COLLEGE GRADUATES & THE AMERICAN DREAM
Blumberg, Paul & Murtha, James M.
An Intellectual Reserve Army A case might be made that the graffiti in public bathrooms offer as valid a perception of vox populi as the more conventional materials used in public-opinion...
...Yet, after diligent students make the grades and get the degrees in preparation for a long-anticipated career if that job does not materialize, the present cautious and careerist mood may be replaced by a radicalized consciousness...
...income distribution remains highly unequal despite a significant amount of educational leveling...
...Less has been written on the alienation of the white-collar worker, if for no other reason than that objective working conditions seemed far superior in the office to those in the factory...
...Of course, in our national context, this stratum of educated labor, though sizable by most standards, is neither large enough nor sufficiently powerful or homogeneous to constitute a potent force in its own right...
...102-104...
...A Second Look at the Uncommitted," Social Policr...
...If graduation leads, not to a career, but to an abyss into which capped and gowned students are dumped, then here, as C. Wright Mills would say, is the real point of intersection where personal troubles become social issues...
...Decades ago, some members of the Old Left entered industry voluntarily in order to provide left leadership for workers...
...This created a difficult situation for the respectable elements of the community whose advice seemed to create more problems than it solved, and for several years there was much uncertainty over just how graduate joblessness and underemployment might verbally be dealt with...
...They even gave me a goldplated plaque to show I've learned how to use the machine...
...Such cynical humor is but one manifestation of the increasing awareness of a college diploma's growing "uselessness" and the crisis of major proportions that is developing for college graduates in this country...
...If the long and arduous process of education should prove for millions of young Americans to be little more than a broken promise, we are facing a portentous social event and, indeed, one of the major ironies of our time...
...Here we ought to reread Karen Horney's The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, especially her discussion of the psychic costs a competitive social structure exacts from its members...
...considered average and have to settle for less than the best, while the desirable places are reserved for those with an average of between 3.7 and 4.0...
...In the most well-known study of the occupational prestige of 90 occupations, the highest-ranking manual-labor job (locomotive engineer) placed no higher than 39th on the list...
...Is the Taxi Rank and File Coalition and other similar groups just an aberration, or is it a harbinger of the potential radicalizing influence of educated labor in industry...
...Yet, it has been decided that there is a "teacher surplus"—and 4,000 teachers were fired before the start of the fall 1976 term...
...According to this theory, if we assume that today's students are tomorrow's corporate employees, the following are some of the elements that generate discontent among educated workers: • The irrational demands of capitalist marketing and production for profit will come into conflict with the rational orientation of technically trained persons, as Veblen long ago predicted...
...When American living standards became high enough to permit massive college enrollment, the fundamental force behind the explosion of college attendance was the desire to avoid manual labor and attain "good" (i.e., whitecollar professional or managerial) jobs...
...Graduates of elite schools obviously have the inside track on the remaining good jobs in the economy...
...This process now seems to be under way...
...The manifesto was written mainly by these ex-students who originally became cab drivers out of economic need and now remain on the job partly because of the dismal job market and partly out of zeal to change the industry...
...There is no space here for an elaborate recital of the supply/ demand statistics of the current college job market...
...While its advantages over a society based on inherited social position are obvious in affording persons opportunity for mobility in keeping with their talent and ambition—the potential for failure or, rather, the inevitability of failure, is built in...
...The pamphlet treats the subject of work alienation and the possibilities of work satisfaction, the problems of classconsciousness in jobs where workers work alone as in the taxi industry, the exploitative economics of the fleet cab system, and the link between economic and political power in the country...
...If the job crisis of educated labor deepens, if the road through four years of college now leads persistently to an occupational dead end, then we shall need to develop among our explanatory tools a genuine sociology of middle-class failure...
...At the beginning of the 1970s, young people finally did settle down and hit the books...
...This strange metamorphosis has developed simply because, by endorsing the hippie code of dropping out and doing your own thing, one may reduce the oversupply of collegeeducated job seekers...
...So to prepare anxious students for the grueling competition of the graduate entrance/ qualifying exams, numerous special coaching schools have sprung up that offer tutoring and practice exams to help give a competitive edge to those who enroll...
...Quoted in Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic Books, 1976), p. 220...
...Some will uneasily interpret their predicament by turning blame inward, holding themselves responsible for their failure, in which case this dilemma of educated labor will simply play itself out in a kind of privatized despair that has much psychological but little social and political effect...
...46 abandoned and semiliterates are being graduated...
...For example, as a percentage of all persons awarded doctorates, women accounted for only 12 percent in 1967 but for nearly 20 percent in 1974...
...Once we have dozens of applicants for every routine opening, competition becomes not merely the means of getting the best man for the job but a matter of simple injustice, social imbalance, and wasted potential...
...It argues persuasively for worker and community control of the taxi industry under public ownership and the integration of taxi service with municipal transport to provide taxis to those who really need them the old, infirm, handicapped, and women with children, and in outlying areas rather than on Park Avenue for the able-bodied rich...
...A teacher who thinks what he teaches has no value to the student to whom it is addressed . . . is not to be expected to have a high esteem for his calling...
...And, at a time when many articles and new books are challenging the value of a traditional college degree (e.g., Caroline Bird's The Case Against College), there has been renewed interest in noncollege technical, vocational, and career education...
...The corporate economy may also be the target of these frustrations...
...The evidence accumulating in the last few years leads to these inescapable conclusions: (I) the tremendous growth of college enrollment since the 1950s has culminated in a labor market composed of increasing numbers of graduates with radically diminished job opportunities...
...Consider the message scribbled in a rest room on one campus of the City University of New York, where, with a dramatic arrow drawn toward the toilet paper dispenser, a student wrote: "City University Ph.D.: Take One...
...wanna sell ties or Jockey shorts...
...Take the conditions in the New York City public schools: class size is large and growing...
...The Task Force on Work in America quoted a recent graduate: I didn't go to school for four years to type...
...2) those sectors of the economy that have traditionally employed large numbers of college graduates—such as high-technology manufacturing, education and the other professions, federal public administration, finance, and insurance—have The authors wish to thank Robert E. Kapsis for his valuable comments and suggestions...
...Michael Wolff, "The (Upper) Class of '75...
...The crucial question is not whether massive underemployment can be avoided—indeed, it is already with us--hut where the blame will be placed...
...But to consider this alone, to ignore the present career frustrations of collegeeducated persons, and to view, as some do, a person with a degree in philosophy working as a bank teller as a form of "enrichment" of the labor force rather than a case of underemployment and frustration, is to miss a central dynamic for social discontent emerging in America...
...619...
...We may discover that the "hidden injuries of class," long thought to afflict only the lower strata, now are suffered by the frustrated, underemployed middle class...
...In an industrial society needing a large class of manual and service workers, it is simply a demographic and economic impossibility for everyone to "succeed"—defining success as the achievement of white-collar, preferably professional or managerial, status...
...Though manual labor carries less of a stigma in the United States than in other countries—at least our domestic middle and upper classes are not ashamed to wash their own cars or do their own gardening—nevertheless, one cause of the present dilemma is the low status of manual labor...
...In some countries of Asia and Latin America, men of the local upper classes wear their fingernails as long as possible in order to convey to their neighbors and townsmen that neither in public nor in private do they engage in any productive (read: demeaning) manual toil...
...In spite of the Protestant Ethic and the frontier tradition, Americans also figuratively wear their fingernails long...
...In its own anarchic way, the market eventually satisfies every need...
...45 Not for a moment do we forget the liberalizing and humanizing value of a college education both for the individual and for the society...
...Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out...
...See Kenneth Keniston...
...From the 1880's onwards, there has been discussion about the poor employment prospects of graduates...
...A good apartment...
...Shined shoes...
...The director of career services at Harvard, for example, claims that "the situation of the underemployed college graduate should be viewed as a natural, and probably a desirable, phenomenon...
...The irony of the overproduction of commodities is now supplemented with the irony of too many educated people, too many trained people...
...The fact that we share this problem with other countries does not diminish its seriousness for us here in the U.S...
...As Alan Cartter has noted, while the proportion of college-age men enrolled in college has increased steadily in recent decades, the early 1970s witnessed an unprecedented decline in the proportion of such men pursuing higher education (from 45 percent of 18- and 19year-olds in 1970 to 33 percent in 1975...
...As Raymond Boudon and others have shown, there has been more educational mobility since the end of World War II than occupational mobility.4 Moreover, while educational inequality has diminished over the years, income inequality has held about constant...
...Why such a surplus of candidates for so many white-collar jobs while skilled automotive jobs go begging...
...Paul Blumberg, "Status Is Not Power: The New Intellectual Proletariat," The Nation, August 14-21, 1976, pp...
...the school day has been shortened...
...Yet, many graduates may turn their blame outward toward what may be vaguely called "the system...
...The Ford Motor Company, which then was employing some 67,000 mechanics, estimated that it needed 18,000 more...
...Competition in everyday life makes sense only if there is a reasonable ratio of awards to applicants...
...6 To quote a University of Massachusetts graduate, now driving a pick-up truck: "Four years of college and they move me right into the driver's seat...
...Now America is beginning to share this feature of underdevelopment, as well as a great many others relating to industrial depletion and decline—leading Seymour Melman and others to refer to the United States no longer as "overdeveloped," as C. Wright Mills once termed it, but, ironically, as underdeveloped...
...The positive stereotypes of blue-collar work are stressed: manual work is wholesome and outdoorsy, liberating and productive, honest and natural...
...And May the Worst Man Lose WE MIGHT SAY that the corollary of the competitive American motto "May the best man win" is, obviously, "May the worst man lose...
...This grinding competitive squeeze unhappily coincides with the historic moment when, finally, women and minorities are attempting to get a piece of the action...
...Indeed, this fate has overtaken higher education in India, where university graduates have been plagued for generations by large-scale unemployment...
...are no longer expanding as rapidly as in the past, and in England, France, and Japan, white-collar employment seems to have stabilized at a much lower level than in the U.S...
...I realize that I sound cocky, but after you've been in the academic world, after you've had your own class (as a student teacher) and made your own plans, and someone tries to teach you to push a button—you get pretty mad...
...A political move, however, need not necessarily be toward the left...
...In a rationally organized society, one cannot have too many of these, but under capitalism, the overproduction of education is as serious a crisis as the overproduction of commodities...
...In fact, for decades, sociologists believed that the contradiction between the American dream and the inability to realize it was peculiar only to the lower strata...
...the top 38 jobs were all white-collar—primarily professional and managerial—and blue-collar jobs were concentrated heavily in the lower half...
...A popular magazine published by Time, Inc...
...Having grown up in an increasingly abundant society (or so it seemed in the I 960s), young people used to affluence will presumably reject life goals of material gain and turn toward reform and social improvement...
...9 On the theoretical level, much of this ties in with recent speculation about the new working class developed by Andre Gorz and Serge Mallet who contend that the increasing sophistication and on-the-job frustration of educated labor leads not only to work alienation but also to militant trade unionism and left-wing political consciousness...
...She enjoys art, craft, nature and ideas outside working hours...
...The ultimate determinant of mobility in society is not the educational system but the economy, and if the number of high-level jobs does not expand fast enough, even granting every citizen a Ph.D...
...I wanna punch out every guy I see with a fat briefcase...
...is essentially radical sociology, economics, political science, and history learned in college and applied to the conditions of the New York City taxi industry...
...Nest Times, May 28, 1976, p. 46...
...But suddenly the world turned upside down, and all the promises of a successful business and professional career began to go sour, and after hitting the books young people often ended up hitting the unemployment line...
...I could throw up when I read the classifieds...
...most of the protagonists in this drama, the young college graduates, have neither been studied nor have they spoken...
...Never underestimate the capacity of Americans to individualize even the most collective misfortunes and social evils...
...The industrial reserve army of unemployed workers Marx described as a central feature of capitalist organization is now being joined by a growing intellectual reserve army of unemployed and underemployed college graduates...
...3) the collapse of the college job market, especially since the beginning of this decade, is reflected in declining opportunities for professional and managerial 'positions, a great rise in the proportion of graduates working at clerical and sales jobs, a decline in the real starting salaries of college graduates, narrowing of the traditional income differential between highschool and college graduates, and the growth of substantial unemployment among recent graduates . 1 If the ladder that was always assumed to link education and jobs has broken down, and if this development is not temporary, cyclical, or specific to the recent recession but reflects deep socioeconomic changes in the supply/ demand position of educated labor, then we ought to consider the wide-ranging consequences...
...These have been adequately summarized by the mass circulation magazines and more thoroughly treated in the academic literature...
...Press n.d...
...Higher education raises the aspirations of millions while the job market frustrates them...
...will not guarantee Ph.D.-level jobs for everyone...
...Its author (Champ Clark) neatly manages the changing emphasis from middle-class achievement to the nobility of downward mobility in interviews with young people from middle-class homes who had the courage to climb down the social ladder and become truck drivers, pipe-fitters, carpenters, house painters, telephone equipment installers, and the like...
...This is an extraordinarily elitist point of view...
...This theory of a new working class does not dogmatically assert that white-collar employees are simply wage workers in white shirts who will become relentlessly proletarianized in both the conditions of their work and life...
...Five years ago, college-educated cabbies graduates from CUNY and also from NYU, Yale, Columbia, Brandeis and elsewhere helped to organize the Taxi Rank and File Coalition, a radical socialist faction within the bureaucratized taxi union...
...Here is the major point of crisis and of pain—to invest years in school, with high hopes for a career afterwards, leading, finally, to nothing...
...Says the Establishment A DECADE AGo,when a million flower children bloomed and the counterculture swept the campuses, when students were dropping out to live in communes, take up handicrafts, join religious cults, travel, farm the land, or do manual toil, respectable members of the community were aghast...
...not been expanding adequately to absorb the college-educated mass...
...It suggests that the members of this class, qua middle class, will experience contradictions between their training as educated workers and the inhumane employment demands of capitalism, and that this contradiction, as played out in the French events of 1968, for example, will eventually radicalize this class...
...An Intellectual Reserve Army A case might be made that the graffiti in public bathrooms offer as valid a perception of vox populi as the more conventional materials used in public-opinion research...
...Trucking is a dirty, hard, rough job, and that is just the reason I like it...
...Students, of course, have always been tested and graded and testing itself is hardly new—but it now has reached absurd intensity...
...It is possible, of course, that many graduates may not need to place blame anywhere, but will be able to mitigate the effects of a shattered career by refocusing their aspirations and redefining success in terms of personal and family happiness...
...51 • The authoritarian administration and enforced conformity of the corporate milieu will prove intolerable to university graduates who have grown accustomed to the freedom and autonomy of the university environment...
...It is also possible that many of these stranded graduates will channel their discontent in a political direction and opt for leftwing political action...
...I want important papers...
...crucial courses and whole programs have been 2"The Academic Profession in India," Minerva, September 7, 1969, p. 356 cf...
...5 Speaking approvingly of a graduate who had recently come through his office and had worked as a waitress and then a gardener, he describes her life in terms that a decade ago were invoked only by the college counter culture...
...In order to spare the economic system from the anarchy of an oversupply of educated labor, dropping out suddenly has become very chic...
...Academia can surely survive a few hard years in which many graduates have difficulty finding appropriate jobs...
...This teacher surplus exists only in relation to a certain crackpot political and economic reality...
...Letters of recommendation also become subject to this process...
...While such dilettantism may be fine for single, free-wheeling graduates from Ivy League colleges, with rich daddies to back them up if dilettantism doesn't happen to pay the bills, it is no solution at all for the mass of graduates from less-than-elite colleges, with less-than-elite daddies, whose marriage and family responsibilities make this kind of underemployment and refined dilettantism a mocking luxury they cannot afford...
...My Son the Auto Mechanic WHILE MORE university graduates compete for an inadequate number of professional and managerial positions, there is a crying need for automobile mechanics and other skilled craftsmen...
...He has my job...
...I wanna take taxis .. . Jesus.' Summarizing the entire problem, James O'Toole writes: What is clear from almost every study of job dissatisfaction is that the placing of intelligent and/or highly qualified workers in dull and unchallenging jobs is a prescription for pathology—for the worker, the employer, and the society...
...They sent me to Xerox school for three hours...
...It appeals to me because it's so masculine...
...If the public has come to define higher education as the one sure channel of upward mobility, and it now seems closed, the public reaction may lead to new policy decisions and lower funding at all levels of American education...
...issue an article on "White-Collar Kids in BlueCollar Jobs...
...If recent trends continue, a college education, which for decades has been part of the American dream, may lose its appeal...
...For a definitive account of the present and future job prospects for college graduates, see Richard B. Freeman, The Overeducated American (New York: Academic Press, 1976...
...Yet it might play a significant role as part of a general liberal-left and working-class coalition in the political arena...
...You think I , Work in America (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T...
...While technical training is essential for the operation of an advanced, industrial society, university education also undermines the system by inculcating a critical perspective and critical consciousness...
...So far, we do not know...
...Her home and life-style: "a large frame house she shares with five others, yoga classes two evenings a week, the neighborhood coffee house, good conversation, free concerts, the all-night bookstore, deep friendships, active exercise of mind and body...
...But the public's view of the link between education and jobs is based on a fundamental fallacy: college graduates get good jobs...
...Alienation, Unionization, and Politicization SINCE MARX brought Hegel's concept of alienation down from heaven to earth and planted it squarely in the modern factory, much theory and research has centered on the alienation of the industrial working class...
...As numbers increased . . . pessimism grew...
...Said one desperate Yale graduate, out of work for months after graduation: I'll do anything...
...Did not the job crisis of the 1970s do much to tame and conservatize the campus radicalism of the 1960s...
...I'm bored...
...When Marx wrote of the crisis of overproduction under capitalism, he referred to the overproduction of commodities, that crisis of glut in which want coexisted with surplus...
...And in this social issue lies the potential for social change...
...Many others, however, will be demoralized and seek to place blame somewhere for their failed careers...
...10 In our view, the most potentially explosive force for radicalizing educated labor is not any of those mentioned above but, rather, the tension created by the high occupational aspirations of millions of young people and the grossly limited opportunities that so many of them are now facing...
...The irony of today's job market is that many college graduates may play the same role, not out of choice but out of necessity, and may be radicalized more by the job itself than by previous experience or ideology...
...Today, with competition tremendous, a 3.0 average is almost tantamount to failure...
...thus a greater number of college graduates means more good jobs for everybody—equality is achieved through education...
...47 long as only 20 percent of the population goes to college, the system works smoothly...
...Edward Shils comments on the poor employment prospects of India's graduates and the shadow this casts on the morale of students and the faculty: The restless uninterestedness of the students and the half-heartedness of the teacher are both dominated by a belief in the inevitable prospectlessness of the graduates' career...
...If, however, underemployed universi50 ty graduates are increasingly recruited into the ranks of lower white-collar workers, the potential for work alienation among this group is obvious...
...Money) featured in its February 1976 `Francis D. Fisher, "Education for Underemployment," Change, February 8, 1976, p. 16...
...3 This seemed to work as long as the number of good jobs continued to grow...
...But our present dilemma is neither the fault of the left nor the right...
...If there is an upper limit of about 20 percent to the number of good jobs and as 3We follow here David Hapgood's lucid presentation of this argument in The Screwing of the Average Man (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974), p. 157...
...Now we see another kind of overproduction, this time not of things but of trained and educated persons...
...In the past, when social scientists studied failure and its accompanying psychological manifestations of self-blame, self-hatred, and lowered self-respect, they focused their attention on the working and lower class...
...Rationally, of course, i.e., in terms of the dire educational needs of the city, there is a teacher shortage...
...Thus, what we have created in the past generation is not more economic equality but simply an increasing contradiction between growing educational achievement on the one hand and occupational and income inequality on the other—a disparity that cannot help but generate frustration...
...However, an extended career crisis—with growing numbers of young people finding that their education will not lead them to meaningful jobs—would affect not only the morale of the students but that of the faculty as well and even the very spirit of higher education...
...Christ, I'm sick of the whole thing...
...Today, top-level jobs in the U.S...
...it is not a political or social-policy problem but has to do with elusive social values that are far more resistant to change than mere public policy...
...One attitude that seems to be emerging, unbelievably, is that people in 49 respected positions have begun to take over much of the anticareer rhetoric of the youth culture of the 1960s...
...A paramount feature of underdeveloped countries such as India and Mexico is the presence of a drifting, aimless, underemployed intelligentsia...
...Several years ago, the Automotive Service Industry Association estimated a national need for between 125,000 and 200,000 mechanics and auto body repairmen...
...Horney argues that competitive pressures tend to generate anger, envy, hostility, the wish to defeat and humiliate one's opponent, and that fear of competition can also lead to dropping out of the race, and to self-effacement and selfbelittlement...
...Even allowing for the recent grade inflation, competition is caricatured as gradepoint requirements soar...
...In 1970, women accounted for only 8 percent of all law-school applicants, but by 1974, the proportion had increased to 20 percent...
...But if 40 percent of the population goes to college, this does not mean that 40 percent of the population will get good jobs...
...Some of them had been part of the New Left during the 1960s, others were radicalized by the character of their new job...
...Those with a 3.5 average are perhaps 'Raymond Boudon, Education, Opportunity and Social Inequality (New York: John Wiley, 1974...
...But what happens if there is an upper limit on the number of good jobs in society—say, 20 percent...
...The Reserve Army of the Underemployed, Part I," Change, May 1975, p. 28...
...it intrudes itself even in the social context of the glorification of the worker and manual toil (e.g., in the Israeli kibbutzim, in communist societies, etc...
...If graduates can now, after all, be encouraged to travel, work on farms, take up carpentry or jewelry-making or pottery, work part-time, and experience themselves more fully through off-beat religion or pop psychology movements, then the economic system is saved from the massive dislocations that would otherwise result through the overproduction of educated labor...
...Their 35-page manifesto— "Taxi at the Crossroads: Which Way To Turn...
...While growing levels of work alienation may be readily anticipated in these circumstances, we would also expect the development of militant white-collar trade unionism, which might embody not only traditional economic demands but also demands for various forms of work restructuring, humanization, and workers' control, in an attempt to compensate underemployed graduates for the basic vacuousness of their jobs...
...The Taxi Rank and File Coalition (about three-fourths of its members are college graduates) publishes its own monthly newspaper, The Hot Seat, controls shop committees in about 15 of the city's 50 garages, and won approximately 20 percent of the vote in a three-way union election in 1974...
...Failure suggests personal defect, while the system itself escapes responsibility...
...The radicals may blame the conservatives and business for creating the college-educated glut to staff and overstaff the modern corporation...
...Students are relentlessly ranked and rated, scored and scaled and subjected to an alphabet soup of unnerving exams (SAT's, GRE's, LSAT's, MCAT's, DAT's, GMAT's, CPAT's, VAT's, OCAT's...
...May the Best Man Win .. . NOW THAT THE SUPPLY of able students exceeds the available places in graduate and professional schools, and the number of graduates exceeds that of desirable jobs, the painful thumbscrews of competition are turning tighter and tighter...
...An open-class system, based upon competition, achievement, and mobility, is actually a mixed blessing...
...After all, it survived the depression...
...it simply means that 20 percent of the population will continue to get good jobs and the remainder, even the college-educated remainder, will be "underemployed...
...I wanna briefcase...
...I will not conform...
...This, obviously, is not only an American problem...
...Still, large numbers of WASP, upper-class Ivy League graduates are encountering the same employment problems that afflict the college educated mass...
...Aside from cheating and other disheartening forms of student "innovation," what are the personal consequences of these enormous 48 competitive pressures...
...Yet, as the late Ely Chinoy pointed out many years ago in Automobile Workers and the American Dream, because an open-class society offers no formal, legal barriers to achievement, encourages everyone and pretends to afford equal opportunity to all, success seems limited not by the restraints of the system but appears to turn on the personal abilities of individuals...
...We may expect higher education to be the object of anger and resentment...
...While manual work is celebrated, the negative stereotypes of white-collar work are invoked: it is effete, sedentary, ulcer-producing, conformist, confining, parasitic and unfree...
...Why this imbalance...
...There was a time when an undergraduate grade point average of 3.0 was respectable enough to gain admission to most graduate and / or professional schools in the country...
...Workers overqualified for their jobs, whose job expectations go beyond their job reality, are apt to be disappointed and frustrated...
...their long, delicate fingernails are a visible symbol of their conspicuous leisure...
...One young woman, now working on the Alaska pipeline, gave up her previous job of, as she termed it, "a prissy schoolteacher...
...Macho images are evoked of the free man in the open air, of Lady Chatterley's gamekeeper, and the noble savage, almost parodied by the remark of a young man who, though the son of a very successful New Jersey businessman, decided to become a truck driver: I am a six-foot-two-inch 200-pound, stomping dynamic, goodlooking Jew...
...Some will blame the universities for a grand career ripoff, and as a result all of higher education may suffer...
...With the emergence of a sizable intellectual reserve army, this situation is no longer specific to the lower strata...
...There is no reason to assume that high-level white-collar jobs must continue to expand...
...2 The Indian example is instructive...
...Meanwhile, the panic of the many becomes the profit of the few...
...Ivy League graduates are both better and worse off than graduates of more ordinary colleges...
...I do what I want to and when I want to and do it honestly...
...These people—after having been socialized for years in upper-class style, manner, and sensibilities, and having grown up with what Robert Coles has called a sense of "entitlement"—find the discrepancy between their inflated expectations and the realities of the job market almost too much to bear...
...52 Waiting for Lefty MANY college graduates in the New York area are forced to work part-time or full-time as cab drivers...
...Conventional opinion chastised the hippies for being overprivileged kids who were ungrateful for their parents' care and for refusing to study hard and take the places that awaited them in the comfortable white-collar business and professional world of their fathers...
...There also arises a paradoxical fear of success stimulated by the apprehension that one's own success will generate in others the same anger and envy one feels toward them...
...Conservatives may blame the left for a simpleminded leveling ideology that introduced open-enrollment schemes to give everybody barely literate a college education...
...continuously humiliated...
...Add to this the disappointment and frustration of parents whose investment in money equals their children's investment in time, and whose hopes inspired the hopes of their children...
...The tragedy, of course, is that scarcity now intensifies the competition and aggravates relations between white males and all other Americans...
...July-August 1971, pp...
Vol. 24 • January 1977 • No. 1
