BLUE COLLARS, CAP AND GOWN

...Once out, they find that their incomplete education has not prepared them to compete for middleclass jobs...

...Therefore, the increasingly common argument, that they are now or soon will be a "left vanguard" for the rest of the working class also seems farfetched...

...By far the best source of data on the question is the Quality of Employment Survey conducted in the winter of 1972-73 at the University of Michigan—by any standard, the largest, most detailed survey on attitudes about work ever undertaken...

...Slightly more than threequarters of the college-educated manual workers said they would "take it"—a substantially higher proportion than registered by either high-school dropouts or those with just 7 Robert Quinn, Graham Staines, and Margaret McCullough, Job Satisfaction: Is There a Trend...

...The proportion saying, "something else," regularly increased with education, from 46 percent of the least educated to 62 percent of the most...

...5 Even those most taken with "technological upgrading" would not seriously maintain that one or two years of college training is either necessary or helpful to the performance of blue-collar work...

...q 223...

...It is also a phenomenon virtually unique to American society in the last half of the 20th century...

...Richard Freeman, The Over-Educated American (New York: Academic Press, 1976...

...The job, one presumes, is the most immediate and visible symbol of "dashed aspirations," and thus the logical target for discontent...

...How bitter the experience seems...

...Here," Blumberg and Murtha say, "is the major point of crisis and pain—to invest years in school, with high hopes for a career afterward, leading, finally, to nothing...

...To be sure, the one-shot cross-sectional survey says nothing about trends, about whether workers are "becoming" more or less satisfied, etc...

...From Sar Levitan and Robert Taggart, "The Blue Collar Worker Weathers the Ordeal of Change," in Levitan, ed., Blue-Collar Workers (New York: McGraw Hill, 1971), p. 378...

...Roughly half the persons who enroll in colleges, however, fail to attain a degree, and, in contrast to the pattern for graduates, about 40 percent of the dropouts end up in bluecollar or manual occupations, where chances for upward movement, especially into the middle class, are relatively slim...

...4E.g., Paul Blumberg and James Murtha, "College Graduates & the American Dream," Dissent, Winter 1977...

...James O'Toole, "The Reserve Army of The Union-Employed," Change, May-June 1975...

...Twenty-five years ago, the proportion of blue-collar workers with some college education stood at about 4 percent...

...Many of them were born in the "baby boom" of the postwar years, the children of returning veterans who themselves "returned" to factory work...

...In many cases, to be sure, these early jobs are relatively menial and unchallenging and thus 2James O'Toole et al., Work in America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973), p. 136...

...Approximately one-fifth of all white male manual workers in the U.S...

...One question asks what respondents would advise for "a good friend of yours" who indicated an interest in "working in a job like yours for your employer...

...Will their presumed discontent and rebelliousness make collegeeducated workers a vanguard of the working class in the near future...

...6 Yet, more and more, young people with only a few years of college find that routes into white-collar employment are closed and turn to blue-collar work...

...The numbers involved are by no means trivial...

...8 What has been said about the attitudes of college-educated blue-collar workers toward their work is equally true of their satisfactions "Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic Books, 1976), p. 222...

...7 The much-discussed contrary hypothesis, that worker alienation is on the rise, possesses no substantial base in evidence...

...Still, even if these early jobs are not all that one might hope, they are at least white-collar jobs that offer some chance for later improvement...

...Quinn and his associates, however, have reviewed the major national surveys of the topic conducted over the past 15 years and, contrary to the recent wave of claims, they report that "there has not been any significant decrease in overall levels of job satisfaction...

...Government Printing Office, 1974), p. 1. a high-school degree...

...These surveys, while by no means adequate to answer all questions about the collegeeducated working class, now do elevate discussion past mere speculation...

...It was possible to check this hypothesis on a number of more direct measures of mobility expectations, and in all cases the collegeeducated manuals did prove to have the highest expectations for the future...

...219 represent some degree of underemployment in the sense that the people involved are capable of more demanding work...

...The following conclusions depend on the responses of college-educated manual workers to questions put to them in recent national surveys...

...While a possibility, the answer is somewhat more subtle...

...For the most part, they are the children of blue-collar workers who, despite obvious efforts, never "made it" into the middle class...

...since then, the proportion has increased five-fold...

...The children, in turn, spend one or two years in these places, then leave for one or another reason...

...Their stated satisfactions with incomes and financial situations, with their marriages and family life, with life in general, and their overall state of "happiness" were in all cases indistinguishable from the rest of the working class...

...There was one important exception to the patterns just described, this on a question asking, "If you were free to go into any type of job you wanted, what would your choice be...

...The proportion of manual workers who would "strongly recommend" the job under these circumstances varied from 62 percent of the high-school dropouts to 61 percent of the collegeeducated— again a trivial difference...

...The latter proportions hovered around 60 percent...

...Have we at long last found a question that truly reveals the extent of dissatisfaction with work...

...About 40 percent of them, for example, expected to be in a different job "five years from now," compared with about 20 percent who expected this among manual workers with a highschool education or less...

...Finally, the college group was also much more likely to be actively seeking different work than were other bluecollar workers...

...work, one consequence of this oversupply of graduates will be a large class of underemployed college graduates, disillusioned with work and resentful of the poor returns on their investment in collegiate education...

...One thing is certain: if the college-educated manual workers believe that their situation is soon destined to improve, then the chances for insurgency directed at their current situation are correspondingly diminished...

...Freeman, op...

...While this sounds plausible enough as a hypothesis, most of the available accounts contain nothing in the way of evidence beyond the occasional striking anecdote...

...The college-educated working class, it might be said, is educated at the periphery, not at the center, of the American educational system...

...Thus, the current stint at manual work represents at worst a postponement of their ultimate aspirations, not a conscious abandoning of them...

...their outlooks are characterized more by accommodation than discontent...

...Trend data give some indication of just how recent this phenomenon is...

...So they take up the manual work of their fathers, victims of the "false promises" that society has made...

...and in this respect, any discontent they engender would probably be short-lived...

...The remaining three-fifths are concentrated heavily in lesser-known state colleges and universities: Arkansas State, Newark State, Tennessee Tech, and so on— not Harvard, Berkeley, or Wisconsin...

...Similarly, about two-fifths of the college-educated manual workers expected to be promoted at their 222 current place of work within a year...

...Their background thus fits into a cherished American image: the hard-working blue-collar father, scraping and sacrificing so his kids can have it better than he did...

...Of this 20 percent, the overwhelming majority (about 85 percent) do not have a college degree...

...Adding the two positive responses together ("very" and "somewhat" satisfied), the proportions were 91 percent and 88 percent respectively, again no difference...

...As might be expected, college-educated manual workers tend to come from workingclass (and farm) backgrounds, not from the middle class...

...for the high-school dropouts, the proportion was about 20 percent...

...But is the resulting tension and frustration, as those authors say, indeed "the most potentially explosive force for radicalizing educated labor...

...6Thus: "the more educated the blue-collar worker, the more likely he is to be dissatisfied with his work, and the more he will want to make some of the decisions connected with his job...

...Measured against the full spectrum of human needs, "overeducation" is certainly a contradiction in terms, suggesting, wrongly, that people can somehow learn more or know more than they need to...

...One implication is that the college-educated working class is disproportionately young: more than half of them are under 30, making them by far the youngest sector of the manual class...

...Thus, theirs is not "downward mobility" but blocked mobility...

...The result—a college-educated segment within the traditional blue-collar working class—is surely "overeducation" in its purest and most visible form...

...3John Porter, "The Future of Upward Mobility," American Sociological Review, February 1968, pp...

...We need a systematic, empirical review of the outlooks of the college-educated working class...

...To get a good job," it is said, "get a good education...

...A related question reads, "Knowing what you now know, if you had to decide all over again whether to take the job you now have, what would you decide...

...Most recent discussions of overeducation have focused on what we regard as the less serious half of the problem, that is, on the situation of college graduates.4 Yet nearly 90 percent of the graduates enter their working careers somewhere in the white-collar ranks...

...For all the talk about frustration and pain associated with greater education in the 221 working class, overall levels of satisfaction appear to be high and the differences across educational groups prove to be remarkably insubstantial...

...5The preceeding and all subsequent figures are taken from our paper, "College Educated Blue-Collar Workers," read at the American Sociological Association meetings (New York, August 1976), and from our subsequent research...

...These "extra years" of education, for the most part, were not received at betterknown colleges and universities...

...These and a large array of very similar findings have led us to two conclusions: (1) In absolute terms, manual workers are generally much more positive about the work they do than is commonly supposed...

...Two-fifths of the college-educated workers have attended a two-year junior or community college (although fewer than 5 percent have a degree from such institutions, suggesting that even here we are dealing primarily with a dropout population...

...In the phrase of Bowles and Gintis, they seem to have retained their faith in "private solutions," and so long as this remains true, the appeal of "political solutions" can only be modest...

...Often, the distant quality institution is out of the question: grades or family resources are such as to send them to nearby, more affordable, but often less prestigious schools...

...For obvious reasons, we have concentrated our efforts on the question of work and the reaction of college-educated manual workers to it...

...The few findings reported so far are 220 sufficient to impart a sense of the origins of the college-educated working class...

...Their relative youth, of course, only reinforces an expectation of their discontent and frustration and, ultimately, of insurgency directed against the system that is responsible for their fate...

...Washington, DC: U.S...

...Surveys conducted by the National Opinion Research Center show a very similar pattern: in their combined 1972, 1973, and 1974 surveys, the proportion of college-trained manuals who were "very" or "moderately" satisfied with their work ran to 78 percent (vs...

...And (2), education is practically useless as a predictor of job discontent in the working class...

...While we do not share this view—and least of all do we presume to know more of how people "really" feel about their work than what they tell us they feel—we have also examined a wide variety of more specific questions relating to the sensed quality of one's job, and nearly all of them result in essentially the same picture...

...A new "crisis" in capitalist social organization has begun to command the attention of scholars and commentators—the muchdiscussed problem of "overeducation" in America—a problem that one necessarily approaches with some caution...

...One question in that survey simply asked, "all in all, how satisfied would you say you are with your job...

...It can also be acknowledged that this period of underemployment may well be a period of discontent or dismay...

...Indeed, the opposite argument is far more common: that among blue-collar workers increasing education is associated with frustration and discontent...

...The alternative is factory work or unemployment...

...5-19...

...But for many others, the reality is quite different...

...The standard "job satisfaction" question has been the object of much derision, especially as its "meaning" seems so elusive and ambiguous (particularly to advanced intellectuals who comment on jobsatisfaction questions...

...A college education, so it is said, is the ticket to the "good life," to the gracious suburbs, the stable and comfortable white-collar jobs...

...Yet, despite the apparent plausibility of this assumption, there is precious little evidence that would support it...

...In sum, the idea that the best-educated blue-collar workers would be more dissatisfied, alienated, or disenchanted does not receive serious support in any context, least of all in the context of work...

...Thus, whereas on all other questions clear, and often sizable, majorities of the college-educated manual workers appear to be satisfied with their jobs, now we find that three-fifths of them would nonetheless prefer to be doing something else...

...Still, there is now ample evidence that the United States has "democratized" access to education to the point where the institutions of higher learning are producing far more people trained for upper-level professional, technical, and managerial careers than the economy can readily absorb.' The wellknown Task Force Report Work in America estimates that in the next decade there will be 2.5 college graduates competing for every job requiring a college degree and that the market value of a degree will plummet...

...For many families, of course, the sacrifices pay off: the children study hard, receive good grades, are sent to quality institutions and enjoy some success there, then end up pursuing successful and rewarding whitecollar careers...

...Without major changes in the quantity and quality of 'Cf...

...From William and Margaret Westley, The Emerging Worker (Montreal: McGill U. Press, 1971), p. 118...

...have spent one or more years in institutions of higher learning...

...They clearly do not feel that they are "locked in" to "deadend" jobs...

...Those who miss the message at home will certainly receive it through the schools or the media...

...Whether these expectations for a better future are realistic or not cannot be decided with the evidence in hand...

...Their extra years of education, in short, produce nothing in the way of a credential that might be traded in the job market for more prestigious or rewarding work...

...For decades now, liberal intellectuals have looked to education as the universal solution to social ills: more education would break the vicious cycle of poverty, elevate the masses from their state of ignorance, sharpen their talents, provide equal opportunity for all...

...Workers who expected that they would soon be moving into a different line of work, we assume, would be more likely to give the "disaffected" answer to this question—not because they were dissatisfied with their current work but because they were aspirants or, less charitably, mobilityconscious...

...84 percent of the segment with high-school education or less...

...with all other domains of their experience, so far as we have been able to measure them...

...2 How far we have come in the last decade...

...Or: "If the blue-collar worker is not challenged, his rising education may lead to work dissatisfaction...

...Much obviously depends on the future health of the economy and on an array of intangible factors...

...The proportions of blue-collar workers who said they were "very" satisfied varied from 47 percent of those with less than a high-school education to 46 percent of those with some college training—in sum, no difference...

...A mere ten years ago, it was possible to write in a learned scholarly journal that "it is becoming apparent that all large-scale industrial societies are failing to produce the full range of highly qualified manpower that is necessary for them to maintain themselves and to develop further their industrial potential and economic growth...

...Because of the trends, representatives of this group now appear in sufficient numbers to allow for detailed analysis...

...Such examples may be multiplied almost indefinitely...

...However "frustrated" and "disappointed" they are with the present (and we think the evidence is that they are much less frustrated and disappointed than most commentators have argued), they are nonetheless optimistic about the future...

...Thus, it appears, collegeeducated manual workers are satisfied with their jobs in part because they expect that they will soon be moving out of them into different, better lines of work...

...That collegeeducated manual workers "should" somehow feel more hostility toward their jobs seems to have escaped their own attention entirely...

...3 Today, of course, the more apparent problem is what to do with the surplus of "highly qualified manpower" that has been created...