Is higher education hurting working class students, instead of helping them?

A few days ago, a student, "K," who was in one of my classes last fall, knocked on the office door to say hi, and we ended up having a wonderful conversation for more than half-an-hour.  I told her it felt like I was talking with my daughter and not with a student.

"That's a good thing, right?" she asked with a smile.

It is a good thing, indeed.  Taking such an interest can also mean that I end up worrying about things I don't really have any business worrying about.  Because, I can't change a damn thing, which is what the personnel officer tried telling me even at the campus interview as I was wrapping up my undergraduate degree.

I worried about her sister's college admission.  A high school senior I haven't even met! Later that night, I wrote in an email to "K":

you may want to pass this along to your sister.  This news item will also provide you folks with a perspective on what makes a college "selective" and why it matters.

It is a dirty, rotten, secret in higher education that is rarely ever openly discussed: it is not merely the diploma.  A diploma from a college like where I work doesn't have the same weight as a diploma, in the same academic major, from a different college.  The selectivity of the college and its prestige matter a lot.  I would think that it is the same case anywhere in the world.  On top of that, the possibility for post-college career connections at those selective institutions dwarf what a student at the university here can even hope for.

Add to all that the family background.

And then the dollars that students shell out.

The bottom-line then is a disastrous reality:

If you are a low-income prospective college student hoping a degree will help you move up in the world, you probably should not attend a moderately selective four-year research institution. The cards are stacked against you.
That’s the sobering bottom line of Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality (Harvard University Press), a new book based on five years of interview research by Elizabeth A. Armstrong, an associate professor of sociology and organizational studies at the University of Michigan, and Laura T. Hamilton, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California at Merced.

But, those students do not have any idea of how much higher education is becoming yet another brick in the wall!

The co-author of Academically Adrift, Richard Arum, whose research famously showed that a striking number of students learn little to nothing of intellectual significance in college, said in an interview that the book powerfully demonstrates that that lack of learning is not just attributable to student laziness. “This current work shows how students can – from their perspective – come to understand and interpret the life of being a student, the life of being in college, as having very little to do with academic engagement,” Arum said. “The institution itself has basically built this into the structure of higher education today.”

What I don't get is this.  It is one thing for a loony tune blogger like me to keep writing about all these issues with nobody listening to me.  But, what about all these researchers from a lot more prestigious places and think-tanks whose findings are also pretty much ignored?  

Institutions like the one where I work have a significant number, I would think more than a simple majority, of students who come from working-class backgrounds.  Many are the first from their families to attend college.  They, innocently, believe that if they somehow manage to get a college diploma it will be a guaranteed pathway into the prosperous upper-middle stratum.  All is not on the level:

More affluent students have parents who can help them figure out how to get through college — what courses to take, and when; how to manage time, get help or mercy from professors, etc. They can also use connections to get the kids jobs regardless of academic performance. 

Slightly more than a year ago, two sisters wrote about their educational experiences and decisions they made in an essay with a provocative title: "Should Working-Class People Get B.A.'s and Ph.D.'s?"

Briallen has a Ph.D. from Princeton University and is a lecturer in the English department at Yale University. Johanna is a high-school graduate working full time at a bakery for slightly above minimum wage.

It is not that Johanna was any less capable than Briallen; they were "equally bookish and academically inclined."  So, why college for one and not for the other?

For both of us, decisions about education have been limited and complicated by our class status.

Sisters, equally capable, from the same family background.  First the elder one:

Briallen worked in child care and food service for a while after high school, went to community college, and was accepted to a selective four-year college but was not offered enough financial aid to go. She finally graduated from a local college with the help of Pell Grants and a lot of debt. She can't imagine her life without higher education, but as a non-tenure-track academic in a tough job market, she has limited job security, and she owes more than $800 a month in student-loan payments. Her student debt makes it impossible for her to save money or start a family anytime soon, and she is entering her mid-30s.

The younger sibling processed her sister's experience, and had some of her own:

Johanna was wary of graduating with substantial debt and no family safety net, so she took a year off to work and save money and try applying to college again. Her financial-aid offers the next year were no better. She ended up taking classes at the local satellite campus of a state university while living at home and working long hours at a salon to pay her own way.
But after a couple of quarters she discovered that, because of the poor academic advising she had received, none of the introductory courses she had taken were actually required for her degree. Her AP credits from high school should have qualified her to start as a sophomore, but she was mistakenly placed in freshman-level courses.
After learning that she'd spent almost all of her hard-earned savings on classes she was not even required to take, Johanna lost her faith in the wisdom of investing in higher education. She left school and is now working full time for $13,000 a year. She's proudly debt-free and self-supporting, and in her limited free time she is pursuing reading, writing, and the free or cheap cultural and educational opportunities available to her.

Their conclusion?

Although we both continue to struggle with the stressful economic implications of our different education levels, we are proud of each other and of our very different choices. We just wish we'd been given the opportunity to make them more freely.

As I noted in this op-ed:

We push teenagers into higher education by scaring them about the earnings they could lose. Here, we commit two huge mistakes. First, we simply define higher education as nothing but a passport to a job, instead of a means of instilling in the young a joy for lifelong-learning as a path toward understanding their own potentials, of which earnings is merely one. On top of this, by constantly dangling the dollar sign in front of them, we are almost brainwashing teenagers to think that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is nothing but the pursuit of money.
Instead, the young ought to understand something entirely different — that life entails making decisions all the time, and that this will mean difficult tradeoffs, which sometimes can be expensive. Thus, we would not simply push teenagers toward college because they would otherwise be losers, but we would help them think and act every time they reached a fork in the road of life — the tradeoffs that Robert Frost so elegantly articulated as “the road not taken.”  

It is to also highlight the other road that I emailed "K"--as long as her sister has seriously considered the different roads that could take her in different directions from the intersection where she currently stands.  Because, blindly taking any one route can be disastrous, especially for those from working-class backgrounds.

Half a world away ...