[Pophealth] higher education the answer to inequality?

[Stephen Bezruchka]

I was always moved by the argument that if higher education was the 
solution, that we should all have college degrees or doctorates, then once 
that happened there would be no premium for such and inequality and other 
injustices would take other forms.  This article presents other important 
perspectives.  STephen

*****
Tannock, S. (2006). "Higher Education, Inequality, and the Public Good." 
Dissent 53(2): 45-51.

IS IT POSSIBLE that our thinking on the question of college access and 
economic inequality is back to front? At a time when some young Americans 
are quite literally dying to go to college-the primary reason now cited by 
young recruits for enlisting in the U.S. military is their desire to 
obtain financial assistance for college-we need to take a serious second 
look at what is being said and done with higher education and young people 
in this country. Now that alternative historical avenues for social and 
economic advancement (for example, industry-wide unionization and 
expanding public sector employment) have been shut down or obstructed, 
going to college remains the only legitimate, large-scale means for 
getting ahead. Yet even as demand for college education swells across the 
nation, the sobering truth is that college, in its current form at least, 
can help only a few of us resolve our labor market difficulties. According 
to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, no more than 30 percent of jobs in 
the United States currently, and for the foreseeable future, will require 
a college degree.
Unless we rethink fundamentally the approach we have been taking to 
college we may well be backing ourselves into a corner from which there is 
no way out. Such rethinking requires us to enter into a new conversation 
about the relation of higher education not just to inequality in this 
country (and beyond) but also to our vision of the "public good." This 
conversation needs to include individuals of all social backgrounds, 
occupations, and levels of income and education-unlike today's, in which 
research and debate on higher education is preoccupied with what is 
happening on college campuses, in isolation from what is happening away 
from them, and is dominated by the voices of current and former 
chancellors, provosts, and presidents from elite universities. In this 
essay, I look at one piece of the overall problem-the wage gap between the 
college and non-college educated in America-in order to suggest some of 
the directions that this larger conversation must explore.
The College/Non-College Wage Gap
In 2003, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, four-year college graduates 
in America earned an average paycheck nearly double that of high school 
graduates. Holders of doctoral degrees earned nearly three times, and 
holders of professional degrees more than four times, what high school 
graduates were making. Of course, there are important exceptions to the 
overall wage and wealth gap. America's richest individual in 2005, Bill 
Gates, is, after all, a college dropout. Other familiar examples of the 
non-college wealthy include professional athletes, film stars, recording 
artists, and television personalities. Signs have emerged, too, of college 
graduates' languishing in unemployment or low-wage employment: driving 
taxis, tending bars, working the late shift at the local 7-11. Even for 
college graduates employed in professional and semi-professional jobs, 
wages can be low. As Gordon Lafer points out in The Job Training Charade, 
"One out of every six college graduates [works] in a job that [pays] less 
than the average salary of high school graduates." These exceptions 
deserve our close attention: we need to recognize the ways in which talk 
of a college/non-college divide can sometimes lead us to misunderstand 
inequality in America.
Nonetheless, the average wage gap is important for three reasons. First, 
the gap grew exponentially over the last third of the twentieth century, 
and, though it has shown some signs of leveling off recently, it remains 
both sizable and salient. second, this gap helps us to understand the 
behavior of many people in contemporary America. Students are firmly 
oriented to the gap: the number one reason college freshmen give today for 
pursuing higher education is to get a good job and secure a higher 
standard of living. Colleges actively promote this gap: they market 
themselves to prospective applicants by pointing to the doors they open 
into lucrative employment. K-12 educators are fixated on this gap: the 
highest purpose of high school-and even elementary and preschool-is to 
prepare students for college. And politicians are highly aware of this 
gap: to succeed economically in this country, so they all say, it has 
become a virtual requirement to obtain a college degree.
THE THIRD REASON for focusing on the wage gap is that it provides a simple 
and shorthand way of tracking what colleges are doing in our society and 
economy. And so it enables us to hold colleges and universities, as well 
as graduates and professionals, accountable for their role in the 
production and reproduction of inequality.
The dominant public response to the wage gap has been to call for 
increased opportunities for young Americans to go to college. At the K-12 
level, this means raising the degree of "college readiness" among 
elementary and secondary students. At the post-secondary level, it means 
equalizing access to college, specifically for youth from disadvantaged 
race and class backgrounds (through affirmative action and other campus 
outreach programs) and second, expanding college access overall by 
promoting a "college for all" agenda (which, in actuality, never means 
"all" students, just those who are "capable" of benefiting from continuing 
education).
This response is common among individuals of all ideological stripes, from 
right to left. Writing in these pages, Adolph Reed, Jr., spelled out the 
central plank of the left-wing U.S. Labor Party's education and social 
justice platform as a call for "free higher education for all"-on the 
grounds that "post-secondary education is increasingly a prerequisite for 
effective labor force participation" ("A GI Bill for Everybody," Fall 
2001).
Despite this near-universal consensus, the dominant response to the wage 
gap is wrongheaded and unjust. It is wrongheaded because only a minority 
of jobs in the United States require a college degree. It is unjust 
because it accepts the wage gap as natural, inevitable, and 
legitimate-rather than treating it as something to be questioned and 
challenged. Given the actual distribution of jobs in the country, this 
response tacitly condones relegating the majority of Americans to a 
lifetime of work in low-wage, poor-quality jobs, and makes K-12 schooling 
into little more than a vast sorting system for identifying each 
generation's economic winners and losers. By focusing our attention on the 
false promise of increased educational attainment as a cure-all for 
inequality in America, it diverts energies from the underlying sources of 
injustice.
We need to turn our thinking about higher education and inequality 
completely around. Currently, leftists, liberals, and conservatives all 
tend to applaud the role that college plays in increasing the earnings of 
the college educated. But what if we were to view the growing wage gap not 
as a sign of success in higher education but of failure? What if we were 
to frame the gap as a public bad, and stigmatize it? Finally, what if we 
were to see the task of narrowing this gap-in ways that were socially 
just-as something to which we should all dedicate our energies, whether we 
are in the academy or without? In this way, we could begin to shift our 
politics away from the errant task of trying to get everyone into college, 
toward the more genuinely democratic task of building solidarity and 
equality among all individuals, irrespective of educational or 
occupational status.
Higher Education and the Public Good
What is at issue here is how we are to define the relationship between 
higher education and the public good-a relationship that has been cause 
for great concern recently on many college campuses. Over the last five 
years, more than five hundred college and university presidents have 
signed onto a collective "Presidents' Declaration on the Civic 
Responsibility of Higher Education," avowing that they face an "urgent and 
long-term" task of "renewing] our role as agents of our democracy." Since 
the mid-1990s, the Kellogg Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good 
has convened a series of high profile "vision" meetings, dedicated to the 
idea that U.S. universities must be "more responsive to the changing needs 
of American society." Individually, campuses across the country have 
busied themselves with becoming more visibly "engaged," "service"-oriented 
"partners" with their surrounding communities.
All this isn't due only to existential malaise, a sense of having strayed 
too far from core moral and social purposes laid out in founding charters. 
More to the point, leaders in higher education are concerned about a 
crisis of legitimation. They are worried about the threat to their 
continued access to public funding by the growing sense (among students, 
families, politicians, and the general public) that universities are 
primarily oriented to serving the private interests of individuals, 
elites, and corporations. "We cannot lay claim to greater public 
investment," Berkeley's then-chancellor Robert Berdahl warned in a 
National Press Club address in 1999, "unless we are seen to serve the 
public good."
SINCE THE BEGINNING of this country, public and private institutions of 
higher education have received extensive public financial support, in the 
form of direct subsidy and investment, as well as through tax breaks to 
college students and their families and tax exemptions to colleges and 
their donors. Unlike with primary and secondary schools, we have never 
expected colleges (particularly fouryear colleges) to serve directly all 
individuals in the country-including the shift, in the period following 
the second World War, from an "elite" to a so-called "mass" or "universal" 
model of higher education. But we have expected-and we should expect-that, 
in return for public support, colleges will benefit all of us, even if 
indirectly, regardless of whether we go to college or not.
At the start of the twenty-first century, as colleges struggle to 
(re)legitimate themselves in the public eye, they are faced with a real 
dilemma. How, as public policy scholar David Kirp asks in Shakespeare, 
Einstein and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, "can the 
public be persuaded that universities represent something as ineffable as 
the common good?" Campuses are increasingly draping themselves in the 
clothing of "service learning," "student volunteerism," "civic 
engagement," "community outreach," "knowledge sharing," and so forth. But, 
as David Maurasse notes, in Beyond the Campus: How Colleges and 
Universities Form Partnerships with Their Communities, "it is one thing to 
be involved in service, it is another actually to be helpful." How can we 
tell whether university posturing about serving the public good is 
anything more than window-dressing? And, even if we can argue that 
individual "community outreach" efforts are effective, how can we tell 
whether the overall impact of a university's activity on the surrounding 
public consists, in the end, of more help than harm?
Discussion of the growing college/noncollege wage gap in the United States 
has been conspicuously missing from most of the recent talk of renewing 
university commitment to the public good. Yet, surely, this gap provides 
us with one of the best indices we have of the relationship that higher 
education bears to overall well-being. The wage gap, to use Kirp's 
language, brings talk about serving the public good immediately into the 
realm of the concrete and the "effable."
As a starting point, we could reframe the relationship between higher 
education and the public good as follows. Universities serve the public 
good, all else being equal, not when they contribute to "economic 
development" in some abstract and general sense, but when they help to 
increase the wealth and well-being of all individuals together; and more 
specifically, when they work to ensure that the college-educated do not 
gain at the expense of the non-college-educated. Universities fail to 
serve the public good when they increase primarily the wages, wealth, and 
well-being of their own students, while leaving everyone else further and 
further behind. If universities are unable-or worse, unwilling-to tackle 
such issues as the wage gap, then perhaps a compelling public-good 
argument can be made that the non-college-educated in this country (that 
is, the majority of the population) would be better off spending their tax 
dollars on themselves directly, rather than allowing them to be siphoned 
through an increasingly expensive, elitist, unresponsive, and uncivic 
system of national higher education.
Narrowing the Gap
We have been taught by human-capital theory to link more education with 
more pay. We have been disciplined by neoliberal ideology to believe that 
wage distribution must be left to the market, that there are no 
alternatives available, and that inequality is inevitable. Elements of 
truth exist, of course, in both of these views; but the whole truth can be 
found in neither.
Education is not linked in all cases with increased income (recall the 
exceptions to the college wage gap mentioned earlier), nor does it have to 
be so linked in any single case. The signaling function that formal 
education plays in assigning pay levels in our credentialist society can 
be (and frequently has been) challenged; and the content of education can 
shape different social and economic outcomes. Markets, meanwhile, work the 
way they do because they have been organized and legislated to work this 
way; they can always be re-organized and re-legislated. We should 
remember, after all, that it is almost without exception the 
collegeeducated who design and implement our market policy.
Although it is not obvious exactly how universities could narrow the wage 
gap significantly across society (for this would require large-scale 
political, cultural, and structural shifts not currently in view), it is 
possible to imagine the directions in which this project might proceed. 
Numerous small-scale examples are in place already. Universities 
themselves are large employers who hire vast numbers of both the college- 
and non-college-educated, and their own pay scales have substantial impact 
on the size of the overall wage gap in many localities. Over the last few 
years, a nationwide "campus living wage" movement has emerged to try to 
transform university pay structures and start closing what is often 
referred to as the "campus wage gap."
More fundamentally, though, universities have an impact on the wage 
gap-along with many other inequalities in wealth and health indicators 
that go along with it-primarily through their decisions about which 
educational agendas and research concerns take priority. It is not just 
through figuring out how to raise the wages of the non-college-educated 
(that is, bringing up the bottom) that universities can work toward 
narrowing the gap, but also through curbing the perceived need, the 
desire, and perhaps the ability, of their own graduates to earn 
astronomically high incomes. Indeed, it is precisely the linking of these 
two, the conditions at the top and bottom, that is essential in any 
serious effort to achieve greater economic equality.
As one illustration of how university practices can affect the relative 
size of the wage gap, consider the link between student financial aid and 
public interest law. Over the last couple of decades, college tuition and 
individual student debt in the United States have skyrocketed. The 
ramifications of rising costs and debt have been considered primarily in 
terms of college access-who is and is not able to afford higher education 
in this country. Increasingly, the poor and working classes are less 
likely than wealthier classes to attend college and get a degree, not just 
because of their lack of the skills and knowledge necessary to get into 
higher education but also because of a sheer lack of financial capacity.
Unequal college access is an issue of great importance. However, we need 
to consider as well the public good effects of tuition and debt levels not 
just on who gets into college, but also on what college students do once 
they leave the university campus, degree in hand. In the field of law, a 
growing number of concerned observers argue that surging debt among the 
nation's law graduates is responsible for creating a "crisis" in the 
practice of public interest law in the United States.
Between 1991 and 2001, law school tuition in the United States nearly 
doubled. Lawstudent borrowing rose dramatically, so that by 2000, 
graduates were leaving law school with a median educational debt of more 
than $84,000 (a figure that does not include previous undergraduate debt). 
A recent survey found that two-thirds of law graduates say that debt is a 
primary factor in keeping them from considering a career in public 
interest law. The median starting salary for a lawyer in private practice 
is now two and a half times higher than that for a public interest lawyer; 
and this gap will only grow larger, because private practice salaries rise 
at faster rates than do public interest ones.
Other surveys have found that about half of the students who begin law 
school with stated public interest law commitments go into private 
practice law upon graduation, in large part because of their debt burden. 
For those students who do take a public-interest law job after law school, 
many find that they are unable to keep on working in this sector for more 
than two or three years, at which point they transfer into more lucrative 
positions. As an American Bar Association report-Lifting the Burden: Law 
Student Debt as a Barrier to Public Service-shows, the consequence is that 
a large majority of public-interest law employers in the United States, 
have a hard time recruiting and retaining lawyers.
What is the effect on the wage gap when law students increasingly opt for 
private practice over public interest jobs? First, high debt burdens seem 
to increase the overall wage levels of lawyers by pushing them away from 
the lower-paying public-interest sector. Second, the lack of large numbers 
of qualified and experienced lawyers doing public-interest work probably 
has a negative impact on the quality of that work. And because much of it 
is dedicated to representing the interests of the poor on such issues as 
labor, housing, and civil rights, this, in turn, is likely to have a 
negative impact on the overall level of wages and well-being of the 
non-college-educated in America. Finally, the flood of lawyers into 
corporate legal departments presumably enhances the ability of 
corporations to litigate effectively to increase their profitability-and 
this all too often comes at the expense of the broader public, in 
particular, the working class and poor, both in this country and 
internationally.
What we can see playing out in the practice of law occurs in other fields 
as well. According to a Nellie Mae National Student Loan Survey in 2002, 
some 17 percent of students, or close to one in five, said that student 
debt had an effect on their career plans. The cumulative effect of rising 
tuition and debt, therefore, on depressing the wages of the 
noncollege-educated, while at the same time inflating the wages-but also 
restricting the freedom-of the college educated is conceivably quite 
large.
The American Bar Association, along with many other lawyer advocacy 
groups, is now calling on federal, state, and local government to 
restructure financial assistance for U.S. law students, precisely in order 
to ease the crisis in public-interest law. Proposals for reform include 
increasing the availability and scope of Loan Repayment Assistance 
Programs and public-interest law fellowships, as well as instituting other 
forms of loan forgiveness and income-contingent repayment. For all these 
reform measures, strong public-good arguments can certainly be made.
BUT WE NEED to be careful. Student debt is just one factor among many that 
push law students away from public-interest law and into the world of 
private and corporate legal practice. As studies such as Robert Stover's 
Making It and Breaking It: The Fate of Public Interest Commitment During 
Law School and Robert Granfield's Making Elite Lawyers: Visions of Law at 
Harvard and Beyond have shown, law school curriculum, pedagogy, and 
programming bias can have enormous impact on shaping students' 
orientations to and expectations about legal practice. We should remember, 
too, that only a minority of law students express any commitment 
whatsoever to publicinterest law when they enter law school. In other 
words, the decisions that law schools make about whom to admit and not 
admit also play a pivotal role in determining the overall ideological 
makeup of their student bodies.
In this case of promoting public-interest law, then, as in all other cases 
in which universities seek to rethink the impact they have on social and 
economic inequality, it is essential to look critically at everything from 
college admissions to college finances to pay structures to research 
priorities. It is also essential to take a collective approach. For no 
single university can exert a substantial impact on the overall wage gap 
on its own, in isolation from what the rest of the country's institutions 
of higher education are doing.
Beyond Economism and Nationalism
Asking that our colleges be held accountable to the task of reducing 
economic inequality is, I believe, a good starting point for rethinking 
the relationship that higher education bears to the public good. But this 
is only a starting point. It is necessary but not sufficient. When we 
think of the unequal relationships that exist between the college and 
non-college-educated, we have to consider at least two other critical 
issues, one of which requires us to look inward and the other, outward.
First, it is not just a difference in wealth and wage levels that 
separates the college- from the non-college-educated. It is also the many 
intrinsic rewards often associated with those social positions to which a 
college degree provides access. Status, power, voice, opportunities for 
meaningful employment and participation: in all these areas a gap exists 
between the college- and non-college-educated that mirrors the gap in wage 
levels.
If we cannot think of ways to address these kinds of inequalities, we risk 
finding ourselves right back where we started. For it would then be unjust 
to deny individuals the opportunity to go to college, and at the same 
time, it would be misguided to expect that universal college enrollment 
could ever successfully resolve these inequalities. Positions of status, 
power, voice, and meaningful employment are currently just too few in 
number to be made available to everybody.
Second, we must address the nationalist framework that I have allowed to 
shape my discussion thus far. Some would argue, contrary to my assertions 
here, that college education can in fact help everyone in America gain 
access to high-wage employment. This is the argument of Robert Reich in 
his 1991 book The Work of Nations. Work today, he says, can be divided 
into three broad categories: "routine production services" and "in-person 
services," both of which are increasingly likely to be poorly paid; and 
"symbolic analyst" work (by which Reich means the work of professionals, 
managers, and the college-educated), which continues to be relatively 
highly paid. What Reich proposes as a sound development strategy-and what 
many countries around the world have, in fact, been attempting in recent 
years-is to pursue a nationalist education and economic agenda that seeks 
to monopolize as many of the world's high-paying symbolic analyst jobs as 
possible, while shunting off production and in-person service to citizens 
from other countries, whether they work domestically or overseas. The 
United States, and the developed Organization for Economic Cooperation and 
Development countries generally, already hold a disproportionate share of 
the world's college jobs; and universities and nations around the globe 
are competing with one another to secure an ever-larger piece of the 
higher education pie.
If we are to develop a comprehensive vision of how higher education should 
serve the public good, we must, of course, reject as shortsighted and 
unjust such forms of nationalist competition. We must make sure that when 
we speak of inequality, we are thinking of it at a worldwide level. And we 
must, hard as this is to conceptualize, include in our vision of the 
"public" and the "public good" the college- and non-college-educated not 
just of our own country but across the planet.
There has been, over the past decade, much talk of the need to build 
international labor solidarity to head off a devastating "race to the 
bottom." But little has been said about how we should work internationally 
to avert a potentially equally devastating "race to the top." Without 
attention to both of these races, "internationalism" and "global labor 
solidarity" will amount to little more than well-intentioned, but empty 
political rhetoric.
The Paradox
Without a vision of what higher education should look like in a just 
world, it will be hard for us to move toward justice. Even with such a 
vision, we still face the vexing issue of how to advance. Too often, talk 
of serving the public good on university campuses these days proceeds as 
if such work were little more than a happy series of camera-friendly 
photo-ops designed to demonstrate the bubbling over of 
university-community synergies. A serious commitment to battle inequality 
along the lines envisioned here means that we will have an enormous fight 
on our hands.
There are places, though, to dig in and get started. The 
college/non-college wage gap provides a useful metric for assessing shifts 
in the impact that higher education is having on inequality in society. 
The legitimation crisis in higher education provides an opening for 
broadening the conversation about what we should really be asking of our 
colleges and universities. Public funding of higher education provides 
leverage in support of demands we wish to place on higher education. The 
U.S. Supreme Court Bob Jones decision of 1983-in which Bob Jones 
University was stripped of its tax-exempt status on the grounds that its 
racism was in violation of "fundamental national public policy"-provides, 
if not legal precedent, then at least a conceptual model for pressuring 
universities to serve the public good.
In an essay on "Equality of Opportunity, and Beyond," John Schaar quotes 
Matthew Arnold as saying that "equality will never of itself alone give us 
a perfect civilization. But, with such inequality as ours, a perfect 
civilization is impossible." This may be the paradox of rethinking the 
relationship that education now bears to the economy. By working 
diligently to reduce the impact of education on wealth and wages, we can 
free educational institutions to foster the kind of teaching and learning 
that could, in the long run, produce a much more radical re-visioning of 
our world than is possible right now-socially, culturally, politically, 
and also economically.
[Author Affiliation]
STUART TANNOCK is a visiting scholar at the Center for Cities and Schools, 
Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of 
California-Berkeley, for the 2005-2006 academic year.