for themselves, turn back to what worked in the past, namely university degrees. If every generation needs a dream, the tragedy of the twenty-first century is that young adults have had to borrow the vision of opportunity that sustained their parents. The Dream Factories are proving to be more ephemeral and less real than anyone thought. Dealing with this reality may well be the transformative challenge of our time.

1

The Dream Factories

The world’s universities and colleges are in turmoil. In a little over a generation, they have been transformed from training grounds for professionals, the curious, the gifted, and the wealthy into expensive extensions of high schools, designed to educate a broad range of people and prepare them for stable middle-class opportunities. The transformation has its roots in the post–World War II era, starting in the USA with opportunities for returned servicemen, then growing there and elsewhere during the 1950s and 1960s with the space race and the search for sustained economic growth.

The dream of universities as the guaranteed road to prosperity—an idea that grew first and fastest in North America—delivered on what it promised, at least at the beginning. An expanding professional and scientific economy produced many opportunities for young adults, who found that a college degree provided a reliable and useful ticket to the middle class. The convergence between post-secondary studies and employment opportunities, while not ideal, was nonetheless impressive and, for those intellectually and financially able to consider college, rewarding. But the result has been an institutional sea-change. Universities, once ivory towers, have increasingly become Dream Factories, educational institutions dependent for their revenues and thus their existence on selling their product—their dream—to an ever-wider audience.

The Growth of Mass Education

The roots of the current situation go back about a hundred years. In 1900, college education was restricted to a tiny minority of the population, and even a high school education was not common: in the United States in about 1900, fewer than 5 percent of the population graduated from high schools, which often had entrance examinations and charged fees. After World War I, governments in the industrial world, especially in the United States, accepted the premise that economic prosperity required an educated and well-trained workforce. All over the industrialized world, governments invested in a massive expansion of elementary and secondary school education. Countries moved quickly toward universal schooling, ensuring that young boys and girls had the rudiments of writing, arithmetic, and basic civics. This happened at different times in different countries: in the UK, for example, it did not occur until after World War II. Many children moved from classroom to the industrial workforce, even in their early teens, but societies declared mass education to be an essential prerequisite for a modern economy. From a standing start in the mid-nineteenth century, public elementary education expanded rapidly to become virtually commonplace, at least in the world’s wealthier countries.

In the 1960s and after, as the complexity of the modern world increased, societies doubled down on the educational commitment. Publicly funded, universally accessible high school education came into vogue worldwide, as it had already done in the United States. Governments that had invested massively in elementary school classrooms and teachers now raced to build high schools to accommodate the millions of teenagers seeking a high school education. The systems varied, with Germany leading the way in incorporating industrial and skills training in the advanced school system, and countries like the USA, the UK, and Japan focusing more on general education. But the expansion of the high school system was remarkable, with millions of children who, in previous generations, would have entered the workforce in their early teens, continuing their studies at an advanced level. By the 1970s, high school participation had become as commonplace as going to elementary school had been two generations earlier. By the 1990s, in countries like the USA, Canada, the UK, Japan, South Korea, and across Scandinavia, university became the new preoccupation, with governments opening up millions of spaces for young people anxious to join the expanding professional class. Mass education had more than arrived; it had leapt up the age ladder into the early twenties.

The resulting global university system is an incredible mishmash, with public and private institutions of widely differing quality, and now, particularly in the United States, for-profit schools as well. The University of Phoenix is the flag-bearer for this quintessential contemporary private-sector institutional model. It is listed on NASDAQ, has produced many millions of dollars of profit for its shareholders, provides student-centric education, without spending money on such things as academic graduate programs or faculty research. Courses are offered where and when students want to take them, not according to faculty biorhythms and preferences. It is also now the largest university in the United States, with close to four hundred thousand students. The University of Phoenix’s parent organization—the Apollo group—is one of a substantial number of for-profit educational deliverers, including the American InterContinental University, Capella University, and Walden University, several of which have expanded operations internationally.

Not all for-profit institutions have operated ethically, particularly in the USA. The University of Phoenix has run into substantial difficulties, closing many physical campuses, facing legal challenges, and seeing its stock price plummet. Several private universities figured out how to capitalize on the generous Pell Grants, a program expanded by President Obama to ensure that any student who could spell university got to go. Unscrupulous recruiters convinced students to sign up for expensive for-profit education, without telling them that they had to pay back any money borrowed under the system. The for-profit movement has expanded internationally, with new institutions springing up from Malaysia (Multimedia University) to Grenada (St. George’s University) and Spain (Universidad Europea de Madrid), as well as elsewhere. With governments rushing to meet demand in most countries, it is not clear how much further the for-profit movement will spread at present.

New technologies have accelerated the growth even more. Massive online and distant-education universities, with student populations counted in the hundreds of thousands, offer hundreds of degrees to off-campus learners. If participation and enrolment are proper markers of success, students love them. The largest institutions, located in India, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey, have over a million students. Many of these universities have tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of enrollees, all studying online and most working toward a university degree. Not a great deal is known about the quality and career impact of these institutions. Suffice it to say that digital technology is allowing governments to deliver advanced learning to literally millions of students who would not otherwise be able to attend a standard university. If a student from Pakistan presented a degree from Anadolu University in Turkey, how many employers would know that this institution, with over one million students, served only twenty-two thousand students on-site and educated the rest at a distance? Would it matter? Academics debate and study the quality of the online learning experience and have yet to reach an absolute consensus about the utility of this type of education. For governments unable to cover the costs of regular universities, and for students unable to participate in standard education processes, distance learning is a godsend.

While college conversions, distance education, and private universities all played a role in the growth of the post-secondary system, one of the greatest contributors to university expansion came from institutions already in place. From the 1960s onward, existing universities the world over built new facilities to house the influx of students who swarmed onto campuses and to provide research space for the faculty hired to teach them. (Politicians like new campus buildings almost as much as they celebrate expansion in student numbers.) Money was forthcoming for the laboratories, libraries, classrooms, residences, and other facilities deemed essential for the modern research-intensive university. The results were often spectacular. Moscow State University, operating since the eighteenth century, has grown to an amazing complex of over a thousand buildings covering some one million square metres, more than 40 percent larger than the Pentagon, the world’s largest office building. In many instances—the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia being one of the latest examples—governments and donors have produced eye-popping architectural masterpieces to grace university campuses. In the vast majority of the cases, however, the buildings had the aesthetic of a nineteenth-century prison or an early twentieth-century factory. Only rarely has design overcome financial considerations, resulting in a network of institutions that lack the intellectual impact of the stunning artistry of the facilities at the University of Leuven, the cold rigour of Cambridge, the majesty of Duke, or the dignity of college campuses like Swarthmore, Middlebury, and Dartmouth.

Declining Standards

These places differ profoundly in history, design, and ambiance, but they are all Dream Factories, institutions devoted to a simple concept: guaranteeing a successful life to those who pay to attend them. Their promotional materials, full of photographs of happy students studying with classmates and enjoying the bucolic campus life, promise great careers and a golden ticket to the middle class. They are the quintessential institution of the twenty-first-century knowledge economy, tackling the challenges of the high-tech, globalized economy and the realities of an international workforce in rapid transition.

It took close to a century for high school graduation to become almost universal in first-world countries. Regular schooling did not suit all students equally, particularly those who were inclined toward the skilled trades. Governments generally did not fund high schools equally, resulting in substantial educational gaps among poor, rural, and minority populations. Equally, the rapid expansion of the post–World War II industrial economy, which drew heavily on low-skilled and semi-skilled labour in the factories and construction trades, meant that it was still possible, in the 1950s and 1960s, for young people, particularly men, to make a good living without a high school education. Many left high school without graduating, often following their fathers’ paths to plants, mines, or construction sites. The gathering strength of unions, combined with an abundance of low-skill/high-wage work, ensured that these jobs paid well and carried generous benefits. As a result, high school graduation rates did not rise as rapidly as early high school attendance.

The situation became more complicated by the early twenty-first century, as a pattern of social passes, particularly in the United States and Canada, produced a steadily increasing number of high school graduates who got through school without learning much of anything. Consider these depressing facts. Among American high school graduates, only 40 percent have age-appropriate reading skills and only 25 percent have appropriate mathematical skills.[1] The situation in Canada is not much better. The high school completion rate has increased in recent years for a number of reasons, one of them being massive government encouragement to stay in school; another presumably being a lowering of standards for graduation. The percentage of young adults (age twenty-five to thirty-four) who have attained at least upper secondary education is, according to the OECD, fairly even across Western industrialized countries, with Canada, at 92 percent, having one of the highest completion rates. In comparison, the percentage of Americans who graduate stands at 89. In both Turkey and Mexico it is 46 percent.[2]

Japan and Germany have higher and more standardized academic accomplishments, as do South Korea, Finland, Singapore, and Taiwan. In China, a country that has made massive investments in high school education over the past thirty years, educational fraud and manipulation of transcripts is so widespread as to make it difficult to assess educational achievement. Many Chinese proudly carry high school diplomas that provide no assurance that they have the abilities and learning that have, since World War II, been associated with a high school degree. But, of course, the same is true in the United States.

College and university education is now replicating the high school experience. A new focus on higher education has occurred as job opportunities for high school dropouts have declined and opportunities for high school graduates have shrunk in the face of the collapsing power of trade unions and the disappearance of traditional low-skill/high-wage work. Naturally and inexorably, governments, parents, and young people have begun to focus on post-secondary education.

The inflation in education has been steady. Before 1920, most students stopped their studies after elementary school. Before the 1960s, they stopped after high school. In the last third of the twentieth century, in a fit of educational optimism that gripped much of the world, attention shifted to community colleges, colleges, and universities, with the latter representing the gold standard for those who felt that they had the skills, determination, and ability to prosper. A quick look at the same industrial nations illustrates the degree to which college and university preparation swept the wealthiest countries.

As with the high school systems after World War II, the colleges and universities took in many more students than they graduated. The percentage of those not finishing increased over time, primarily because the standards of the advanced educational institutions proved to be less flexible than the high schools’. This is an important point. Governments rejoice that 90 percent of the population has at least a high school education, but we may ask this question: How much of an achievement is it to earn a qualification that nine-tenths of the population also earns? High school graduation is almost universal in a country such as Canada and even more so in Scandinavia, South Korea, Singapore, and Japan. Largely because of public, government, and parental pressure, high schools have lowered educational standards to ensure more students graduate—literate and numerate or, in the case of all too many, not. For the time being (with variations between institutions), colleges and universities have maintained higher academic standards and resisted the pressure—also from the public, governments, parents, and students—to pass those who fail to meet clear and objective standards of academic achievement.

Higher Education Generates Mixed Reviews

Not surprisingly, universities generate mixed reviews. Some people, like President Obama, believe that universities are central to personal success and national prosperity. Enthusiasm is particularly strong among organizations of university presidents and teachers. Andrew Hacker, a well-known American public intellectual and emeritus professor of political science at Queen’s College, New York, baldly states that everyone has the capacity to succeed at college and benefit from what it has to offer. "All young people, he says, and he puts the word in italics, have knowledge-thirsty minds that can be awakened and encouraged to examine the world they inhabit."[3] Others are more skeptical and are beginning to question the contribution that those currently being urged to get a degree will make to economic, social, and cultural success. Angela Merkel, solid where Obama wanders into the fantasy world of Garrison Keller’s Lake Wobegone (where everyone is above average), demonstrates the uncertainty and caution of a thoughtful leader:

We have committed a lot of resources to increasing interest in mathematical, engineering and scientific training courses, and will continue to do so. We have too few students, rather than too many, in these subjects. If we wish to maintain prosperity and living standards in our countries, it thus behooves us to encourage the enjoyment of science education. Taking a degree in the natural and engineering sciences is considered to be rather precarious. In terms of career prospects, experience has repeatedly shown that whilst the take-up of people trained in these professions is very good during economically buoyant periods, during a recession these people will experience considerable difficulties in finding a job. This is why it is also the job of business and education institutions to ensure there is a permanent shoring up, so to speak, of career prospects for graduates from the mathematics and natural science disciplines. Scientific knowledge has a very short sell-by-date, which is why we cannot afford to have gaps in the provision of qualified scientists.[4]

A smaller number are increasingly skeptical about university education. Few are as blunt as Simon Dolan, United Kingdom multi-millionaire high school dropout and author of How to Make Millions Without a Degree: And How to Get By Even If You Have One:[5] I feel University only prepares students for a very specific set of circumstances. I’m not sure if it robs them of life skills, but it certainly delays the point at which they attain those life skills. By life skills, I mean work skills, be that in an office or in a factory or whatever—the key is that work skills can only be learned through real work. These are skills that you don’t learn from a book; you learn them by getting out there and doing them. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, has gone a step further, offering to pay young people $100,000 to not attend university for two years and instead to pursue their business ideas. As Thiel, who believes that universities are oversold and headed for a crash, told TechCrunch in 2011, A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.

The more young people who go, or who ponder