Higher Education and the American Dream: Success and Its Discontents

Introduction: Houses, Automobiles, and Higher Education

Introduction: Houses, Automobiles, and Higher Education See the USA in your Chevrolet America is asking you to call Drive your Chevrolet through the USA America’s the greatest land of all (Sung by Dinah Shore in a 1952 television advertisement) The university has eliminated more than 500 jobs, including deans, department chairmen and hundreds of teaching assistants. Last month Mr. Crow [the university president] announced that the university would close 48 programs, cap enrollment and move up the freshman application deadline by five months. Every employee, from Mr. Crow down, will have 10–15 days unpaid furlough this spring. (New York Times, March 17, 2009) This is a story of success, unbelievable success, and of the discontents that came with it. Higher education in the United States has been the victim of its own success. As it became the only route to an increasing number of professions and the primary path to economic success, it generated higher and higher expectations, an enormous expansion of enrollments, and money. With these, came discontent and disappointments. During the last half of the 20th century higher education in the United States triumphed. Few industries grew as fast, or gained such prestige, or affected the lives of so many people. Higher education received remarkable sums of money from federal, state, and local governments. Alumni and foundations gave generously to it. Families reached into their savings, postponed purchases, and went into debt so that their children could go to college. Higher education , even more than elementary and secondary schools, simultaneously embodied both a public good and a private benefit. It served public purposes beneficial to the nation’s economy, protected the national defense, opened up new avenues of knowledge, developed high 1 to?rdelt:Whats minta 1 4/8/10 10:11 AM Page 1 2 Higher Education and the American Dream new technologies, and made palpable the goal of equality of educational opportunity. It provided extraordinary private benefits such that individuals who possessed it improved their access to higher income, status, and security. Along with purchasing a house and buying a new automobile, it was a pillar of the American dream. For me that dream was real. In 1948 my parents, grandfather, baby sister and I moved from a crowded apartment in New York City to a one-square-mile unincorporated village called Carle Place on Long Island, just outside the city. Our house was built by William Levitt, who took advantage of new technologies and factory-like production processes and guaranteed loans to builders given by the Federal Housing Administration, and low-interest mortgages provided by the Veterans Administration, to create inexpensive tract housing for people like my parents. Although such housing, spreading across the American landscape, would be lampooned—called “little boxes” filled with oppressively conformist people in the song made famous by folksinger Pete Seeger—the critics missed the essential point. Having one’s own house was a dream come true. Levitt also made clear how intertwined the country’s automobile industry was to the housing industry, once comparing himself to General Motors. The connection was reaffirmed by the New York Times (February 6, 1994) in an article entitled, “How William Levitt Helped to Fulfill the American Dream,” suggesting that Henry Ford and William Levitt were part of an American package. Such esoteric understandings were not a feature of my parents’ repertoire, and I was too young to realize the cultural significance. But I did recognize that something special had happened when my father arrived home one day in the mid-1950s in a brand new, two-tone Oldsmobile, a car which became my parents’ most prized possession and the one which I drove on my first high school dates. Federally financed highways, low cost gasoline, and technological innovations combined with federally financed home building, low interest mortgages, and new technologies to give my family two of the pillars of the American Dream. If the house and automobile were the first signs of a dream come true, they soon gave way to the greatest aspiration of all: sending the kids to college. Although I recognized that my mother’s return to the labor market while I was in high school had something to do high 1 to?rdelt:Whats minta 1 4/8/10 10:11 AM Page 2 Introduction 3 with our education, I never quite understood how my parents could send my sister, Shelly, and I to private...