Passing the Torch: Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off Across the Generations?

1. Passing the Torch: An Overview

Chapter 1 Passing the Torch: An Overview central theme in our culture is that “getting an education” is the key to upward mobility. Americans hold dear the belief that young people can escape from poverty or disadvantage if they persevere in school and work their way up to a college degree. We also expect that once the first generation in a family has struggled to complete a college education, succeeding generations will sustain this advantage. Through most of the twentieth century, these popular beliefs coincided with increased access to higher education for an ever-broader swath of Americans, including racial minorities and the poor.1 In recent decades, however, dissident voices have been raised, arguing that public universities are admitting people who are unqualified and ill suited for higher education. Colleges have been criticized for dumbing down curricula while tolerating grade inflation, which protects the academically incompetent. Access to higher education has gone too far, according to these critics, and public colleges are conferring devalued degrees upon unworthy students. Important changes in public policy have accompanied this shift in perception. The first thing to go was a long-standing tradition of free tuition at some public colleges. This was followed by decades of reductions in state funding for public higher education, forcing state universities to hike tuition, to the detriment of students from less affluent families. Opportunity programs such as affirmative action and “second chance” policies such as remedial education and open admissions were attacked as unfair or as a waste of resources, reflecting the belief that underprepared students would not succeed in college. The political backlash against mass higher education has undercut or eliminated many policies aimed at helping underprivileged students: affirmative action has come under a judicial cloud; in several states, women on welfare may no longer attend college while receiving public support; restrictions have been placed on remedial education; needs-based financial aid has lost ground to merit-based scholarships; and so on. 1 A This sea change regarding educational opportunity policies reflects larger disputes over the validity of government intervention, especially the extent to which public education should attempt to ameliorate class and racial inequalities in society. These disagreements over social values and political philosophies are deep-seated and not easily resolved. At the same time, the criticisms of mass higher education are built upon allegedly factual claims—that affirmative action does not help minorities and makes them feel inferior, that degrees have become cheapened, and that university graduates lack basic work skills, among others. Researchers are well placed to adjudicate these factual matters, by investigating the outcomes of opportunity policies in the recent past. To date, the best-known scholarship looking into these controversies has focused on affirmative action policies. For example, William Bowen and Derek Bok, in The Shape of the River, convincingly documented the achievements of students admitted through affirmative action, after surveying graduates from the nation’s most prestigious private and public universities. The authors found that affirmative-action students in highly selective institutions were very successful in terms of degrees, earnings, and professional accomplishments.2 Selective colleges and universities are gateways to the most highly rewarded positions in the occupational world, so it is understandable that affirmative-action policies have received the scrutiny they have. Still, affirmative action in highly selective colleges is just the tip of the iceberg of educational access in America.3 The overwhelming share of the burgeoning enrollment of poorer and minority Americans has occurred in less selective institutions,4 places—mainly in the state colleges and universities—where the tide turned several decades ago in the direction of mass higher education. In this sector of the higher education enterprise “nontraditional students” are found in greatest numbers. The research in this book centers on these public institutions. Our principal concern is with the many thousands of poorly prepared high school students from economically disadvantaged families who enter college and try to make their way into the American middle class. We focus on two critical issues: First, are young people from underprivileged backgrounds able to benefit from higher education, given their poor preparation in high school? Questions here concern the proportions of students who ultimately obtain a degree, and whether those credentials really pay off in terms of earnings and mobility. Second, what is the impact of higher education upon the next generation ? Do the benefits of college opportunity produce an intergenerational momentum that...