The middle class has traditionally believed that higher education was crucial for climbing the success ladder and making money.
Parents of the Baby Boomer generation encouraged their children to choose college majors that would insure them economic success during their adult life. However, many boomer college students decided to take more liberal education options having little fear of finding careers that paid well. Born as the West was emerging from the trauma of the Second World War, graduating from university as hostility to the Vietnam draft plunged campuses into turmoil and helped to spawn the counter culture, the “Baby Boomers” have been shaped by turbulent social and political change.
These boomers were born into the beginning of a long and prosperous world economy. Their children, who also grew up in prosperity had the luxury of their helicopter parents guiding them through their younger years. The Gen Y or Millennials children were encouraged by their boomer parents to complete their university studies to guarantee a promising future.
Now, as the world economy dips into a long period of economic recession, the boomers approach their retirement years---while many still support their unemployed or underemployed adult children.
The grassroots leadership protesters at Occupy __________ may not have put forth an explicit set of demands yet, but there is one thing that they all agree on: student debt is too damn high. Since the late nineteen-seventies, annual costs at four-year colleges have risen three times as fast as inflation, and, with savings rates dropping and state aid to colleges being cut, students have been forced to take on ever more debt in order to pay for school.
The past decade has seen a student-loan binge, so that today Americans owe well over six hundred billion dollars in college debt. That's a burden that's hard to carry at a time when more than two million college graduates are unemployed and millions more are unemployed.
Wages for college graduates actually fell over the past decade, and the unemployment rate for recent grads is close to ten percent. That's hardly a ringing endorsement of the economic value of education. Though recent college grads are having a hard time finding a job, it's much higher for recent high-school graduates, who have an unemployment rate of nearly twenty-two percent.
Can only the Wealthy Can Afford College Today?
A Georgetown University study of the class of 2010 at the country’s 193 most selective colleges found that as entering freshmen, only 15 percent of students came from the bottom half of the income distribution. Sixty-seven percent came from the highest-earning fourth of the distribution. These statistics mean that on many campuses affluent students outnumber middle-class students.
“We claim to be part of the American dream and of a system based on merit and opportunity and talent,” Mr. Anthony Marx, a political scientist and president of Amherst College, says. “Yet if at the top places, two-thirds of the students come from the top quartile and only 5 percent come from the bottom quartile, then we are actually part of the problem of the growing economic divide rather than part of the solution.”
For all of the ways that top colleges have become diverse, their student bodies remain shockingly affluent. At the University of Michigan, more entering freshmen in 2003 came from families earning at least $200,000 a year than came from the entire bottom half of the income distribution. At some private colleges, the numbers were even more extreme.
Perhaps, it is time for America to figure out its priorities by pulling back from attempting to solve worldwide issues and begin concentrating on domestic solutions....
Source: The New Yorker, November 21, 2011 and The New York Times, May 25, 2011
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