The United States has higher education that is admired, imitated and envied. I tried to describe it in some detail in my book – Higher Education in the United States – history and structure (Editora Unesp, 2015). In the last twenty years, however, that country's academic leadership has been disputed by European and Asian competitors. The Americans still occupy first place on the podium, but they are no longer alone in the front rows.
I have dealt with these challenges and impasses in other texts. In this article I will mention just one of them, the difficulty of moving from the extraordinary massification of access to improving results, that is, in what can be called success.
Before, however, to contextualize this issue, it is worth reconstructing some moments in the spectacular trajectory of this educational system. Some remarkable moments in American education show how it anticipated what other countries would only do decades later. The saga began with the so-called “Common School movement” of the 1840s and 1850s - leading to the universalization of elementary schools at the end of the 1910th century. Then, there was the movement in favor of the “comprehensive” High School, from 1940 to XNUMX, leading to an almost universalization of secondary education.
Finally, the massification of higher education, marked by two major events, two decisive interventions by the federal government. First, the land donation law of the 1862th century – with the creation of the Land-Grant Colleges and Land-Grant Universities (1890, reissued in 1945). Then, the GI Bill (2), the name by which the plan that aimed to reincorporate those demobilized from the war is known. The formulators expected the adhesion of two or three hundred thousand “veterans”, under the heading higher education. But there were more than 1940 million. By the end of the 1949s, the higher education system had doubled in size and changed its characteristics; it was now mostly made up of public schools (colleges and universities). In XNUMX, half of higher education students were GI Bill recipients!
To complete massification, in the 1960s came the programs of Lyndon B. Johnson (The Great Society), which helped to greatly expand Community Colleges, short-term higher education (two-year colleges). These peculiar institutions incorporated huge contingents of ethnic minorities, mainly blacks and Latinos.
The movement of the impressive numbers can be seen in the graph below, adapted from an essay by Martin Trow (Twentieth-Century Higher Education: Elite to Mass to Universal, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2010)
This expansion was part of an increase in optimism, growth in opulence and relative reduction in inequalities, especially in the period 1945-1970, a rosy period for the so-called American Dream, the expectation, real or illusory, that there was an open path to success for everyone born or raised in “America.” A part of American Dream was obtaining a higher education diploma and obtaining a job corresponding to that diploma, with good salaries and social prestige. College for All (CA) was not just a path. It was, apparently, the “only way”. High school, the comprehensive middle school, was the ticket to the world of success.
Other paths to success?
Unless I'm mistaken, it was James Rosenbaum who first used this term, in 2011, with the book Beyond College for All - Beyond College for All: Career Paths for the Forgotten Half. And the title already showed a new trend: the idea that there were alternatives to this path and that they should be seriously considered.
However, it is reasonable to remember that the College for All fever had already been criticized before. This powerful idea – which grew after the Second World War – had ups and downs after the end of the 1960s – along with the fluctuations of the dream as a whole. In the 1970s, the demand for bachelor's degrees cooled and their salary differential declined, that is, what they earned more, compared to workers who only held high school certificates.
At this juncture, literature critical of College for All began to flourish. Some mentioned the “overeducation” of Americans, others, the illusion or poor cost/benefit ratio of the bachelor's degree. Some ups and downs have hit CA, in short. But at the beginning of the new millennium, criticism grew again, now strengthened by the suggestion of clearer alternatives, such as those suggested in the books by Kenneth Carter Gray and Edwin L. Herr – Other Ways to Win: Creating Alternatives for High School Graduates (Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks-CA, 2006) - and by Kevin Fleming - Redefining the Goal: The True Path to Career Readiness in the 21st Century (CreateSpace Platform, 2016).
I try to represent, in the diagram below, one of the central ideas of the diagnosis outlined in Gray and Herr's book.
The data is official (Department of Education). Each square represents 5% of children and adolescents (schoolchildren). Only 10% of them can be considered "winners" if the standard is this: getting a bachelor's degree (any) and getting a good job in the field of that degree. The rest are made up of "losers". Well, the problem is the time and money that was wasted to produce so many losers. Not to mention the expense on self-esteem. In other words, in the opinion of critics, it is necessary to have a better policy for these 90%, not just telling them that this is the way to go. If we remain under the illusion of “university for all”, they say, we are taking into account and correctly stimulating only the 10% that “win”.
The diagnosis leads to a recipe: the dissemination of “other ways to win”. Basically, these other paths are the choice of post-secondary technical education, the one that, for example, community colleges offer in their vocational programs. Given the weakness of North American workforce training programs - compared, for example, with their European competitors -, the proposal has found reasonable repercussion among businesspeople and policy analysts. However, it is much less welcomed among students and their families, who still dream of college and a well-paid, “career” job.
The refusal of “other ways” is further reinforced by the fact that, in general, “alternative” higher education is, very often, what we think of as “for other people’s children”. In American society, unlike German or Swedish society, for example, the distance between the “blue collar” worker, even a highly qualified one, and engineers and executives is enormous. Both in terms of salary and prestige. Thus, the promise of College for All continues to be heard, even though it is clearly doomed to failure. Is there a way to be different? Is this an exclusively or typically American problem? Well, don't expect answers to such questions from this article. Stating them already seems relevant to us, for now.
