are college degrees worth less than they used to be?

About a year ago, a friend of mine told me he wondered why he had bothered to get an education. He felt that the job prospects and earning potential he had did not balance against the time and money he had invested in getting his Ph.D. He speculated more broadly that college degrees were becoming less and less valuable in our country and asked why we should continue to place such a high priority on college as a nation.

My friend’s thinking, plus the fact that I teach at a California community college, got me paying attention to some of the conversation that our society having about college degrees. In particular, over the last year I’ve been noticing more and more people questioning the value of a college degree. The script for these articles, videos, rants, complaints goes something like: 1) college costs a lot of money and finishing requires taking on significant debt, including some statistics on the amount of debt taken on by college students; and, 2) a college degree doesn’t guarantee a good job like it did in the “good old days,” followed by an anecdote about a college graduate’s job search and maybe some questionable statistics.

A recent (6/13/11) Time magazine article (“Now What? Mortarboards and diplomas don’t get you as far as they used to. These new graduates are in for a bumpy ride.”) is a good example. Along with anecdotal evidence, the author cites a Rutgers University study finding that 30% of college graduates from 2006 to 2010 didn’t find employment within six months of finishing school (there’s no comparison with unemployment for folks without a college degree during the same time). Further, a Twentysomething Inc. poll found that 85% of “graduates are taking shelter under Mom and Dad’s roof.” (The timeline for this statistic is not clear—is it within one year of graduation? Or two years? Certainly, it doesn’t mean that 85% of all college grads are still living at home for the rest of our lives.) These two stats exhaust the quantitative data supporting the article’s title and it concludes that, although science and engineering majors are more likely to find jobs than their colleagues in liberal arts (U.S. Labor Department data), the nationally high unemployment numbers are promoting choosy employers.

Belying the faux-profound conclusion, the tone of the article is decidedly alarmist, ignoring that fact that people with a college degree continue to enjoy higher employment percentages than people without degrees; more education still promotes greater employment, in general, and graduates know it—the same Rutgers study found that 62% of those with a Bachelor’s degree believe that more education is needed to be “successful.” In addition, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, more education tends to increase your income.

More thoughtful approaches to what a college degree means today include Sherry Linkon, at the Center for Working-Class Studies, who discusses the value of getting an education for people headed toward professions such as accounting, education, communications, and social work, for whom getting a college degree is a crucial step on the way to being certified to do the work. At the same time, Linkon points out that colleges force these essentially vocational students into general education classes that don’t seem to have anything to do with their chosen field of work. Importantly, she also discusses the knowledge that working class folks bring to these (and all) professions, much of which is not taught in school.

Then there is a New Yorker article by a college professor who tries to answer his students’ question: “Why do we have to read this book?” He believes that college should exist to educate citizens for democracy, but he’s not sure that’s how our society still uses higher education.

One could legitimately ask if we ever did use it that way. Indeed, self-improvement blogger Brian Kim writes:

Back in the day, everything that was said about getting a degree was true. If you had a degree, you separated yourself from the pack. Not many people were able to get degrees because not many people were able to afford college. It was normally reserved for the rich or upper middle class. And that’s precisely why the degree was so valued . . . because it was scarce. Scarcity creates value.

Like Kim, I think our society has always used college to reinforce the status quo elite, but I also think that in at least the last 50 or so years we’ve also used it for more democratic purposes. The facts are that in the last 50 years, our country has made a college education more available to women and people of color and they have taken advantage of it. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, women outnumber men in college and in degrees earned. In addition, the number of people of color earning degrees is increasing for every group.

The blog posts and articles go on and on, including a paranoia-inducing video put out by the mysteriously obscure, apparent scam organization “National Inflation Association” telling us that our education system sucks and that we should buy gold and silver to survive the coming economic apocalypse.

At the same time, College Board blissfully continues to tell us that “one of the best things about getting a college education is that you have more careers to choose from” and produces lists of the “Hottest Careers for College Graduates — Experts Predict Where the Jobs Will Be in 2018”

Trying to make sense of this cacophony, I’ve begun to think that its purpose is two-fold: to complain about the loss of privilege for those who used to be “entitled” to good-paying jobs; and, to promote the impression that by continuing to democratize college degrees for more and more segments of our society we further devalue a college degree. It’s not a big leap to think college degrees are being devalued by white men precisely because more women and people of color have them.

But beyond the more or less explicit racist, classist, and sexist agenda, these arguments ignore the issue of what happens to degree earners when they enter the job market. It would be great if jobs were equally distributed across all demographics of the degree earners — that would imply that hiring practices had improved greatly and that race, class, gender, and other forms of oppression in our society have diminished — but I don’t believe that is the case. Instead, as we all know, in most jobs white men continue to be more likely to get hired and be promoted than other people.

That means that the crying over the uncertain job market for college grads is almost entirely a tactic to protect white male privilege and entitlement; that is, it’s the same old discrimination in play. And, the people questioning the value of their degrees — whether knowingly racist, classist, and sexist or not — at least all ignore the reality of the privilege that most of them have. As a white man from an middle-class background, my friend’s analysis of his degree may be accurate for him. But for everyone else, the statistics say that a college degree remains a viable path to a better job and economic improvement.

“A college degree ain’t what it used to be.”

This blog post gives a sense of what people are feeling like on the ground. I’ve heard similar sentiments from several people, mostly white middle class folks. What it looks like to me is that as those people are increasingly competing in the work place with people with whom they didn’t used to have to compete. Makes them mad, because they feel entitled to a job — after all, they’ve been told all their lives that a college degree is the key to a good job.  The result is a more or less deliberate devaluation of the college degree. That is, as some of us work to democratize a college education, others work to maintain the privilege they’ve enjoyed in the past.

separate and unequal

An article from the San Francisco Guardian confirming my assertions about who is going to public school and who is not.

more on paying to create an unequal society

A little more research reveals that the 20,000 school age children not in San Francisco public schools are not all white. However, what I’m now hearing at least anecdotally (but apparently backed up by data I have yet to see) is that the children of middle and upper class parents are going mostly to private schools. And since income breaks down by race, with Whites and Asians topping the statistics in San Francisco, middle and upper class parents are paying to create a racially unequal society.

Furthermore and contrary to what I initially thought, people (mostly parents) are talking about this problem. (I’ve been insulated from this situation because I don’t have kids.) The problem is that voting patterns and political influence are also correlated to class status, with working class and poor parents being least likely to be politically engaged. And so the parents who are most likely to impact the public school systems are paying to remove their children from that system.

At least that’s part of the educational and racial justice story in San Francisco. Is it like this elsewhere? Is the same dynamic playing out in cities across the country?

white people are paying to create an unequal society

The San Francisco Chronicle recently published an article, entitled “Latino kids now majority in state’s public schools,” describing the unsurprising news that the Latino kids are now officially more than 50% of all the children in our public schools. The article goes on to discuss the real and potential impact of demographic changes on the political landscape, both local and statewide.

But for me the real news—which may not be news for many—was when I saw the demographics for the more than 55,000 San Francisco Unified School District students:

Latino	13,078
White	5,924
Asian	22,326
Black	6,046
Other	5,235
Not reported	2,531
Total	55,140

 

There’s nothing wrong with these numbers—except for the fact that, while whites make up a little more than 50% of San Francisco’s population, white kids are only 10.7% of the total number in public schools. A little more looking reveals that there are about 75,000 school age kids in San Francisco and 20,000 of them are not in public schools.

These numbers suggest to me that 20,000 white kids—75% of all the white kids in San Francisco—are going to private schools. If I’m misunderstanding these numbers, or if I’m missing some important piece of information, I’d like to know. Really. Please tell me. I’d like believe that white people aren’t deliberately and at great cost to their personal finances creating an unequal and unjust educational system and, therefore, an unequal and unjust society. I’d like to believe that white parents aren’t taking their kids out of schools with children of color in them, thereby depriving all kids the chance to get to know children from other communities and backgrounds.I’d like to believe that there’s a very good reason for the numbers. Please explain.

But if you can’t explain, then let’s start talking about the racism we are perpetuating and what we’re going to do about it. I think we could start by leaving our kids in public schools and by working and paying together to make those schools the best they can be.

a different mirror

At this point in the development of our culture and its history, most college-educated folks, as well as many others, know that the white-washed, reductionist history we were taught in grade school is narrow and crafted to serve the ruling classes; white men dominate that history, despite the fact that people of color, the poor, women, and others had major impacts both on the stories we were told about our nation’s origins and, especially, on the stories we were not (usually) told. At the same time, our knowledge is frequently theoretical; that is, our concrete knowledge of the contributions made by non-white males is often limited.

Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (1993) is here to change that. Organized both chronologically and by ethnic group, the book is separated into chapters that tell a single group’s history and its effect in the U.S., including a wealth of quotes and information from original and secondary sources. Connected enough by unifying metaphors to read the work through from cover to cover, each chapter can also stand alone if your interest is more focused and less general.

Among many significant insights, Takaki’s analysis of the civil rights movement as emerging from the upheaval and opportunities during World War II surprised me, because I hadn’t heard it before, and rang true. Such analysis is helpful as we continue to see the results of these developments in our culture. The current backlash in our “post-feminist” and “post-racial” society, with its roots in the 1980s, is another attempt by those with privilege and power in our country to keep the rest of us from uniting for the good of the many, rather than the benefit of a few. Such moves started early in our history (e.g., when “race” was created to divide white indentured servants from black) and, as I’ve said, continue to this day.

Takaki’s book is a classic and deserves to be. When I saw him speak in 2007, his enthusiasm, erudition, and genius were obvious. His tragic death last year was a loss to us all.

covering

In Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (2006), Kenji Yoshino uses “covering” to mean the opposite of flaunting. Covering is a wide array of behaviors by individuals in a society that attempt to hide the way those people don’t conform to the “mainstream” idea of what society considers “normal” human behavior. Covering is assimilation, an often useful action in a diverse society of people trying to get along with one another.

Yoshino frames covering as part of a spectrum of oppressive behavior by dominant cultural groups, a spectrum that starts with demands to “convert,” then to “pass,” and finally to “cover.” Focusing largely on gay and lesbian identity, Yoshino traces some of the history of demands to “covert” to heterosexuality, followed by the demand to “pass” as straight, and finally, the current requirement to cover, potently symbolized by the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the U.S. military. Converting is about actually becoming something different; the “converted” would actually stop being attracted to same-sex partners and be attracted exclusively to opposite-sex partners. Passing is less about actually changing your preferences; instead, it’s about pretending to be something you’re not; it’s a performance of heterosexuality. Covering is not a full on performance of straightness, but rather a not-flaunting of queerness. As I said above, covering is the opposite of flaunting.

The same spectrum of oppression works outside of hetero-normativity. For example, racial minorities in the U.S. have had a similar history, though of course passing is limited to those whose phenotype allows them to do so. Covering is much more pernicious. Witness the demand for African-American’s to wear their hair more like white or Asian hair, a demand that requires painful treatments, enormous amounts of money, and hours of regular maintenance. African-American women face especially stringent requirements for what hairstyles are acceptable, requirements that deny a rich cultural history and the physical nature of their hair. (If you haven’t seen Chris Rock’s documentary, Good Hair, on the subject, then check it out as soon as you can.) Essentially, our society asks black folks not to display their black hair, i.e., not to be so black.

As a straight, white male from an essentially middle-class background, I have to cover few, if any, of what U.S. culture considers major dimensions of identity to make myself seem “normal.” That doesn’t mean I don’t need to cover parts of myself. For a relatively mild example, I occasionally like to lick my plate, not wanting to waste the delicious sauce on the dish; however, I usually (but not always) restrain that urge in public because I don’t want people to think I’m completely uncouth or crazy. More seriously, I frequently hide my urge to cry in public. I also quite consciously dress to be taken seriously at my job, despite the fact that I would often be happier in other, less “acceptable” clothing.

I mention these examples not to trivialize the oppression that people of color, women, members of the LGBT community, and others experience, nor to make light of the strong demands that our culture makes on them to cover their individuality. Instead, I mean to emphasize that we are all required to cover in one way or another. Covering mutes our individuality by obscuring the idiosyncratic differences between us. And, as Yoshino acknowledges, this is often good because it helps the world run more smoothly. As long as people are given the choice to cover or not, Yoshino has no problem. What he objects to is forcing people to assimilate.

Yoshino’s discussion of covering is most poignant when most personal, when he describes his coming out as a gay man and then his struggle not to cover. His legal analysis brings out his training as a lawyer, which is good—and, as with much legalese, sometimes you wish he had said the same thing in a lot fewer words. At the same time, his experience as a poet and his general love of language make even the driest passages a relative joy to read. I’ve never read a more finely crafted piece of non-fiction. In this way, Yoshino is refusing to cover any of who he is—poet, lawyer, son-of-immigrants, gay man, and more—he flaunts it all. His final prediction, about the end of identity politics, seems overly optimistic, perhaps even naïve; but I believe he is true to his experience and to who he is throughout. That courage not to cover is rare and I, for one, appreciate it.

we real cool

In the preface to We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2004), bell hooks notes that “there is not even a small body of anti-patriarchal literature speaking directly to black males about what they can do to educate themselves for critical consciousness, guiding them on the path of liberation.” hooks writes the book, then, “as a black woman who cares about the plight of black men. I feel I can no longer wait for brothers to take the lead and spread the word. I have spent ten years waiting. And in those years the suffering of black men has intensified. Writing this book I hope to add my voice to the small chorus of voices speaking out on behalf of black male liberation.”

I read the book, not because I’m a black man, but to think about my African-American male students and how to help them succeed in my classes; I knew hooks would provide incisive cultural observation and a hopeful, loving message. I also read because I could, in the future, have a bi-racial child who would be considered by many to be black. I feel the need to prepare. I wanted to think about it with something beyond my own brain and the influence of those around me.

When I expressed these sentiments to my old friend, John, a parent, he said that he couldn’t help me think about having bi-racial children, but nevertheless he thought the most important thing a parent can do for a child is be present for him or her. He said that that the complications I was considering might be good to be aware of, but that ultimately the most important thing is to love your children and show them that you do. hooks says pretty much the same thing. The book is pretty critical of black men and points to better parenting as part of the solution. I can be a part of that solution in that I can hold high expectations for my children and give them the support to achieve them. I can love them and demonstrate that love consistently. Hopefully, I can also model what it means to be a man in a way that does not perpetuate all of the racist, patriarchal injustice against which hooks rails.

outliers

Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell, 2008) is subtitled The Story of Success, because Gladwell sets out to look at successful people, how they achieved that success, and what factors outside their control helped (or hindered) them on the way to success. He looks at professional hockey players and other athletes. He looks at Bill Gates. He looks at school children and lawyers. From my perspective his conclusion is that every successful person has a series of advantages and/or opportunities that don’t come to most of us; there is some unearned, usually structural advantage—often several of advantages—that successful people have that the rest of us don’t. Therefore, Outliers is a thoroughgoing critique of idea that meritocracy exits.

For example, in Canada, where many professional hockey players grow up, children’s hockey is organized by age group. If you will be 12 during the calendar year, whether in January or June or December, you will play in the 12 year-old league. If you turn 12 in December, compared to children born in the first few months of the year, you will be 10 or 12 months behind in development. So, when it comes time to select the best of the 12 year-old league, you’ll be at a significant disadvantage, because you’re likely to be less physically developed than most of your peers. The best of any particular age group tend to get more playing time, more coaching, and just play more hockey. Thus, when you get to the 13 year-old league, not only are you behind your peers physically, but also in terms of experiencing and training. This gap widens at every age group—is it any surprise that most of the Canadian national hockey team is born in the first three months of the year? According to Gladwell, the great majority are.

This is a great illustration of an arbitrary advantage, given to some and not to others, that leads to the difference between success and failure at something, in this case hockey. Gladwell describes similar structural and systemic advantages and disadvantages in all kinds of situations until, after telling a story about a “brilliant immigrant kid [who] overcomes poverty and the Depression, can’t get a job at the stuffy downtown law firms, makes it on his own through sheer hustle and ability,” he says: “I hope by now that you are skeptical of this kind of story . . . . [S]uccess doesn’t happen that way. Successful people don’t do it alone. Where they come from matters. They’re products of particular places and environments.” Successful people are “a product of the world in which they grew up.

Gladwell goes further, explicitly critiquing the way our culture clings to “the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we chose to write as a society don’t matter at all,” thereby wasting huge a amount potential talent:

Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by “we” I mean society—in determining who makes and who doesn’t.

Gladwell implicates us all. “To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success . . . with a society that provides opportunities for all. ”

Societal responsibility for helping our children succeed and for helping all people realize their potential is an important message. If Gladwell had left I there—pushing us to accept our responsibility and calling out to change the arbitrary nature of success in the current structures—the book would have been a useful and even profound call to improve education and opportunity for all.

Unfortunately, rather than change society to acknowledge the talent and skill of more of us, for Gladwell the solution seems to be to deny ones culture in the name of being successful by the standards of our current structures. Looking at Korean Air pilots and their historically disproportionately high crash rate, Gladwell literally argues that “to be a success at what they did, they had to shed some part of their own identity,” a deep respect for authority that he admits “runs throughout Korean culture.” Similarly, for Marita, a twelve year-old girl in a special school called KIPP (Knowledege is Power Program) in New York City. “[T]he cultural legacy she has been given does not match her circumstances . . . . Her community does not give her what she needs. So what does she have to do? Give up her evenings and weekend and friends—all the elements of her old world—and replace them with KIPP.” That is, Marita needs to give up her culture because her culture isn’t giving her “what she needs.”

This attitude is classic cultural deficit reasoning (see the work of Tara Yosso and my entry on a lecture she gave in San Francisco). The idea, often put forward by well-meaning liberals, is that the poor (usually non-white) unfortunates, who don’t have the advantages that middle-class white kids have, can be saved by assimilating, by learning and adopting white middle-class culture. That this ignores the strengths, abilities, intelligences, and experiences the rest of the world brings to every situation doesn’t seem to register. This perspective looks at what people don’t have (i.e., they don’t have middle-class white culture), rather than what they do have (i.e., cultures and practices and abilities all their own). It also ignores the racism, sexism, classism, and other oppression that people outside dominant groups endure and the way that identity is fundamentally shaped by those forces.

A much better approach would recognize that everyone comes with strengths and weaknesses and would celebrate the incredible diversity of our cultures and abilities. It would foster talents we currently don’t even call talents. Creating true opportunity for more people to be successful in our culture means acknowledging the wealth that all people bring to school and work and politics and life.

Tim Wise on Van Jones’ resignation

No it’s not all about race, but it’s a lot about race. Check out Wise’s writing on the issue--cogent, insightful, and well-researched, as usual.