College makes sense for the elite, but it might not for the working class
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College makes sense for the elite, but it might not for the working class

Educational levels do not just reflect social class, they are constitutive of it. Graduating from college is a class act that both enacts class status and reproduces it.

As blue-collar jobs disappeared and communities withered in rural areas and rust belt cities, we have not responded with good jobs for “school leavers” (as the British call them). That phrase says it all: if you want a good living, get a college education and a white-collar future. If you leave school, you get what you deserve.

On the right, the talk is of bootstraps and college loans. On the left, it’s of Pell grants and affordable tuitions. But the prescription is the same: a college degree. This ignores an important fact: only 33% of Americans obtain college degrees.

The working class is not buying it. In the past three decades, college graduates’ earnings have climbed to 60% higher than those of high school graduates, but the proportion of Americans who completed 4-year degrees has not risen substantially. A slight increase in the percentage of women who do so was offset by a decrease in the percentage of men.

Insistence on college makes sense for professional elite kids: for them, it’s the prerequisite that allows them to reproduce their parents’ class status. But college may not make economic sense for working-class kids. It’s a much riskier decision that may not pay off. Working-class kids worry they might end up with a first-class degree and still fail to get a job because they don’t know the unwritten social codes of professional life; a British news report told of class migrants failing to get investment banking jobs in London because they didn’t know the “no brown in town” rules (i.e., don’t wear brown shoes in the City). Vance relied on his professional-class girlfriend to explain the folkways of her class. Without her, he notes, he lacked the social capital to navigate an elite career. At an interview, he called her from the restroom to find out which fork to use. Lucky he did: “the[se] interviews were about passing a social test—a test of belonging, of holding your own in a corporate boardroom, of making connections with potential future clients.”

Americans assume college is a class escalator, but it operates as a “caste system: it takes Americans who grew up in different social strata and it widens the divisions between them,” concludes public policy expert Suzanne Mettler. It’s easier for elite kids to get into selective schools because parents’ social networks give them access to the people who matter and because elite kids can do the unpaid internships and community service selective colleges now expect to see on their applications. It’s also just easier to get in, period. A child from the professional elite is three times more likely to be admitted to a selective private institution than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.

At a more basic level, working-class kids not only may not know how to get into elite schools; often they don’t even understand that there’s a big difference between going to Amherst and Michigan State. Indeed, they may have never heard of Amherst. One class migrant who ended up attending Brown wrote that her guidance counselor didn’t have much guidance to give: “He didn’t know much about Brown or any other schools I was applying to, didn’t have any advice for applying, and didn’t look into it afterward.” Her younger sister, who ended up at Wellesley, fared little better: her counselor didn’t even know where Wellesley was. She also remembers that their counselors would sometimes actively discourage them and their friends from applying to top-tier schools. The attitude was “You’ll never get in, that’s not for you, why’d you want to go there?” remembers their cousin.

Part of this is geographical. So-called “education deserts,” or communities in which there are either zero colleges or universities or only one community college nearby, are mostly situated in the rural areas of the Midwest and Great Plains, where many white working- class kids live. In contrast, professional-class kids often go to colleges far from home. Working-class families, expect their kids to remain in their families’ clique network throughout their lives.

Even if they’ve heard about selective schools, working-class kids of all races also know they’re expensive. They may not know scholarships are available or may be unable to pay even application fees. And like poor kids, working-class kids may be less likely to have the kind of school records that make them eligible for admission to selective schools.

And then there’s the debt. “I still value education,” wrote Diana Johnson,* “although it has gotten me nowhere, and in much debt.” Average college debt among graduating seniors who had taken out student loans more than doubled between 1986 and 2008, and increased 56% in the decade before 2014. In the 30 years since 1980, “the inflation- adjusted cost of college tuition and fees rose as much or more than the returns to a college education.” Taking on this amount of debt is a risky business for a kid from a working- class family. Students who don’t complete their degrees may end up worse off than if they’d never started: with a lot of debt, and no extra earning power. In 2009, student loans were siphoning off 35% of college dropouts’ annual income.

Another reason many working-class kids don’t go to college is that they don’t want to be “pencil pushers.” And many are proud they keep the economy going. Others want to work with their hands or believe that being a firefighter adds greater value to the community than designing ever-more-attention-grabbing Google ads.

And then there’s that uncomfortable fact that some aren’t suited to intellectual work.

So there are lots of reasons why college, which is such a no-brainer investment for professional-class kids, may not be as good or as safe an investment for working-class kids. They’re not ignorant and lazy. They just live in a different world.

When a Harvard-educated lawyer went into public interest law, his working-class parents found his career path mysterious. “What did they expect?” I asked. “Isn’t this what they wanted?” Nope: “What they wanted was for me to stay in [the Rust Belt city where he grew up] and buy a big car and a big house. Sort of like the real estate agent my mom worked for.” What they wanted was to keep him home, in body and mind—just with more money. That’s not what they got.

Incomprehension may bleed into hostility. “That’s the education talking,” class migrants often hear. “I feel like I have changed sides in some very important game,” noted one. Lamont mentions the disapproval of “people who forget where they come from.” “Admitting to ability or intelligence was a great sin and indicated that you were ‘stuck on yourself,’” noted another class migrant. She worked in her hometown as a carhop to make money for college and went to great pains to fit in. She thought she’d succeeded when the most handsome boy around asked her out. But then he stood her up, and she gradually realized the whole thing had been deliberately planned. “Perhaps in their view, it was retribution because they were somehow being stood up by me. I was deserting my class; they knew their place.”

Finally, there are the insults working-class students experience in the classroom. “[M]any of the professors resented having to teach us. One of them once described in class the mission of the school as ‘teaching the first generation of immigrant children how to eat with a knife and fork,’” said a class migrant from an immigrant background. Professors typically attended elite institutions, and some feel defeated and resentful when they end up teaching working-class kids at lower-ranked schools. Professors who would never let a racist comment pass their lips openly embrace “the stereotype of the southern redneck as racist, sexist, alcoholic, ignorant, and lazy.... redneck jokes may be the last acceptable ethnic slurs in ‘polite’ society,” reports a Southern class migrant. “A lot of my friends who did not make it to college were those who would not stand for that kind of treatment; they insulted back,” noted another class migrant. Yet another reason working-class kids don’t go to college or finish it.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review. Excerpted from White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America by Joan C. Williams. Copyright 2017 Joan C. Williams. All rights reserved.

Philip Crawford

East Los Angeles Collage

2y

So this college got its own built in park so the students can have pick nicks

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Jack Tractor

Moderator at VehicleBodyManufacturing@yahoogroups.com at Yahoo Groups

6y

The missing data is the lowest IQ of a successful graduate in each major. https://www.quora.com/What-college-majors-have-on-average-students-with-the-highest-IQ

Jack Tractor

Moderator at VehicleBodyManufacturing@yahoogroups.com at Yahoo Groups

6y

The Democratization of College is probably lowering the average IQ of graduates. http://thehill.com/policy/defense/248499-study-enlisted-marines-intelligence-rising-marine-officers-declining

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Jack Tractor

Moderator at VehicleBodyManufacturing@yahoogroups.com at Yahoo Groups

6y

The weak point of the whole article is that it uses the term "working class". College is for those who have the IQ to benefit from it.

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Jack Tractor

Moderator at VehicleBodyManufacturing@yahoogroups.com at Yahoo Groups

6y

Griggs vs. Duke power essentially made it OK to use educational credentials for job selection but not skill testing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co. This paved the way for using government subsidy to achieve EEO goals.

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