Beyond College For All: Career Paths for the Forgotten Half

Chapter 3. College for All: Do Students Understand What College Demands?

55 Chapter 3 College for All: Do Students Understand What College Demands? I n beginning a study of the high school–to–work transition, we must first establish whether high school is still an important institution for affecting work entry. For much of this century, most people entered the labor market directly after high school, but there has been an astounding growth in college enrollment in recent decades . If nearly all students are planning to attend college, then high school may no longer be an important influence on work entry. Community colleges have enormously increased college access in just one generation. While four-year-college enrollment roughly doubled between 1960 and 1990, public community college enrollment increased fivefold in the same period, from 200,000 to more than 1,000,000 (NCES 1992, table 169). In turn, college opportunities have dramatically increased. While 45.1 percent of high school graduates entered some postsecondary institution in 1960, over 62 percent did in 1993. Moreover, community colleges initiated open-admissions policies and remedial courses to reduce the academic barriers to college. The value of the associate of arts (A.A.) degree has increased in the labor market, so that students no longer need a B.A. to gain an economic benefit from attending community college (Brint and Karabel 1989; Grubb 1992, 1993, 1996). Community colleges have increased access to an economically valued degree. Have these changes created an easy route to college success, or do they merely confuse students so that they fail to prepare themselves appropriately? In an early study, Burton Clark (1960) showed the ambiguity of the mission of community colleges: they seemed to offer access to four-year colleges but in fact these institutions “cooled out” aspirations as students gradually realized that college was not appro- 56 Beyond College for All priate for their abilities. Studies since Clark’s have continued to find substantial college attrition (Grubb 1989; see also, Clark 1985), and they have focused on the factors that redirect students’ plans (Karabel 1972, 1986). Clark took the term “cooling out” from Erving Goffman’s (1952) analysis of confidence swindles. The key to a swindle is to give “marks” confidence that they will gain a valuable reward at very little cost, and then lure them into an “easy success” strategy. That is why a mark willingly hands over something of value to a swindler, and why people pay for “snake oil” remedies that offer high expectations for a small price. Marks do not realize that their expectations were mistaken until a later time, after the swindler who encouraged the expectation is no longer present. This chapter contends that the high level of community college dropout arises because high schools offer vague promises of open opportunity for college without specifying the requirements for degree completion. Like Goffman’s confidence schemes, students are promised college for very little effort. Lured by the prospect of easy success, students choose easy curricula and make little effort. Just as some high schools implicitly offer students an undemanding curriculum in return for nondisruptive behavior (Sedlak et al. 1986), many high schools enlist students’ cooperation by telling them that college is the only respectable goal and that it is easily attainable by all. Failure in community colleges may stem not from any overt barrier in those institutions but from seeds planted much earlier—when youths are still in high school. Because students usually do not realize that their expectations were mistaken until long after they have left high school, high schools are rarely blamed for their graduates’ failures in community college. Today many high schools encourage the “college-for-all” norm, which states that all students can and should attend college but fails to tell students what they must do to attain a college degree (Rosenbaum , Miller, and Krei 1996). A variant of the so-called contest mobility norm, which says that opportunity for upward mobility should always stay open (Turner 1960), the college-for-all norm encourages youths to retain ambitions of advancement as long as possible, but it ignores the barriers that limit their careers (Rosenbaum 1975, 1976, 1986). Noting the change in students’ aspirations, Barbara Schneider and David Stevenson (1999) have called them The Ambitious Generation . Americans are rightly proud of the college-for-all norm. It discourages schools from tracking students prematurely, and it encourages College for All 57 high expectations in youths. It argues for better instruction in...