[Hales]  Death of the College Dream?

By Anthony Hales Jr.
December 14, 2011

For the past two months, Americans have struggled to figure out what exactly the Occupy Wall Street movement is about. Who are the protesters? What do they stand for? What is their agenda? Many have asked these questions, but no one has seemed to produce a solid answer.

The protesters are clearly frustrated with the status quo in America. To borrow from a popular '90s-era rock band, there is a rage against the machine. While the Occupy movement has named a long list of villains, one consistent target has been higher education.

For most of the past century, American kids have been sold the college dream: If they obtain a college degree, they will be rewarded with a good job and a stable career.

This message has been preached for good reason; statistics show that college graduates on average earn more than $1 million more than their less-educated counterparts throughout their lifetime. For a long time, the simple fact that a student had a degree demonstrated to potential employers that a person was capable of learning and therefore, qualified for employment. American magazines and television interviews are filled with rags-to-riches stories where college degrees help spring people up the socio-economic ladder.

Americans for the most part bought into the college dream. Higher education has seen growth almost unparalleled by any other industry for the past four decades. U.S. Department of Education statistics show that enrollments at American degree-granting institutions have come close to tripling since 1970. As America shifted from low-skill to high-skill jobs during the latter 20th century, bachelor's degrees went from being commodities to near necessities for participating in the American economy.

After Congress removed income caps from federally backed student loans in 1978, students were basically able to attend any college they qualified for, and the college arms race began. The explosion of for-profit colleges such as the University of Phoenix and Strayer University opened college access to an entirely new population of non-traditional students and jumpstarted the online degree movement. Students can now earn two-year, four-year, and advanced degrees without ever leaving home.

While a college education is still essential to thriving in most American industries, a shifting economy, growing student-loan debt, and high unemployment and underemployment among recent graduates require that we reconsider the college dream. Student-loan debt is set to hit a trillion dollars in 2011, and many Americans have no clue how they will pay off their loans. Many analysts considered student loans to be one of the most inflexible debts: Student loans cannot be discharged during bankruptcy and hover above the heads of indebted graduates like the anvils in old Bugs Bunny cartoons.

The great recession has had a catastrophic effect on recent college graduates even for those lucky enough to find jobs. Shifts in the economy have left many questioning the viability of certain degrees. A recent proposal on slate.com by Yale law professors Akhil Reed Amar and Ian Ayres suggests that law schools pay lower-performing students to quit.

Despite an arguable decrease in economic value over the past decade and a half, the price of four-year degrees at most American universities has drastically increased. Driven by decreased state financial support, tuition rose again across the country at twice the rate of inflation in 2011. This continues a trend that has been in place since the early '90s. To put it simply, we now pay a lot more for college degrees that are arguably worth a lot less than they were 20 years ago.

The status quo in higher education is unsustainable. Young people are paying attention. They see their older siblings and friends graduating with outlandish student-loan debt burdens and decreased job prospects, and are asking questions. Some of those who went through the system and feel bamboozled are speaking out—at the occupy protests, on blogs, on social networks and on editorial pages across the country.

For many, the college dream is starting to sound like a myth, and a revolution against the system is brewing. If we continue down this same path, America may end up with a higher-education version of the 2008 financial crisis.

It is time for a serious look at the way we operate post-secondary institutions from both a federal and state perspective. In a world where independence is valued but resources are limited and diminishing, we need a serious focus on systematized planning and alignment. Most importantly, we must have a goal and a purpose for higher education. The president has consistently said that he wants the U.S. have the world's highest degree-attainment rate. While a noble goal, a nation that leads the world in attainment rate at the cost of student-loan debt hindering an entire generation leaves a lot to be desired.

Anthony Hales Jr. Is a graduate of Jackson State University and recently finished a master's degree in public policy at George Mason University. He lives in Washington, D.C., and is co-founder of the Seville Skills Foundation (http://www.sevilleskillscamp.org or http://www.facebook.com/sevilleskills), a non-profit that teaches life skills to urban youth through sports. Contact him at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

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