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
