It is a man's opinion of himself which determines his own fate.
--Henry David Thoreau
The college systems works well for those born into affluent families, according to Suzanne Mettler, professor of government at Cornell. The system we have now of "first order colleges" (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, and the non-jock part of Stanford) and "second tier" upper class colleges (the rest of the Ivy League, and about thirty to fifty other highly selective colleges from Swarthmore to Duke to Wellsley) and a "third tier" respectability (Vanderbilt, NYU, Notre Dame) to selective schools like Boston College and Michigan all allow a certain ordering, which one might imagine the human resources people at the bank use to order the applicants applying for ground level jobs.
You might imagine that, but you'd likely be wrong.
The fact is, this caste system doesn't really seem to play out in the lives of people who flow through these caste determiners. In fact, it is entirely possible, as Andrew Hacker (professor of government at Princeton, Cornell, then Queens college) has suggested, it may be what the Harvard tier produces are unimaginative managers, who become well paid lawyers, bank presidents, the well to do bourgeoisie who never do much of transcendent importance, who never see the possibilities in a new technology like computers, who never make any really significant discoveries in science or engineering, but who do make significant six figure salaries and provide very well for their families. This happens not so much because of anything Yale or NYU taught them or any connections made there, but because they came from families which prepared them over a period of decades with certain expectations and a sense of entitlement.
What appalls professor Mettler is how people from lower class families are sold a bogus dream by the University of Phoenix and its ilk, telling the hapless paying poor that all they need is that University of Phoenix merit badge and the knowledge imparted along the way, and they will change their lives, leaping from lower class lives to upper class or at least to upper middle class lives.
What most if not all wind up with is a lower class life now made more difficult by high debt.
The Phantom suspects there might be answers in the numbers, if colleges and universities had those numbers or permitted those numbers to be generated, but the Phantom suspects those numbers have never been systematically collected.
What you would like to know is, looking at all college freshman, starting with the income of their parents, their place in the class structure of American society, how many moved up, how many fell and how many stayed the same? And you would like to see those numbers at 1, 5, 10, 20, 30 and 50 years post graduation.
Some would argue all that is relevant is what happens a year after graduation--that is all you can ask of a college--providing a foot in the door, but given the new patterns of employment and unemployment of twenty somethings, the Phantom would like long term data.
The Phantom hears, all day long, brief life histories of his fellow citizens. It is his impression that people from families with more than 4 children tend to be poorer, to pursue careers in areas which do not require prolonged training or gestation--they need to get to work. People from families of eight tend to graduate from high school, to stay within a few miles of where they graduated high school and to struggle, often working two jobs without prospects for ever living anything more than pay check to pay check. Some find trades and crafts--HVAC, plumbing, electrician, machinist--and they do better than their parents. But most follow the same path their parents followed, like salmon swimming upstream, spawning and turning belly up--their fates, financially, romantically, socially are locked in, predetermined.
If we could figure out whether these impressions are accurate, we might be able to figure out whether we might want to change these patterns and then, harder yet, we might figure out how we could change these patterns.
We do have historical precedent: After WWII, returning veterans went through college on the GI bill and sons of farmers and laborers and factory workers moved into white collar jobs, first homes, bought first cars, established families, but this was in the setting of government spending and a booming economy, very different times.
When the Phantom asks the woman who is working in a day care center every morning and stocking shelves a Walmart every evening and in Macy's selling handbags every weekend what her educational back ground is, she'll say she went to college. Where? Oh, Hesser College or McIntosh, the for profit places. And she thinks this credential is the same as if she had gone to Harvard or Boston College. She went to college, after all.
When the Phantom asks the 20 year old mother of a two year old what her plans are for the future, he hears she is taking a strenuous course at some local for profit to be a "Medical Assistant" for which she has to study anatomy and physiology and a bunch of other courses which her future employer does not care about. She is working hard because she has been told by somebody this will be good for her future and she has been duped. It is sad to see.
But her parents were factory workers and they have no idea what to advise their daughter about the worth of a particular "college degree." She was one of six kids, and one has gone into the Army, one works for the state highway department, filling potholes, one worked for a local factory, got laid off in the recession, then overdosed on meth and died. These are the stories the Phantom hears every day.
President Reagan shrugged and said, "The poor will always be with us," and he cut funding for student loans for real colleges. The whole notion that the government or any sector of the American civilization should be concerned about changing the lot of large portions of the citizenry died during Reagan's reign.
The new for profit "college degree" is just one more way the haves keep the have not's under their thumb. Develop a "business model" for a college, sell it to the unsuspecting who are trying to move up the caste system, and make your bundle on the backs of the dispossessed.
Is this a great country, or what?
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