the decision to go to CalTech or to study computer science at the University of Hong Kong. It is often considered an extended family failure if a son or daughter ends up at Brandon University or Newcastle in the UK. A Western family is likely to be happy with admission into any field at Yale, Swarthmore, or Auckland; if the young adult is only able to get into the University of Pennsylvania at Bradford or Charles Darwin University (Australia), it is much preferred that they take a practical field, such as math or education. University is a family matter, starting with the enforcement of parental expectations from a very young age, establishment of an education trajectory, selection of a university, and financing.
There is a gripping illustration—tragic in so many ways—of how this works out in America, and this story can be replicated in dozens of countries around the world. Waiting for Superman is a documentary film indictment of public education in the United States. In the process of critiquing the existing school system, director Davis Guggenheim follows dozens of children entered into a lottery to get into a prestigious and high-quality charter school. The calculus from here is devastatingly simple. Get accepted and the student is on track to university admission and the prospect of a good life. Get turned down and the student is sentenced to a lifetime of mediocrity and poverty, based on attendance at a substandard public school. The faces of the parents—and by extension, their children—as the lottery names are called, passing over one after the other, speak volumes about the crisis of expectations. With so many North American families assuming that their children have to go to university in order to succeed, the failure to get into a good feeder school at the age of eight or nine years is viewed as a family catastrophe.
As for the agents who help with getting them into a good college, a distressing number of them are apparently willing to fabricate or alter high school transcripts and other documents in order to get past admissions officers and visa officials. Often, the universities pay the agents as well, creating impressive cash flows and potential conflicts of interest all around. The result can be spectacular abuse, such as the 2012 scandal that hit Dickinson State University in North Dakota, where it was discovered that dozens of students had been let in inappropriately and were then shepherded through the degree process in questionable ways. Or worse, the 2011 scandal involving Tri-Valley University of California, accused of collecting fees from foreign students but not requiring them to attend class so that they could work throughout the country on student visas.[25]
While most Western countries have fairly straightforward systems of admission—those with the highest grades get in—the United States has a bewildering array of institutional choices and admission procedures. Here, as in China, admission agents have proven extremely popular. Agents advise about where to volunteer, how to broaden the resumé, and how to shape the all-crucial letter of application to suit institutional expectations. There are shady dealings here as well. Some high school seniors have been directed to faux humanitarian projects, allowing the students to stay in nice accommodations while getting their pictures taken with orphans and AIDS sufferers. Amazingly, and perhaps providing proof of their poor fit at a top institution, the applicants and their parents seem to believe that the universities don’t know about these scams. Outsourcing both the selection process—agents are supposed to find the best school that will accept the student—and the work needed to get into that school undercuts one of the core purposes of the admission process. Universities want to know (or they should want to know) that the student is really interested in attending their institution; not that their parents can afford to hire an agent to fill in the forms, edit the letter of application, and charm the admissions officers.
In an age of egregiously spoiled children—one outcome of small family size and two-career families—it’s hardly surprising that parents devote a great deal of effort to the admissions process. But there are deeper issues at play here. While the reality is less impressive than the myth, most wealthy parents buy into some variant of the double-dipper myth of university attendance. The first, and widely shared, element is that a university degree creates job opportunities and therefore a steady adult income, and even a rewarding career, although that is becoming secondary. Second, there is the belief that attendance at the “right” university will bring prestigious opportunities, through personal connections (maybe your son will marry the daughter of a billionaire or your daughter’s roommate will become a senior executive at Procter & Gamble) and the glamour of the degree. That 40 percent of the graduating class from Yale University found work in the financial industry—despite the moral bankruptcy of the sector in the last decade—is a clarion call to parents: “Get your kids into Yale and they will be rich!”
Other countries offer variations on the same theme. Attendance at a top Japanese school is often a precondition for a great job in the civil service, where power rests in Japan. In India, graduating from an IIT produces a badge of honour that the individual and the extended family carry for life. Every country has its institutional hierarchy, which in the minds of parents relates far more to career opportunities and income forecasts than the universities would like to believe; their commitment is to the ideal of high education, world-class research, and a stimulating intellectual environment. The Times Higher Education Supplement produces a widely distributed annual ranking of the top four hundred universities in the world. Grabbing a spot near the top—“the 400” represents about half of one percent of the world’s universities—pushes an institution to the forefront of parents’ minds. The rankings, won by academic success and determined by peer reviews, have their primary value in recruiting students (and donors) to the institution. In much the same way, the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings industry shapes and distorts institutional expenditures and planning, all with a view to making the universities more attractive to students and their parents.
The Rationale for Investing in Higher Education
Accept, if you will, that there are parents who truly wish their students to have a challenging intellectual experience, to study at the feet of the masters, and to graduate from universities with a well-developed world view and a broad understanding of the human condition and/or the natural world. Recognize that these parents are in the minority. Parents are prepared to invest very heavily—up to $60,000 a year for a top American private university and $20,000 a year for a high-ranked public institution, when living costs are factored in.
Why do they pay so much? Because they want their children to get a job and earn a high income. (Or, to be frank, if the family is truly wealthy and the teenagers will never have to work for a living, the goal is largely pride and bragging rights.) They have sipped the university Kool-Aid for decades and perhaps benefited from university attendance themselves, when participation rates were much lower and the job market much more favourable. Or sometimes they ante up because they can see no other alternative. We live in an age that prioritizes white-collar office work and that unwittingly deprecates blue collar or physical labour, even if such work produces higher and steadier incomes. Finally, parents are willing to pay up because they know that few children have the entrepreneurial spirit and drive to produce their own jobs and careers. So, in an age of rampant credentialism, when a university degree is a prerequisite for the most basic, entry-level jobs—rental-car clerk, telephone operator, and the like—when they are bombarded by promises about the knowledge economy, when government leaders speak about the high value attached to post-secondary education, and when everyone is encouraged to enrol in university, they do the obvious thing.
Politicians reinforce these parental obsessions when they speak in boosterish terms about the “knowledge economy” and the open-ended opportunities that lie before college and university graduates. As companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, Sun Computer Systems, DoCoMo, Samsung, Alibaba, Nokia, and thousands of others displaced the big industrial firms at the top of the corporate order, it seemed that new technologies and their applications would define the evolving global economy. The global expansion of university education, both domestically and in terms of the annual migration of millions of international students, has been tied to the assumption that the high-tech economy of the twenty-first century would easily absorb all of the graduates from the world’s universities. This is proving to be only partly true.
Diversity in Size, Diversity
