more, particularly those from poorer or marginalized populations, colleges and universities convert dreams into reality. These are the system’s success stories and they deserve to be heard.
But colleges and universities also produce poor results, the numbers varying, based on the quality of the input (admission standards), the rigour of the programs (academic standards), and the nature of the field of study (professional standards). How often do these institutions publish accounts of the devastation of student and family dreams when young people are forced to withdraw because they lack the intellectual ability to complete an undergraduate degree? Do we hear about the international students with limited English-language ability, whose families saved for years and struggled to get them into a third-tier American or Canadian university only to have them fail to graduate and head home in despair, having used up the family’s money? And is there much coverage, beyond the occasional obligatory story about English-literature graduates serving coffee at Starbucks, about the system-wide experiences with unemployment and underemployment? For many university students—no one knows the percentage, but it’s much too high—the Dream Factories produce unhappiness. For a growing number, these factories produce outright nightmares.
There is a silver lining in this story. Many employers do favour college graduates, even if it is for work that does not require an advanced education, such a hotel clerk, rental-car sales associate, retail clerk, or the like. Fairly or not, many employers use the completion of an undergraduate degree as a sign of commitment to task, work ethic, and basic ability, and not any longer as a sign of excellence in such previously fundamental areas as writing and mathematical ability, basic understanding of political and legal systems, and general education. In other words, if you are hiring car-rental desk clerks, and of two hundred applicants, half have college degrees, there’s no reason not to give them preference. So, in an economy with too few jobs of any variety, college and university graduates can usually find some sort of employment.
Using twenty-first century survival skills—marked by moving back in with their parents, getting regular contributions from Mum and Dad, sharing living accommodations with friends, holding down two or more jobs, postponing major life choices (marriage, children, buying a home), and getting by with less—young college graduates are generally making do. They may not enjoy the lives of the leisured and well-financed middle class that they and their parents anticipated, but neither are they on the streets. While aspiring to the upper middle class and beyond, many thousands of college graduates are settling into lives in the lower middle class, often enjoying lower standards of living than their parents and coping with ongoing uncertainty about the future. This, for the vast majority of young people in North America, was not the dream that they had been sold.
Upgrading Skills and Credentials
So, what are young people and their families doing about the growing crisis in the employment of university graduates? They are doing just what the Dream Factories and their government supporters want them to do: they are doubling down on their investments and continuing their studies in order to obtain a second or third degree. If graduates with a BA cannot find a job, continuing on to graduate school to obtain a MA should surely give them an advantage over the competition. To top it off, the best schools offer graduate stipends, research assistantships, and other support to help defray the cost of attending. There is not a great deal of evidence, however, that these educational gambles pay off in a major way. Less than a quarter of PhD holders end up with full-time faculty teaching positions. Instead, many wind up on short-term contracts. We won’t get into the horrors of teaching at universities as an adjunct or sessional professor, but it’s tough to argue that it’s worth the cost in money and years that it takes to get a PhD. And, as in other fields, the production of MAs in Political Science, MScs in Biology, PhDs in English Literature, or Doctorates in Education is in no systematic way tied to evident market demand.
Crisis in the Law Schools
The USA is experiencing a decline in law school applicants, with 20% fewer applications this fall [2013], due to the slowly-recovering economy, staffing cuts at law firms, and the rising cost of a law degree. There are roughly 30,000 fewer applicants than there were just 3 years ago, says Wendy Margolis, an official from the Law School Admission Council, which tracks enrolment. Ohio State University’s dean of the Moritz College of Law, Alan Michaels, explains that the recession caused a decreased demand for lawyer services. At the same time, he says, tuition at law school has risen; Ohio State’s law tuition is currently $28,000 per year.[14]
The steady and even growing enrolments belie the notion that there is a crisis in graduate school attendance. After all, if the number of people pursuing law degrees holds steady or dips only slightly, then surely that is an indication that the market has not yet discounted these degrees in any substantial way. But law is a good example. Changing technologies and the shift toward paralegals and outsourced research has reduced the demand for new lawyers. In many jurisdictions, finding a career-launching articling position has become a formidable challenge. Imagine completing a four-year undergraduate degree, fighting to get into a good law school, finishing a two- or three-year program, and then running into a brick wall when searching for the crucial first job.
Here, however, the signs of market awareness are becoming evident. The number of law school applications has indeed started to fall, particularly in the United States, where several small law schools have closed. But the law schools that remain need students to fill the classes and pay the bills. Faced with fewer applications for a fixed number of positions, the law schools simply go down the scale a little further—effectively lowering their standards of admission—in order to complete the incoming class. Lower-quality students likely mean higher failure rates, poorer performance at the bar examinations, and less-effective lawyers in the profession. This is hardly the outcome any country would want.
Even here there are some oddities. The rush to graduate schools does not hold, incidentally, in the highest-demand areas, like engineering, the sciences, and accounting, where undergraduate-degree holders can usually still find good jobs. In these cases, international students make up the lion’s share of the graduate enrolments, perhaps because of the lower math and science skills of domestic students. Some of these degrees are of value mostly to the incomes of those who hold them. The best example is the growth in Master of Education and PhD/Doctorate in Education programs. Most of these graduate students are practising teachers; the main attraction of the graduate programs is contractually fixed salary increases tied to the completion of an additional degree, even if the degree is not connected to their teaching duties. For the United States, the salary bill for these extra—and often irrelevant—degrees adds more than $5 billion a year to the education system’s budget.
Paying the Bills
In order to manage student debt, some undergraduates have gone so far as to pay for their education by selling companionship and sex to older men. The usual income for “sugaring,” as it’s called, is between $3,000 and $5,000 a month, according to a Miami firm called “Sugardaddie.” Allison, a twenty-three-old “sugar baby” in New York state, whose online name is Barbiewithabrain, has earned that much and more over the past five years from three successive sugar daddies.[15]
The situation in graduate schools raises the question about what else young adults can do in this job market to advance their interests and meet their aspirations. In the 1960s and 1970s, a high school diploma was sufficient to get the attention of most ordinary employers. By the 1980s and 1990s, an undergraduate degree was the key. By the 2000s and 2010s, the undergraduate degree, outside of specialized and technical programs, had started to run its course, providing access to entry-level jobs but rarely to desired careers. Now, graduate and professional degrees are deemed the key to entry into a successful economic future, although even here the shine has started to come off the advanced degrees. What a change this is from a generation or two earlier, when a college diploma was a sure ticket to the middle class.
The greater problem is that the doors are open so wide that the system is overwhelmed by students of minimal academic
