Category Archives: Writing

In terms of what strategies colleges and universities could use to do bring students more in line with what employers are looking for, Humphreys said, “[employers] want a ‘both-and’ picture; they want higher education institutions to bring students to an even higher level of ability…. They also want [higher education] to ensure that every college graduate, no matter what their major is, achieves much higher levels of evidence-based reasoning, research skills and complex problem-solving skills [along with] ethical decision-making.”

‘More Than a Major’ Zack Budryk

I’ve been an English teacher long enough to remember a time when ‘finding a job’ wasn’t necessarily the first priority in college. Plenty of people went to college seeking specific jobs, of course, but the liberal arts model dominated. My Dad, who was an accountant and studied “Commerce” at L.S.U. in the late 1940s’, used to say that you went to college to get educated; once you were well-educated, you could easily get a job.

His degree included English classes as, in effect, a kind of second major. Over the three last decades or so (every sort of loss seems to start in 1980 with the election of Reagan) the once broad notion of vocation, centered on the professions, has become more and more narrow. It’s no coincidence that this has happened alongside a huge increase in the cost of higher education and ongoing attacks on the federal government.

The right hates class mobility– the servants get restless– and it will not abide the notion of a government with a social agenda and the funds to back it up. Cheap college and a progressive government, after all, brought us the 1960s’. We can let that happen again. We’ve now reached a point where the tail wags the dog: if you go to college to get a job, then the college has to change everything to make that happen.

Even more, college will be assessed by that vocational criteria and little else. It’s a prescription for servitude, not surprisingly, to the masters of the marketplace. And it has created an entire profession– the college professor– where a majority of people are no longer fully professionals; adjuncts paid piecemeal by the student or the course, no benefits. As the recession drags on, perhaps our masters are starting to reconsider.

I come from a very large Catholic family and very few of us went to college. I may be the only person in an extended family of more than 100 people who has a graduate degree. I can remember, in the 1970’s, most of my cousins and friends rejecting the middle class, and a middle class education, in a fairly explicit way. We wanted to be carpenters and plumbers and landscapers, not accountants and doctors and lawyers.

There were only a handful of college degrees in the generation that preceded us. My Dad had one from L.S.U. and I think I had at least one Uncle-in-law who did too. We should have taken the next step up the socioeconomic ladder but we didn’t. I don’t think our socioeconomic background is the only explanation but I do think that we were certainly both alienated by school and more or less institutionally ignored. We weren’t the promising students.

This sounded very familiar to me and much less new than the writer seems to suggest:

If one asked any university official, they would all be wanting to say that what they were trying to do was create a really rich educational environment leading everybody to move into strong professional trajectories. But what happens, particularly in this moment where public universities are becoming so tuition dependent, is that universities are in a position that in order to stay solvent they really have to attend very carefully to what it is that their most affluent, their most reliable set of students—set of customers, really—is going to want.

Elizabeth Armstrong, quoted in “College and Class: 2 Researchers Study Inequality, Starting With One Freshman Floor.“

In my family, two of us finished college degrees and two of us did not. I don’t have children. My sister Jill and her husband Cliff both finished their undergraduate degrees. They have two kids who will be going to college in a few years. I am certain both will do well; one or both may go on to graduate school. My other sister, who finished an associate degree in her 40’s, has one of three kids that will likely finish college.

My older sister, Cynthia, died a few years ago; she and her husband, Don, didn’t get college degrees. He quite high school and got his G.E.D. Their oldest daughter finished her undergraduate degree last year, in large part because she had softball scholarships. I worry that her younger sister will not finish. She has little financial or institutional support, especially now, without her mother, who was a tenacious advocate for her children.