Despite rancorous debates surrounding Title IX and campus sexual assault, civil rights, free speech, tenure, and the use of contingent faculty , Americans on the right, center, and left tend to agree about the benefits of higher education. Conservative Patrick Garry writes that “the most important social mobility function a government can perform—or promote—is education. In an open society, education gives each citizen the opportunity to advance on his or her own merit,” ¹ while the Hamilton Project, launched by the nonpartisan Brookings Institution , asserts in a policy memo that “Over the past fifty years, policies that have increased access to higher education, from the GI Bill to student aid, have not only helped lift thousands of Americans into the middle class and beyond, but also have boosted the productivity, innovation, and resources of the American economy.” ² David Bergeron and Carmel Martin of the progressive Center for American Progress propose college for all “to ensure that the United States has the skilled workforce and educated citizenry to achieve inclusive prosperity and economic growth.” ³

Since the end of World War II, Americans have come to believe that economic advancement can be achieved by increasing educational access. Given the consensus of experts across the political spectrum about the value of a college degree, ramped-up competition among colleges and universities, and working-class anxieties , it is no surprise that “Americans have been bombarded with a steady barrage of media stories showing the growing differential lifetime earnings between those with a four-year college degree and those without, and about the disappearance of manufacturing and the accompanying loss of well-paying jobs that do not require a college degree.” ⁴

While policymakers propose to offer diverse populations better access to educational opportunities and solutions to help at-risk students increase their rates of completion, many people no longer see a college degree as guarantor of economic success or social mobility . Many high school graduates we aim to help by encouraging their college attendance, especially nontraditional students , fall through the cracks, racking up debt, failing to complete degrees that may or may not be relevant, and navigating the world with neither a practical skill set nor an education. Higher education, thus, often further stratifies the social divides it claims to bridge. ⁵

Increasingly, students are weighing the benefits of a four-year education against the costs, averse to taking on crippling amounts of debt. ⁶ Recently, college enrollment numbers have declined nationally. ⁷ Though some of this can be attributed to the graying of America—numbers of high school graduates are decreasing, although graduation rates are at all-time highs ⁸ —student enrollment at for-profits and community colleges is dropping at sizeable rates, and enrollment in four-year publics and privates has stagnated. ⁹ Although Heidi Schierholz of the Economic Policy Institute claims, “Falling college enrollment indicates that upward mobility may become more difficult for working-class and disadvantaged high school graduates,” ¹⁰ it seems just as or more likely that prospective students and their families no longer see a college education as a cost-effective path up the social ladder. Is it social mobility if one ends up only marginally better off financially? Or not at all?

The prevailing image of the college student is still one of the fresh-faced eighteen-year old headed, immediately after prom, to the big state school or to a private institution across the country. However, the traditional student today is becoming overwhelmingly nontraditional, as “single-parents now make up 26 percent of the country’s undergraduate student population,” and single parents, we know, “are also the largest demographic group living below the poverty line.” ¹¹ Given the obstacles these students face—students I am going to call “new traditionals”—such as familial expectations of making good, living off-campus, and working, often to support a family, it should not surprise that their completion rates are poor. Further, because student loans are easy to obtain, “students with a high probability of dropping out of college…borrow on the same terms as good students.” ¹² Unwittingly, perhaps, institutions that primarily serve lower income students may contribute to their future economic hamstringing via steep loan repayments ¹³ or the destruction of their credit.

Along with skyrocketing costs and changing demographics, the educations offered at four-year colleges might not be relevant to most of today’s college students, since “a four-year college degree isn’t necessary for many of tomorrow’s good jobs.” ¹⁴ Yet many students who would be better served by other career paths set out to earn a four-year degree because, as I have noted above, “America clings to the conceit that four years of college are necessary for everyone.” ¹⁵ While “the number of good jobs held by workers with no more than a high school diploma has declined by over 1 million since 1991[,] [g]ood jobs have shifted primarily to workers with Associate’s degrees, who have gained more than 3 million net new jobs during that same period.” ¹⁶ Current data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that the demand for employees in “skilled services industries,” ¹⁷ which include financial and health services, ¹⁸ will continue. ¹⁹ Despite increased expense and students’ desire that education result in employability and adequate future earnings, many colleges and universities continue to focus on the value of the liberal arts or a broad general education curriculum and its soul-enriching consequences. ²⁰

Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, particularly the beginning of scene 2.4, when Hal , in a giddy mood, waits for Falstaff to arrive after the botched Gadshill robbery , offers insight into the problems of higher education today and ways it can better serve the new traditional student. As Terry Eagleton has said, “it is difficult to read Shakespeare without feeling that he was almost certainly familiar with the writings of Hegel , Marx , Nietzsche , Freud , Wittgenstein , and Derrida .” ²¹ If, as Eagleton suggests, Shakespeare’s writings have anticipated the foundations of modern thought, they may prove useful to think through the tensions and contradictions surrounding higher education in this century. The first one-hundred lines or so of 1 Henry IV scene 2.4 precisely address the problems of access, power, privilege , and social mobility that plague the current American system, particularly in their representation of our traditional notions of the college student. They provide a critique of the privileges inherent in that vision and an illustration of the difficulties faced by our new traditional students . In what follows, I am going to offer a parable, if you will, about those problems, casting Eastcheap and the Boar’s Head Tavern as an institution of higher education, and Francis and Hal as, respectively, the “new traditional student” and the self-determining “traditional” student of yore. More high school students today share qualities—weaknesses and strengths—with Francis than with Hal, and institutions of higher learning need to market differently to the Francises of America by scrapping the rhetoric of an education that leads inevitably to “leadership” ²² and instead focus more on employability in a rapidly changing economy that benefits the highly skilled. If the American system of higher education hopes to satisfy current students’ needs, it should (1) refocus on community college for many, if not most, low-income first-generation students , and (2) do away with or greatly reduce liberal arts or general education requirements at most four-year institutions. ²³