the great challenge for university graduates is one that has attracted little attention because it evolved slowly and with little fanfare. Starting with the rapid expansion of government, industry, and the service sector after World War II, North America created one of the most impressive middle-management cohorts in the world. The USA and Canada were not alone. Japan had—and still has—one of the most successful middle-management cultures anywhere. So does England, built around the financial and insurance industries. Germany’s much-vaunted industrial establishment, like the banking sector in Switzerland, is likewise centred on a strong, educated, and conscientious middle-management layer. But consider the observation of Daniel Pink:
During the twentieth century, most work was algorithmic [described as “rules-based”]—and not just jobs where you turned the same screw the same way all day long. Even when we traded blue collars for white, the tasks we carried out were often routine. That is, we could reduce much of what we did—in accounting, law, computer programming, and other fields—to a script, a spec sheet, a formula, or a series of steps that produced a right answer. But today, in much of North America, Eastern Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Australia, routine white-collar work is disappearing; it’s racing offshore to wherever it can be done the cheapest. In India, Bulgaria, the Philippines, and other countries, lower-paid workers essentially run the algorithm, figure out the correct answer and deliver it instantaneously from their computer to someone six thousand miles away.[8]
The transition had a major impact on the prospects for North American youth. In 2015, Robert Putnam published a brilliant but depressing book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, that documented the rapid division of USA society into “have” and “have not” populations. His monumental work makes it clear that college and employment affirmative action cannot overcome deeply entrenched poverty, marginalization, racism, and trauma at the family and community level. Putnam puts words and statistics to what is obvious across the United States and parts of Canada. African Americans are doing much more poorly and have little access to the American Dream. Hispanic Americans, legal or otherwise, have suffered egregiously in educational and employment outcomes. New immigrants, for years the source of much American energy and entrepreneurship, lag well behind. It’s much the same in Canada, where immigrants struggle to have international credentials recognized and where Aboriginal peoples (as in the USA) often live with devastating poverty and community despair. Have-not regions—the Appalachians and Detroit in the USA, significant parts of the Maritimes and rural Quebec in Canada—rely on government transfers and make-work programs. The numbers are shocking: at the end of 2014, over forty-six million Americans relied on food stamps, and for three years in a row this figure included two hundred thousand people with Master’s degrees and thirty-three thousand with PhDs.[9]
Higher Education as the Answer
The problems are deep and systemic, attached to advances in technology, the displacement of labour through globalization, and the shift away from heavy industry across North America. Consider the implications, according to Derek Thompson, writing in The Atlantic, who documented the growing number of nonworking men and young people without jobs.[10]
The share of prime-age Americans (25 to 54 years old) who are working has been trending down since 2000. Among men, the decline began even earlier: the share of prime-age men who are neither working nor looking for work has doubled since the late 1970s, and has increased as much throughout the recovery as it did during the Great Recession itself. All in all, about one in six prime-age men today are either unemployed or out of the workforce altogether. This is what the economist Tyler Cowen calls “the key statistic” for understanding the spreading rot in the American workforce. Conventional wisdom has long held that under normal economic conditions, men in this age group—at the peak of their abilities and less likely than women to be primary caregivers for children—should almost all be working. Yet fewer and fewer are.
Starting in the 1980s, with industrial work eroding quickly, governments, parents, and high school counsellors turned to promoting college or university admission as the best path forward. The evidence was clear, displayed in the career and life experiences of those who opted for post-secondary education in the three postwar decades. The wage and income gap between high school graduates and those with college degrees was becoming steadily larger. What was missed in the celebration of the economic “success” of college graduates was the fact that, “The gap has increased mainly because of the collapse of wages for those who have less education, and not because of any dramatic increase in the earnings of college grads, especially new grads. The reason that fact about the gap matters is because it could well be that college grads do far better than high school grads and still do not earn enough to pay back the cost of their college degrees.”[11] The bonus for spending three or four years in post-secondary education, forgoing income during that time, and paying tuition and living expenses was nonetheless impressive and well worth the effort. Get a Bachelor’s degree and earn $1 million or more over a career than a community-college graduate, and much more than a mere high-school-diploma holder. Get a Master’s or professional degree and add another impressive salary jump. Struggle through to the PhD and earn even more. The formula was so simple. Governments believed that the formula also applied to them: subsidize undergraduate and graduate education, consider these to be investments in people and society, and reap the benefits of much higher taxes in the future. Everyone wins. No one loses.
By happy chance, the Learning = Earning numbers worked out perfectly for the college and university sector. It turned out that, on average, a four-year degree produced $1 million in additional lifetime income for a university graduate over a nongraduate. The world’s best marketing agency could not have found a better set of numbers. Even with the costs of going to school—and before the 1990s, tuition costs were reasonable and within reach for most middle-class families—and the delayed earnings, these young people enjoyed accelerated incomes, as well as cleaner and more attractive office environments.
College and university recruiters jumped to capitalize on the salary numbers. Sitting at dining room tables with prospective students or talking to an eager and earnest family at a recruiting fair, they could wipe out anxiety about high tuition costs and college living expenses with a simple reference to the million-dollar promise. Viewed this way, a degree was not simply an education. For parents, it was an investment, a financial commitment in their children’s future. And as alternative pathways to comfort and prosperity dried up—often for the parents themselves, as they lost their jobs or struggled with a changing workforce—the college promise hung out there like a bright and compelling beacon. Come hither, it said, to jobs and opportunity.
But from the outset, these statistics had been misleading. Averages are averages, indicating what will happen across a broad population. The averages dealing with college graduates include the Harvard-educated doctor, the Wall Street financier from Princeton, the McGill graduate with a degree in neuropsychology, and the oil and gas engineer from Texas A&M, as well as the English literature specialist from Minot State, the psychology graduate from Cal State Northridge, and the film studies major from New York University. Even the most superficial analysis would suggest that the first four would have dramatically different career outcomes than the last three. But the average figures were undeniably true, as averages, and parents and high school graduates, eager for reassurance, accepted the idea, or, to put it baldly, the lie that a degree—any degree from any institution—would provide a ticket to the middle class.
Parents and prospective students were even more strongly seduced by the additional promise of high-quality institutions. If the promises of universities and colleges in general might be suspect, then at least the best institutions provided better prospects. Harvard, University of Southern California, and University of Texas-Austin were clearly going to offer greater hope than a third- or fourth-tier college. Ditto Stanford, Duke, Princeton, Duke, and Yale. The data seem to bear this out. The simple dominance of Ivy League graduates in the American finance sector provides seemingly irrefutable evidence of what many North Americans take to be an unassailable truth. If Learning = Earning, then Learning at an Elite Institution = Even More Earning. The result, of course, is intense
