Paul Tough shows that higher education does not ameliorate the inequities of K-12 but, rather, magnifies them.
...When I was 17 I enrolled in college and everything changed. History, philosophy, geography: A decade at the world’s best universities will lift you to new ground. The life I live now is not the life I was born to. I was propelled up to it, and the motor that powered my ascent was a university education.
This is our ideal of higher education: as an engine of opportunity. And data show that, when it works, higher education is exactly that. So why is it that The Chronicle of Higher Education recently called our system an “engine of inequality”? Has a college degree lost its transformative power, its capacity for lift?
Put simply, no, it hasn’t. We live in a knowledge economy, and human capital has never been more valuable. The problem is distribution. As higher education has increased in value, that value has increasingly become captured by those at the top, so that today, whether you graduate from college is largely determined by your parents’ income. In the United States, 77 percent of children born into the top income quartile will earn a degree by age 24, but for the bottom quartile that number is a mere 9 percent. The implications are clear: The education system isn’t transforming the lives of those who need it most; it is dispensing ever more opportunity to those who need it least... (continues)
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Is Meritocracy Making Everyone Miserable?
In a renewed debate over élite higher education, the question is whether the system is broken or the whole idea was a terrible mistake. By Louis Menand
In recent years, we have been focussed on two problems, social mobility and income inequality, and the place these issues appear to meet is higher education. That’s because education in the United States is supposed to be meritocratic. If the educational system is reproducing existing class and status hierarchies—if most of the benefits are going to students who are privileged already—then either meritocracy isn’t working properly or it wasn’t the right approach in the first place. Paul Tough, in “The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), thinks that the problem is a broken system. Daniel Markovits, in “The Meritocracy Trap” (Penguin Press), thinks that the whole idea was a terrible mistake.
The term “meritocracy” was invented in the nineteen-fifties with a satirical intent that has now mostly been lost. “Merit” was originally defined as “I.Q. plus effort,” but it has evolved to stand for a somewhat ineffable combination of cognitive abilities, extracurricular talents, and socially valuable personal qualities, like leadership and civic-mindedness. Attributes extraneous to merit, such as gender, skin color, physical ableness, and family income, are not supposed to constrain the choice of educational pathways.
Educational sorting often begins very early in the United States, as when schoolchildren are selected for “gifted and talented” programs, and it continues in high school, where some students are pushed onto vocational tracks. But every American has the right to an elementary- and high-school education. You just need to show up. Until you are sixteen, you are required by law to show up.
College is different. College is a bottleneck. You usually have to apply, and you almost always have to pay, and college admissions is a straight-up sorting mechanism. You are either selected or rejected. And it matters where. Research shows that the more selective a college’s admissions process the greater the economic value of the degree. The narrower the entryway, the broader the range of opportunities on the other side. College, in turn, sorts by qualifying some students for graduate and professional education (law, dentistry, architecture). And graduate and professional education then sorts for the labor market. It’s little gold stars all the way up.
College is also a kind of dating service. You and your classmates have chosen and been chosen by the same school, which means that your classmates are typically people whose abilities and interests are comparable to your own. And, for many people, friendships with other students constitute the most valuable return on their investment in college education. One of the things they are buying is entrance into a network of classmates whose careers may intersect profitably with theirs, and alumni who can become references and open doors.
We find it unseemly when someone is hired because his or her mom or dad made a phone call. We think that’s unmeritocratic. But we are not, usually, taken aback when we learn that someone got a job interview through a college roommate or an alumni connection, even though that is also unmeritocratic. We accept that those connections, along with connections that students make with their professors, are among the things you “earn” by getting into a college. It’s one of the rewards for merit.
Education therefore plays an outsized role in people’s lives. It can vastly outweigh the effects of family and local community on people’s beliefs, values, tastes, and life paths. For the individual student, the investment in time and money, not to mention the stress, can be enormous. But, according to Steven Brint’s “Two Cheers for Higher Education” (Princeton), even though tuition and fees increased by more than four times the rate of inflation between 1980 and 2012, college and graduate-school enrollments grew every year. (There has been a dip in recent years.)
Almost every study concludes that getting a college degree is worth it. What is known as the college wage premium—the difference in lifetime earnings between someone with only a high-school diploma and someone with a college degree—is now, by one calculation, a hundred and sixty-eight per cent. For people with an advanced degree, the wage premium is two hundred and thirteen per cent. (Of course, the more people who get a college degree—about a third of the population now has a bachelor’s degree—the greater the penalty for not having one. The decrease in earnings for non-degree holders raises the premium.)
The term “meritocracy” was invented in the nineteen-fifties with a satirical intent that has now mostly been lost. “Merit” was originally defined as “I.Q. plus effort,” but it has evolved to stand for a somewhat ineffable combination of cognitive abilities, extracurricular talents, and socially valuable personal qualities, like leadership and civic-mindedness. Attributes extraneous to merit, such as gender, skin color, physical ableness, and family income, are not supposed to constrain the choice of educational pathways.
Educational sorting often begins very early in the United States, as when schoolchildren are selected for “gifted and talented” programs, and it continues in high school, where some students are pushed onto vocational tracks. But every American has the right to an elementary- and high-school education. You just need to show up. Until you are sixteen, you are required by law to show up.
College is different. College is a bottleneck. You usually have to apply, and you almost always have to pay, and college admissions is a straight-up sorting mechanism. You are either selected or rejected. And it matters where. Research shows that the more selective a college’s admissions process the greater the economic value of the degree. The narrower the entryway, the broader the range of opportunities on the other side. College, in turn, sorts by qualifying some students for graduate and professional education (law, dentistry, architecture). And graduate and professional education then sorts for the labor market. It’s little gold stars all the way up.
College is also a kind of dating service. You and your classmates have chosen and been chosen by the same school, which means that your classmates are typically people whose abilities and interests are comparable to your own. And, for many people, friendships with other students constitute the most valuable return on their investment in college education. One of the things they are buying is entrance into a network of classmates whose careers may intersect profitably with theirs, and alumni who can become references and open doors.
We find it unseemly when someone is hired because his or her mom or dad made a phone call. We think that’s unmeritocratic. But we are not, usually, taken aback when we learn that someone got a job interview through a college roommate or an alumni connection, even though that is also unmeritocratic. We accept that those connections, along with connections that students make with their professors, are among the things you “earn” by getting into a college. It’s one of the rewards for merit.
Education therefore plays an outsized role in people’s lives. It can vastly outweigh the effects of family and local community on people’s beliefs, values, tastes, and life paths. For the individual student, the investment in time and money, not to mention the stress, can be enormous. But, according to Steven Brint’s “Two Cheers for Higher Education” (Princeton), even though tuition and fees increased by more than four times the rate of inflation between 1980 and 2012, college and graduate-school enrollments grew every year. (There has been a dip in recent years.)
Almost every study concludes that getting a college degree is worth it. What is known as the college wage premium—the difference in lifetime earnings between someone with only a high-school diploma and someone with a college degree—is now, by one calculation, a hundred and sixty-eight per cent. For people with an advanced degree, the wage premium is two hundred and thirteen per cent. (Of course, the more people who get a college degree—about a third of the population now has a bachelor’s degree—the greater the penalty for not having one. The decrease in earnings for non-degree holders raises the premium.)
Section 13
ReplyDeleteI do think college allows a lot of great services like jobs and interviews and yes even technically a dating service. Life after college is all about connections, its about who you know. Yes we look down on people when their parents line up a job for their child, but that is how you get ahead in life.