Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years

2. How America Expanded Education and Why It Mattered

CHAPTER TWO How America Expanded Education and Why It Mattered EDUCATION IS Good Business, a 1947 film short sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, exhorted its audience to support investing more tax money into local schools. “Education is the basis of the genuine production of wealth . . . and the foundation of good business,” the narrator insisted, and “tax investments return to the taxpayer.” Clips displayed boys learning farm science, electrical work, and mechanics and showed girls typing and developing art appreciation. Better education would make young Americans better workers (and housewives);they would also earn more money and become better consumers. Ironically, during this era, the midtwentieth century , extra education made relatively little difference in the lives of individualAmericans ; its import would come later. Developments in the following decades overturned many of the film’s presumptions: the occupations it touted dwindled, the high school graduation it celebrated became prosaic, the girls to whom it assigned supporting roles surpassed boys in schooling, and the college degree it never mentioned became the gateway to a better life—and, increasingly, the dividing line inAmerican society.1 THE EXPANSION OF AMERICAN EDUCATION INTHETWENTIETH CENTURY Americans became much more educated over the course of the twentieth century. In 1900 people typically had only a primary school education, al- though more and more states and localities were mandating at least some high school. By 1920 high school graduation had become widespread; from 1960 onward, college followed for most high school graduates. As more Americans gained more schooling,education emerged as a key axis of difference in American society.The people who got the most schooling became increasingly distinct from those who dropped out as soon as the law allowed. Employers who once treated an employee’s diploma as a bonus started to see it as a requirement. Life chances and lifestyles grew more distinct between the less- and the more-educated. Young people started to choose mates who had the same amount of education. Cultural trends, from new clothing styles to new gender roles, started with the college-educated and spread to the less-educated,with enough lag-time to create friction between “snobs” (with degrees) and ordinary “folks” (without degrees). Education expanded not because of students’ demand but because American public institutions supplied more of it and demanded it of workers. Cities and states built elementary and secondary schools,and then they required parents to enroll their children in them. Later, states vastly expanded the public colleges and universities and kept tuition below costs so as to fill them.2 Private college and university enrollments grew only slightly faster than the eligible population did from 1940 to 1980, but enrollments at public colleges and universities soared.The University of Michigan enrolled twenty thousand students pursuing BA degrees in 1955 and forty-five thousand in 1975;enrollments at Ohio State exploded from fifteen thousand to sixty-two thousand in the same twenty-year period.California and NewYork built multicampus systems of community colleges, state universities, and research universities. Telling the basic story of educational expansion from the individual point of view, figure 2.1 draws, as we will do throughout this book, from the national censuses as compiled and coded in the IPUMS.The population in any particular year blends people who are still in school, some who finished recently , and many who finished long ago—the grade school–educated septuagenarian along with the thirty-year-old holding an MA degree.3 So for these purposes, we instead classify people by birth date according to the year they turned twenty-one; this gives us a better sense of the conditions at the time each person finished his or her schooling.We look only at nativeborn Americans here to focus on those whose exposure to schooling was solely in this country.The heavy line in figure 2.1 shows the median years of schooling that adult, native-born Americans attained from the first to the last decade of the twentieth century.We can see that average educational levels increased from a median of 7.4 years for birth cohorts whose members were old enough to be finishing high school in the first decade of the twentieth century to 13.8 years for the cohorts whose members finished their high school education in the last decade of the century.4 The averageAmerican ’s schooling almost doubled over the ninety years. 10 Century of Difference Figure...