Higher Education, Inequality, and the Public Good

...law students, precisely in order to ease the crisis in public-interest law...

...However, we need to consider as well the public good effects of tuition and debt levels not just on who gets into college, but also on what college students do once they leave the university campus, degree in hand...

...and "symbolic analyst" work (by which Reich means the work of professionals, managers, and the college-educated), which continues to be relatively highly paid...

...It is unjust because it accepts the wage gap as natural, inevitable, and legitimate—rather than treating it as something to be questioned and challenged...

...We must make sure that when we speak of inequality, we are thinking of it at a worldwide level...

...Yet, surely, this gap provides us with one of the best indices we have of the relationship that higher education bears to overall well-being...

...And politicians are highly aware of this gap: to succeed economically in this country, so they all say, it has become a virtual requirement to obtain a college degree...

...A recent survey found that two-thirds of law graduates say that debt is a primary factor in keeping them from considering a career in public interest law...

...The wage gap, to use Kirp's language, brings talk about serving the public good immediately into the realm of the concrete and the "effable...

...SINCE THE BEGINNING of this country, public and private institutions of higher education have received extensive public financial support, in the form of direct subsidy and investment, as well as through tax breaks to college students and their families and tax exemptions to colleges and their donors...

...Second, this gap helps us to understand the behavior of many people in contemporary America...

...Too often, talk of serving the public good on university campuses these days proceeds as if such work were little more than a happy series of camera-friendly photo-ops designed to demonstrate the bubbling over of university-community synergies...

...If universities are unable—or worse, unwilling—to tackle such issues as the wage gap, then perhaps a compelling public-good argument can be made that the non-collegeeducated in this country (that is, the majority of the population) would be better off spendDISSENT / Spring 2006 n 47 EDUCATION AND INEQUALITY ing their tax dollars on themselves directly, rather than allowing them to be siphoned through an increasingly expensive, elitist, unresponsive, and uncivic system of national higher education...

...Colleges actively promote this gap: they market themselves to prospective applicants by pointing to the doors they open into lucrative employment...

...How, as public policy scholar David Kirp asks in Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, "can the public be persuaded that universities represent something as ineffable as the common good...

...Universities fail to serve the public good when they increase primarily the wages, wealth, and well-being of their own students, while leaving everyone else further and further behind...

...Universities serve the public good, all else being equal, not when they contribute to "economic development" in some abstract and general sense, but when they help to increase the wealth and well-being of all individuals together...

...The American Bar Association, along with many other lawyer advocacy groups, is now calling on federal, state, and local government to restructure financial assistance for U.S...

...Signs have emerged, too, of college graduates' languishing in unemployment or low-wage employment: driving taxis, tending bars, working the late shift at the local 7-11...

...Now that alternative historical avenues for social and economic advancement (for example, industry-wide unionization and expanding public sector employment) have been shut down or obstructed, going to college remains the only legitimate, large-scale means for getting ahead...

...Over the last few years, a nationwide "campus living wage" movement has emerged to try to transform university pay structures and start closing what is often referred to as the "campus wage gap...

...As studies such as Robert Stover's Making It and Breaking It: The Fate of Public Interest Commitment During Law School and Robert Granfield's Making Elite Lawyers: Visions of Law at Harvard and Beyond have shown, law school curriculum, pedagogy, and programming bias can have enormous impact on shaping students' orientations to and expectations about legal practice...

...The EDUCATION AND INEQUALITY median starting salary for a lawyer in private practice is now two and a half times higher than that for a public interest lawyer...

...A serious commitment to battle inequality along the lines envisioned here means that we will have an enormous fight on our hands...

...In this essay, I look at one piece of the overall problem—the wage gap between the college and non-college educated in America—in order to suggest some of the directions that this larger conversation must explore...

...Unless we rethink fundamentally the approach we have been taking to college we may well be backing ourselves into a corner from which there is no way out...

...What we can see playing out in the practice of law occurs in other fields as well...

...Although it is not obvious exactly how universities could narrow the wage gap significantly across society (for this would require large-scale political, cultural, and structural shifts not currently in view), it is possible to imagine the directions in which this project might proceed...

...At the post-secondary level, it means equalizing access to college, specifically for youth from disadvantaged race and class backgrounds (through affirmative action and other campus outreach programs) and second, expanding college access overall by promoting a "college for all" agenda (which, in actuality, never means "all" students, just those who are "capable" of benefiting from continuing education...

...For those students who do take a public-interest law job after law school, many find that they are unable to keep on working in this sector for more than two or three years, at which point they transfer into more lucrative positions...

...DISSENT / Spring 2006 4 9 EDUCATION AND INEQUALITY Beyond Economism and Nationalism Asking that our colleges be held accountable to the task of reducing economic inequality is, I believe, a good starting point for rethinking the relationship that higher education bears to the public good...

...Indeed, it is precisely the linking of these two, the conditions at the top and bottom, that is essential in any serious effort to achieve greater economic equality...

...Finally, what if we were to see the task of narrowing this gap—in ways that were socially just—as something to which we should all dedicate our energies, whether we are in the academy or without...

...The CollegelNon•ollege Wage Gap In 2003, according to the U.S...

...they can always be re-organized and re-legislated...

...Higher Education and the Public Good What is at issue here is how we are to define the relationship between higher education and the public good—a relationship that has been cause for great concern recently on many college campuses...

...What is the effect on the wage gap when law students increasingly opt for private practice over public interest jobs...

...13 UT WE NEED to be careful...

...The dominant public response to the wage gap has been to call for increased opportunities for young Americans to go to college...

...Numerous small-scale examples are in place already...

...In other words, the decisions that law schools make about whom to admit and not admit also play a pivotal role in determining the overall ideological makeup of their student bodies...

...Education is not linked in all cases with increased income (recall the exceptions to the college wage gap mentioned earlier), nor does it have to be so linked in any single case...

...It is wrongheaded because only a minority of jobs in the United States require a college degree...

...Unlike with primary and secondary schools, we have never expected colleges (particularly fouryear colleges) to serve directly all individuals in the country—including the shift, in the period following the Second World War, from an "elite" to a so-called "mass" or "universal" model of higher education...

...Over the last five years, more than five hundred college and university presidents have signed onto a collective "Presidents' Declaration on the Civic Responsibility of Higher Education," avowing that they face an EDUCATION AND INEQUALITY "urgent and long-term" task of "renew[ing] our role as agents of our democracy...

...Positions of status, power, voice, and meaningful employment are currently just too few in number to be made available to everybody...

...This may be the paradox of rethinking the relationship that education now bears to the economy...

...Such rethinking requires us to enter into a new conversation about the relation of higher education not just to inequality in this country (and beyond) but also to our vision of the "public good...

...For it would then be unjust to deny individuals the opportunity to go to college, and at the same time, it would be misguided to expect that universal college enrollment could ever successfully resolve these inequalities...

...Markets, meanwhile, work the way they do because they have been organized and legislated to work this way...

...At the start of the twenty-first century, as colleges struggle to (re)legitimate themselves in the public eye, they are faced with a real dilemma...

...universities must be "more responsive to the changing needs of American society...

...Even with such a vision, we still face the vexing issue of how to advance...

...Work today, he says, can be divided into three broad categories: "routine production services" and "in-person services," both of which are increasingly likely to be poorly paid...

...It is not just through figuring out how to raise the wages of the non-college-educated (that is, bringing up the bottom) that universities can work toward narrowing the gap, but also through curbing the perceived need, the desire, and perhaps the ability, of their own graduates to earn astronomically high incomes...

...In the field of law, a growing number of concerned observers argue that surging debt among the nation's law graduates is responsible for creating a "crisis" in the practice of public interest law in the United States...

...Other familiar examples of the non-college wealthy include professional athletes, film stars, recording artists, and television personalities...

...DISSENT / Spring 2006 n 51...

...military is their desire to obtain financial assistance for college—we need to take a serious second look at what is being said and done with higher education and young people in this country...

...It is necessary but not sufficient...

...The signaling function that formal education plays in assigning pay levels in our credentialist society can be (and frequently has been) challenged...

...But this is only a starting point...

...All this isn't due only to existential malaise, a sense of having strayed too far from core moral and social purposes laid out in founding charters...

...But what if we were to view the growing wage gap not as a sign of success in higher education but of failure...

...More to the point, leaders in higher education are concerned about a crisis of legitimation...

...Yet even as demand for college education swells across the nation, the sobering truth is that college, in its current form at least, can help only a few of us resolve our labor market difficulties...

...and universities and nations around the globe are competing with one another to secure an ever-larger piece of the higher education pie...

...But, as David Maurasse notes, in Beyond the Campus: How Colleges and Universities Form Partnerships with Their Communities, "it is one thing to be involved in service, it is another actually to be helpful...

...It is also the many intrinsic rewards often associated with those social positions to which a college degree provides access...

...These exceptions deserve our close attention: we need to recognize the ways in which talk of a college/non-college divide can sometimes lead us to misunderstand inequality in America...

...Second, the lack of large numbers of qualified and experienced lawyers doing public-interest work probably has a negative impact on the quality of that work...

...and the content of education can shape different social and economic outcomes...

...Currently, leftists, liberals, and conservatives all tend to applaud the role that college plays in increasing the earnings of the college educated...

...They are worried about the threat to their continued access to public funding by the growing sense (among students, families, politicians, and the general public) that universities are primarily oriented to serving the private interests of individuals, elites, and corporations...

...K-12 educators are fixated on this gap: the highest purpose of high school—and even elementary and preschool—is to prepare students for college...

...And because much of it is dedicated to representing the interests of the poor on such issues as labor, housing, and civil rights, this, in turn, is likely to have a negative impact on the overall level of wages and wellbeing of the non-college-educated in America...

...As Gordon Lafer points out in The Job Training Charade, "One out of every six college graduates [works] in a job that [pays] less than the average salary of high school graduates...

...When we think of the unequal relationships that exist between the college and non-college-educated, we have to consider at least two other critical issues, one of which requires us to look inward and the other, outward...

...At the K-12 level, this means raising the degree of "college readiness" among elementary and secondary students...

...Unequal college access is an issue of great importance...

...As one illustration of how university practices can affect the relative size of the wage gap, consider the link between student financial aid and public interest law...

...Even for college graduates employed in professional and semi-professional jobs, wages can be low...

...Campuses are increasingly draping themselves in the clothing of "service learning," "student volunteerism," "civic engagement," "community outreach," "knowledge sharing," and so forth...

...According to the U.S...

...but the whole truth can be found in neither...

...By focusing our attention on the false promise of increased educational attainment as a cure-all for inequality in America, it diverts energies from the underlying sources of injustice...

...The college/non-college wage gap provides a useful metric for assessing shifts in the impact that higher education is having on inequality in society...

...But we have expected— and we should expect—that, in return for public support, colleges will benefit all of us, even if indirectly, regardless of whether we go to college or not...

...STUART TANNOCK is a visiting scholar at the Center for Cities and Schools, Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California— Berkeley, for the 2005-2006 academic year...

...Other surveys have found that about half of the students who begin law school with stated public interest law commitments go into private practice law upon graduation, in large part because of their debt burden...

...It is also essential to take a collective approach...

...Student debt is just one factor among many that push law students away from public-interest law and into the world of private and corporate legal practice...

...Holders of doctoral degrees earned nearly three times, and holders of professional degrees more than four times, what high school graduates were making...

...And so it enables us to hold colleges and universities, as well as graduates and professionals, accountable for their role in the production and reproduction of inequality...

...Universities themselves are large employers who hire vast numbers of both the college- and non-college-educated, and their own pay scales have substantial impact on the size of the overall wage gap in many localities...

...Labor Party's education and social justice platform as a call for "free higher education for all"—on the grounds that "post-secondary education is increasingly a prerequisite for effective labor force participation" ("A GI Bill for 46 n DISSENT / Spring 2006 Everybody," Fall 2001...

...America's richest individual in 2005, Bill Gates, is, after all, a college dropout...

...Bureau of Labor Statistics, no more than 30 percent of jobs in the United States currently, and for the foreseeable future, will require a college degree...

...We should remember, too, that only a minority of law students express any commitment whatsoever to publicinterest law when they enter law school...

...Given the actual distribution of jobs in the country, this response tacitly condones relegating the majority of Americans to a lifetime of work in low-wage, poor-quality jobs, and makes K-12 schooling into little more than a vast sorting system for identifying each generation's economic winners and losers...

...If we cannot think of ways to address these kinds of inequalities, we risk finding ourselves right back where we started...

...Over the last couple of decades, college tuition and individual student debt in the United States have skyrocketed...

...EDUCATION AND INEQUALITY There are places, though, to dig in and get started...

...Supreme Court Bob Jones decision of 1983— in which Bob Jones University was stripped of its tax-exempt status on the grounds that its racism was in violation of "fundamental national public policy"—provides, if not legal precedent, then at least a conceptual model for pressuring universities to serve the public good...

...Second, we must address the nationalist framework that I have allowed to shape my discussion thus far...

...If we are to develop a comprehensive vision of how higher education should serve the public good, we must, of course, reject as shortsighted and unjust such forms of nationalist competition...

...First, the gap grew exponentially over the last third of the twentieth century, and, though it has shown some DISSENT / Spring 2006 n 45 EDUCATION AND INEQUALITY signs of leveling off recently, it remains both sizable and salient...

...Since the mid-1990s, the Kellogg Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good has convened a series of high profile "vision" meetings, dedicated to the idea that U.S...

...Students are firmly oriented to the gap: the number one reason college freshmen give today for pursuing higher education is to get a good job and secure a higher standard of living...

...For no single university can exert a substantial impact on the overall wage gap on its own, in isolation from what the rest of the country's institutions of higher education are doing...

...This is the argument of Robert Reich in his 1991 book The Work of Nations...

...The Paradox Without a vision of what higher education should look like in a just world, it will be hard for us to move toward justice...

...First, high debt burdens seem to increase the overall wage levels of lawyers by pushing them away from the lower-paying public-interest sector...

...Of course, there are important exceptions to the overall wage and wealth gap...

...But little has been said about how we should work internationally to avert a potentially equally devastating "race to the top...

...There has been, over the past decade, much talk of the need to build international labor solidarity to head off a devastating "race to the bottom...

...And we must, hard as this is to conceptualize, include in our vision of the "public" and the "public good" the college- and non-college-educated not just of our own country but across the planet...

...At a time when some young Americans are quite literally dying to go to college—the primary reason now cited by young recruits for enlisting in the U.S...

...We cannot lay claim to greater public investment," Berkeley's then-chancellor Robert Berdahl warned in a National Press Club address in 1999, "unless we are seen to serve the public good...

...Between 1991 and 2001, law school tuition in the United States nearly doubled...

...And, even if we can argue that individual "community outreach" efforts are effective, how can we tell whether the overall impact of a university's activity on the surrounding public consists, in the end, of more help than harm...

...Discussion of the growing college/noncollege wage gap in the United States has been conspicuously missing from most of the recent talk of renewing university commitment to the public good...

...In an essay on "Equality of Opportunity, and Beyond," John Schaar quotes Matthew Arnold as saying that "equality will never of itself alone give us a perfect civilization...

...Lawstudent borrowing rose dramatically, so that by 2000, graduates were leaving law school with a median educational debt of more than $84,000 (a figure that does not include previous undergraduate debt...

...Some would argue, contrary to my assertions here, that college education can in fact help everyone in America gain access to high-wage employment...

...As a starting point, we could reframe the relationship between higher education and the public good as follows...

...We need to turn our thinking about higher education and inequality completely around...

...Individually, campuses across the country have busied themselves with becoming more visibly "engaged," "service"-oriented "partners" with their surrounding communities...

...Elements of truth exist, of course, in both of these views...

...For all these reform measures, strong public-good arguments can certainly be made...

...The United States, and the developed Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries generally, already hold a disproportionate share of the world's college jobs...

...and this gap will only grow larger, because private practice salaries rise at faster rates than do public interest ones...

...Finally, the flood of lawyers into corporate legal departments presumably enhances the ability of corporations to litigate effectively to increase their profitability—and this all too often comes at the expense of the broader public, in particular, the working class and poor, both in this country and internationally...

...This response is common among individuals of all ideological stripes, from right to left...

...What if we were to frame the gap as a public bad, and stigmatize it...

...Without attention to both of these races, "internationalism" and "global labor solidarity" will amount to little more than well-intentioned, but empty political rhetoric...

...and more specifically, when they work to ensure that the college-educated do not gain at the expense of the non-collegeeducated...

...Increasingly, the poor and working classes are less likely than wealthier classes to attend college and get a degree, not just because of their lack of the skills and knowledge necessary to get into higher education but also because of a sheer lack of financial capacity...

...The ramifications of rising costs and debt have been considered primarily in terms of college access—who is and is not able to afford higher education in this country...

...THE THIRD REASON for focusing on the wage gap is that it provides a simple and shorthand way of tracking what colleges are doing in our society and economy...

...How can we tell whether university posturing about serving the public good is anything more than window-dressing...

...In this case of promoting public-interest law, then, as in all other cases in which universities seek to rethink the impact they have on social and economic inequality, it is essential to look critically at everything from college admissions to college finances to pay structures to research priorities...

...In this way, we could begin to shift our politics away from the errant task of trying to get everyone into college, toward the more genuinely democratic task of building solidarity and equality among all individuals, irrespective of educational or occupational status...

...We should remember, after all, that it is almost without exception the collegeeducated who design and implement our market policy...

...Census Bureau, four-year college graduates in America earned an average paycheck nearly double that of high school graduates...

...More fundamentally, though, universities have an impact on the wage gap—along with many other inequalities in wealth and health 48 n DISSENT / Spring 2006 indicators that go along with it—primarily through their decisions about which educational agendas and research concerns take priority...

...Despite this near-universal consensus, the dominant response to the wage gap is wrongheaded and unjust...

...According to a Nellie Mae National Student Loan Survey in 2002, some 17 percent of students, or close to one in five, said that student debt had an effect on their career plans...

...Writing in these pages, Adolph Reed, Jr., spelled out the central plank of the left-wing U.S...

...Status, power, voice, opportunities for meaningful employment and participation: in all these areas a gap exists between the college- and non-college-educated that mirrors the gap in wage levels...

...As an American Bar Association report—Lifting the Burden: Law Student Debt as a Barrier to Public Service—shows, the consequence is that a large majority of public-interest law employers in the United States, have a hard time recruiting and retaining lawyers...

...Proposals for reform include increasing the availability and scope of Loan Repayment Assistance Programs and public-interest law fellowships, as well as instituting other forms of loan forgiveness and income-contingent repayment...

...But, with such inequality as ours, a perfect civilization is impossible...

...This conversation needs to include individuals of all social backgrounds, occupations, and levels of income and education—unlike today's, in which research and debate on higher education is preoccupied with what is happening on college campuses, in isolation from what is happening away from them, and is dominated by the voices of current and former chancellors, provosts, and presidents from elite universities...

...The legitimation crisis in higher education provides an opening for broadening the conversation about what we should really be asking of our colleges and universities...

...What Reich proposes as a sound development strategy— and what many countries around the 50 n DISSENT / Spring 2006 world have, in fact, been attempting in recent years—is to pursue a nationalist education and economic agenda that seeks to monopolize as many of the world's high-paying symbolic analyst jobs as possible, while shunting off production and in-person service to citizens from other countries, whether they work domestically or overseas...

...The cumulative effect of rising tuition and debt, therefore, on depressing the wages of the noncollegeeducated, while at the same time inflating the wages—but also restricting the freedom— of the college educated is conceivably quite large...

...First, it is not just a difference in wealth and wage levels that separates the college- from the non-college-educated...

...Nonetheless, the average wage gap is important for three reasons...

...We have been disciplined by neoliberal ideology to believe that wage distribution must be left to the market, that there are no alternatives available, and that inequality is inevitable...

...Narrowing the Gap We have been taught by human-capital theory to link more education with more pay...

...By working diligently to reduce the impact of education on wealth and wages, we can free educational institutions to foster the kind of teaching and learning that could, in the long run, produce a much more radical re-visioning of our world than is possible right now—socially, culturally, politically, and also economically...

...Public funding of higher education provides leverage in support of demands we wish to place on higher education...

...The U.S...