American dream, American nightmare
MIAMI – The announcement by President Obama last week that he is launching a campaign he described as personal, using both the bully pulpit of his office and the clout of the federal government, to fight against the accelerating increase in the cost of college is welcome news.
The unaffordability of higher education is not the principal reason that today the United States has the highest level of inequality in the developed world (tax and other government policies that systematically favor the rich are more important), but it contributes a good share.
Numerous studies have shown that those with a college degree make significantly more money than high school graduates or dropouts. College graduates also have lower rates of unemployment. They tend to hold down the kinds of jobs that are more likely to provide health insurance and that are associated with higher life expectancy. Thus being able to attend college – or being shut out for economic reasons – is no small matter. It has clear and substantial consequences for what in classical sociological parlance is called an individual’s “life chances.”
Ironically, even the fact that college costs have increased more sharply at the most expensive universities is cold comfort. It only means that the rich, who have reaped almost all the rewards of economic growth during the last few decades, can still afford to send their kids to the likes of Harvard and Yale. Meanwhile, children of middle-income parents are even less able to pay for the kind of institution most likely to ensure a smooth passage into the corporate and legal elite.
Thus, while the United has always had a significant higher level of inequality than, for instance, the Scandinavian countries (although the gap was never as great as it is now), it had always boasted that its free-market, low tax policies provided a higher level of social mobility (the prospect of succeeding generations climbing to ever higher rungs on the socioeconomic ladder) than the European welfare states. But myriad recent studies have shown that the classical American Horatio Alger story is now history. Today social mobility in the United States is lower than in the traditionally class-bound European countries.
To add yet one more depressing note to this gloomy picture, the progressive erosion of affirmative action in higher education, driven largely by court decisions, particularly at the Supreme Court, have decreased access, especially to the most competitive colleges, to most minorities at a time when the country is becoming increasingly diverse.
Thus that Obama is focusing his attention on a critical problem and pushing for needed change is unquestionable. Now the issue is what Obama will be able to do given the daunting obstacles he will confront and how much political will and capital he is willing to commit to get where he wants to go.
To start with, Obama can do little about one of the major factors responsible for escalating college costs: sharply decreased funding for public colleges and universities by state governments across the nation. State universities, especially the top ones such as the University of California at Berkeley and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, among others, provide opportunities for some very bright students lacking the money, the interest, or the class background to be admitted to the elite Ivy League schools. Second tier state institutions also provide a solid education and a good career path to countless dedicated students.
Defunding higher education is socially regressive and economically counterproductive. Decreased state funding hampers the ability of these schools to serve as vehicles for upward social mobility. It also degrades the quality of the labor force, decreasing productivity and making the state less attractive to employers. Yet none of these considerations have trumped the prevailing philosophy of less government, lower taxes, and massive and very costly incarceration of low-level offenders in pursuit of the futile “war on drugs.”
The second question is whether Obama is willing to play hardball with the universities. More than a year and half ago, in the 2012 State of the Union address, the president vowed to withhold federal funds from institutions that fail to hold the line on tuition. Since then, he has done nothing of the sort: Nada.
Now the president is proposing to parcel out federal funding on the basis of some measure of the “value” provided to students by their institutions, in effect the quality and quantity of education a given university provides relative to what it charges. In the event this policy is adopted, its implementation is likely to be delayed or derailed by endless debate about everything from the criteria for defining quality to the relative value of a humanistic education versus professional training.
What is clear is that if the president’s current campaign against the exorbitant cost of higher education fails, a nation already alarmingly polarized economically and racially will continue on the path from the American Dream to the American Nightmare.
