curiosity. Colleges and universities were not intended for the disengaged. Nor were they designed to be credential- and income-conferring organizations focused on students’ short-term career needs. But this is what governments want them to be, what parents demand that they be, and what a growing percentage of the students expect them to be.
Universities were once bastions of achievement and meritocracy, although nowhere near what faded memories suggest. That still holds for the elite institutions, but many more now wallow in mediocrity. Here is a statement, alarming but true, that you won’t hear from any government or university bureaucrat:
For many of the world’s university students, their attempts to get a degree will result in academic failure. Graduates may experience minimal career benefits, be burdened with debt, will not have the expected job opportunities and income and may find they are not prepared for a successful career. For a minority—ironically largely in academic fields where the programs are regulated by outside professional agencies, like nursing, medicine, and engineering—university degrees produce superb career opportunities, high incomes, and a good chance at professional satisfaction. For many (but not all) of the rest, disappointment awaits.
Colleges and universities have never been perfect. Student thirst for learning was never as intense as nostalgia would have it, although we suggest (and experience reinforces) that it was demonstrably better than at present. The career outcomes for graduates were never perfect, but again better than at present. In over two generations, colleges have gone from being places to learn, as well as to mature and socialize, to places to prepare for a career. The tragedy of the Dream Factories is that, for a significant majority of the students in North America, they are also failing in this new role. What’s more, with the surge of attempts to regulate sexual behaviour and freedom of speech, struggles over on-campus drinking, criticisms of college athletics, high levels of student debt, and many other expanding challenges, the colleges and universities in North America are slowly losing their special status as places to socialize, have fun, and discover one’s future.
What conclusions can we draw from the many transformations of the past fifty or so years? First, there are career benefits, particularly for those who graduate. While much of this is accounted for by non-institutional elements, college graduates generally do reasonably well in the contemporary workforce. Second, there is still a college premium evident in the workforce,[16] and in most countries university graduates have considerably lower unemployment rates than those who do not have a degree. Our point, from the outset, is not to argue that there are no employment benefits from a college degree. Rather, we have emphasized the growing reality that colleges, which lose many of their admitted students enroute to graduation, produce uneven results that are not consistent with the promotional rhetoric and realities of the contemporary workforce.
While it is reassuring to note that college graduates usually do find work, it is depressing for many of them to discover that the work is insecure, low paid, and not connected to their expectations and what they feel are the promises of governments, institutions, and parents. Moreover, the college and university sector does not hold back in celebrating the accomplishments of their top graduates, using recruiting and promotional tactics that are more akin to late-night television weight-loss and hair-replacement advertisements than a realistic assessment of how college might change a young person’s life.
But broader societal forces are at play as well, a fact that helps explain parental paranoia and youth anxiety about the future. Robert Putnam, an eminent American sociologist, documented the surge in inequality in the USA and described the rapid collapse of the American Dream. He put it bluntly:
The causes of this increase in inequality during the past three to four decades are much debated—globalization, technological change and the consequent increase in “returns to education,” deunionization, superstar compensation, changing social norms, and post-Reagan public policy—though the basic shift toward inequality occurred under both Republican and Democratic administrations. No serious observer doubts that the past 40 years have witnessed an almost unprecedented growth in inequality in America. Ordinary Americans, too, have gradually become aware of rising inequality, though they underestimate the extent of the shift.[17]
Putnam argued that unequal access to high-quality education is a significant contributor to the rise in inequality. But if advanced education were actually the panacea it is made out to be, economic inequality in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century should have diminished because of the surge in enrolment. Instead it has grown.
3
Out of Sync
What went wrong? While a college or university degree was never a guarantee of a great job, a high income, and a house with a two-car garage in the suburbs, it served as the closest thing North America had to offer as a guarantee of such an outcome—second only to being born into a wealthy family. That so many college and university graduates struggle to find good jobs is due, in part, to the over-enrolment and massive over-selling of the career benefits of a college degree. But the transformation of North American and global markets has played an equally important role in creating the gap between the dreams and aspirations of twenty-first-century youth and the realities of the world economy.
We can put this very simply. The massive effort to get as many people as possible to college or university is not matched by a comparable effort to create jobs for the increased population of young people and for those dislocated from the workforce as the result of various competitive forces. As James Clifton argues:
The coming world war is an all-out global war for good jobs. As of 2008, the war for good jobs has trumped all other leadership activities because it’s been the cause and the effect of everything else that countries have experienced. This will become even more real in the future as global competition intensifies. If countries fail at creating jobs, their societies will fall apart. Countries, and more specifically cities, will experience suffering, instability, chaos and eventually revolution. This is the new world that leaders will confront.[1]
Outsourcing Jobs to Cheaper Labour Markets
With surprising speed, economic globalization and the rise of East Asia, India, and China have undercut some of the key foundations of the Western economy, displacing hundreds of thousands of workers and dashing the expectations of the young in many countries. What happened to the airline industry fifteen years ago serves as a good example. In the late 1990s, airlines found themselves facing a dilemma. They could continue to hire reservation agents in their own countries, paying a decent wage to get the college and university graduates that they preferred to hire. With benefits thrown in, they were paying more than $35,000 a year as a starting salary for what was, to North American youth, an entry-level and temporary job. But then improvements in telecommunications and computer systems provided access to huge pools of well-educated overseas talent. When India became readily accessible, the airlines (and other businesses) could hire from among tens of thousands of well-educated, highly motivated university graduates. The key differences? In India, these jobs carried an annual salary of $5,000—and any candidate fortunate enough to get one of the positions typically held on to it. The choice seemed obvious: one reluctant North American college graduate at $35,000 a year, or seven university graduates from India, the latter being more grateful for the jobs and often demonstrating a stronger work ethic and more commitment to the position. It makes sense that many telemarketing and reservation systems link phone calls to Bangalore or Mumbai, where staff from India are trained, with greater or lesser success, to speak with North American regional accents.
But that was only the beginning. Factory workers were laid off by the thousands throughout the early twenty-first century, with hundreds of North American factories shuttered and the jobs relocated to Mexico, China, Thailand, the Philippines, and India. The damage got worse during the 2008 global recession—brought to you by your friendly Wall Street subprime mortgage companies and their banking allies—a financial catastrophe that ended only
