An explorative take on why college no longer suits the needs of the American people.
Continuing education has long existed in history, since the foundation of the first learning institutions in England to teach ministry to aspiring religious students. In America, the first colleges were established in Virginia during the mid-1600’s. They were modeled after Cambridge and Oxford. In early days, college was generally reserved for people who aspired to be doctors or lawyers. Colleges in the 1800’s were equipped to help the working class establish a new normal as technology and urban society grew. Neither of these things were particularly evolved concepts by the 1900’s, as the age of industrialism ushered in a new era of manual labor. Before industrialism, much of the manual labor was done by slaves or the ever-severely underpaid working class. In the 1900s, before child labor laws, most manual labor was done by young adults, pre-teens and teenagers — though there were children as young as five going to work in unstable and unsafe conditions.
By the 1930’s, as draft rates skyrocketed in the U.S. military, women took over the majority of manual labor. Colleges, though affordable, were still generally reserved for the aspiring doctors and lawyers. Thus, being a part of the blue-collar class was common. It could even be lucrative, even with gender wage gaps and discrimination. Working men and women could singlehandedly support an entire family — and before contraception was commonplace in society, children were being born at exceptional rates. A whole generation is even named after the 1950’s population boom, when families celebrated the end of a long and devastating war. The introduction of the GI Bill in 1944 made it even easier for military veterans to access higher education. With around 10,000,000 draftees coming home from the war, there was a boom in families supported on college educations.
By the time 1970 rolled around, the average annual income for the working class was roughly $10,000. The price for college was far more accessible to those raised from humble beginnings, commonly falling at about $1000 per academic year with all the necessities to be a successful student. It was easier for families to send their children to college. It was actively encouraged to go to college, seeing as the previous generation had such a large population that obtained degrees. The social attitude towards college shifted. Colleges began offering more programs. Almost everyone was driven to achieve higher academically and there was a plethora of resources to make it accessible.
Fast forward to modern day: What the hell happened?
Today, colleges average a cost of $35,000 a year between classes, room and board, and educational materials. With the median income in America falling in the range of $65,000–70,000 annually, the cost of college is now half a year’s earnings. Today, almost every industry relies on a college or technical education. Gone are the days of apprenticeships. Students are expected to work unpaid internships (or low-income ones) to boost their educational resume, all while balancing their living expenses on limited schedules. The rate of suicide has tripled since 1950 among young adults. It’s hard to solely attribute those numbers to bullying, as the general public has for years, when the cost of existing has multiplied tremendously and sixty percent of people in America live paycheck to paycheck. Financial insecurity can cause severe forms of depression and anxiety. Financial security seems to be a thing of the past — these days, even if you have the societally-deemed appropriate amount of savings in your account, one emergency or natural disaster can offset years of your future.
One thing colleges of today seem to have in common is their lack of educational and mental health support. While many of today’s universities and educational institutions offer limited tutoring resources, crisis hotlines, and campus panic buttons, there seems to be limited understanding of how intense the pressure of a modern education truly is on today’s young adults. Following the global coronavirus pandemic of 2020, which devastated even the upper middle class economically, one would hope more would be done to offset financial insecurity. After all, if the pandemic proved anything, it was that nobody is truly safe from the looming threat of homelessness, starvation, and lack of healthcare. Though remote jobs boomed during the pandemic as companies found new ways to expand their horizons into the world wide web, it created a limited job market in terms of oversaturation. This was thanks to the amount of people whose jobs were deemed “unnecessary”, thus leading millions of people to be laid off for an extended period of months. Though federal regulations allowed businesses to open up at the midway point of the pandemic, many people stayed home out of fear of the virus, which took over six million lives worldwide. Sociology research shows that the number of Americans who joined the population of disabled people was nearly quadruple that amount, leading to a boom of citizens dependent on social security.
Now take a post-pandemic world and combine it with the pressure to reintegrate into the same world that existed before the pandemic. Many college students were forced to drop out of college as a result of rebuilding their lives and finances. Some dropped out because they were forced to move back in with their families, who were often states away. There was a boom in online sex work during the pandemic, too — for any young person trying to explore a corporate job market, this is frowned upon. As they say, what goes on the internet lives forever, no matter how hard you try to scrub the slate clean. Meanwhile, students who chose to go back to school found themselves realizing the mental impact of the pandemic. They also realized just how limited their resources were in offsetting that impact. It was particularly difficult trying to accommodate their own health needs with the demands to rebuild their lives and educations.
The twentieth century culture around college that lead to so many people cultivating new career opportunities has plundered the modern job market. Now the market is oversaturated with degrees in almost every field, creating a severe downturn in college graduates’ job prospects. Almost half of college graduates today are underemployed. Nearly three-quarters of college graduates today leave with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt, a stark contrast to their grandparents’ generations. Even more so, where their grandparents did not answer to a national debt scoring system, this generation does. College debt also counts, thus not being able to afford student loan payments could lead to students defaulting on thousands of dollars and tanking their credit. These days, credit is king. It’s used to finance many endeavors, from everyday shopping to major loans. It’s also used to gauge the reliability of residential tenants and even employees in some workplaces.
Almost 40% of college students don’t even use their degree, because of thankless working conditions for aspiring graduates. Many graduates struggle with paying student loans and living expenses as jobs in their chosen fields offer little in terms of compensation. The requirements for most jobs these days ask for college experience or extended experience in their industries, instead of offering training programs. Yet, their return on these experiences is often a step above minimum wage, sometimes only a few dollars more. In the U.S., only 7% of counties nationwide can survive on minimum wage. Throw in $120,000 of student debt; now survivability is nearly impossible. Historically, minimum wage was set to prevent employers from paying less than a livable wage. After the college boom, it became socially accepted as a starting wage for young people entering the workforce, who still had the benefit of being supported by their families.
There are plenty of experiences from before the twenty-first century in which some young adults were denied access to help from their families. But it was still easier then to fund expenses then. Adjusted for inflation, the average income in the 1970s is comparable to the average income of today. When adjusted for inflation, the average cost of college should be around $8,000 per year today. In fact, looking at countries throughout Europe, the average cost of education is very much on par with those numbers, give or take a few thousand. So why is it nearly four times that amount in the United States? The average cost of living in America is over double the global average.
In some ways, parts of the economy have boomed in the past few decades. The entire world has seen a huge boom in technology, particularly world superpowers such as China and the U.S. Many college degrees are branched into various forms of technology. Almost every industry has felt the impact of technology and risen to meet the demands of an advanced civilization. Everything, from medicine to engineering and beyond has adapted to automating parts of their processes with technology. The people who study to operate, build, and maintain these technologies stand to make the most money. But what happens as more jobs become obsolete in the face of technology? There are machines that have stripped away the demand for many blue-collar workers. Grocery stores have self-checkouts; factories have automated assembly lines. Robots are being implemented in medicine, to reduce medical error — the number one cause of death in medical institutions. Some cars drive themselves now; some police departments have taken to using robotics to enforce laws. Honestly, it’s all giving Wall-E. For those who don’t know, Wall-E is a children’s movie about a robot that saves humans from their own extinction after they develop a severe codependency on technology and destroy planet Earth.
Twenty years ago, tech was a booming industry that had a lot of voids to fill in terms of innovation. It left a lot of space for people with degrees (and plenty without!) to step up to the plate and reap the rewards of successfully pioneering technological advancement. For now, there is still plenty of demand in the industry, even as the need for people dwindles within. But still, it’s only one industry.
The need for college degrees is simply becoming more and more obsolete, despite the increasing requirements for non-automated jobs. Too many people have them and not enough employers are offering enough money to pay them off. College degrees are demanding, expensive, and often not as rewarding as society is taught to believe. For the percentage that make it to the workplace by using their degree, the road is still often long and arduous until they receive any real benefit. 40% of Americans struggle to find work-life balance. Nearly 80% report some form of burnout throughout their career. 50% of college graduates are underemployed; two-thirds of college graduates have degrees for job fields that don’t even technically require them — yet they are still underemployed. It is starkly disappointing that so many optimistic high schoolers take out enough money to finance a house to get an education, only to be let down like this in the end.
College was once upon a time the American dream. It used to offer opportunities to expand one’s horizons. It used to be much more reasonable to finance a college education and support a family. While college and work are just as demanding and time-consuming as they were fifty years ago, the payoff is no longer the same. Technological advancements create a narrower market as more jobs become automated. Today, the burden of paying off those dreams is killing the American dream and leaving it open to debate. What will happen to society as higher education becomes more limited to the upper class? What kind of opportunities can really present themselves in this economic climate? Only time will tell.
Citations
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