The Educated Underclass

Students and the Promise of Social Mobility

Gary Roth

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780745339221
• eBook ISBN: 9781786804426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Classes & Economic Disparity
• Index: Social Sciences

We live in a world with too many graduates fighting for too few jobs; where Deliveroo and FedEx drivers have advanced degrees. The Educated Underclass offers a much-needed look at this societal restructuring from the perspective of students. Gary Roth examines the way that universities often reproduce traditional class hierarchies, the mechanisms that enable upward and downward social mobility, and how the 'overproduction of intelligence' hinders students, calling for a realignment of how social classes function today. The dream of social mobility is dying. Where previous generations where expected to surpass their parents' level of economic success, prospects for today's graduates are increasingly bleak.

1

Higher education and class

In the United States today, college students account for roughly 40 percent of all 18–24 year-olds.¹ Add in adult students and the figures go much higher. Nearly two-thirds of 25–34 year-olds have attended college for some amount of time.²

College students are now drawn from across the social spectrum in a manner unimaginable prior to the late twentieth century. Higher education includes a much wider array of individuals and social groups, not just males, but females too, and not just white students, but also students diversified by race, ethnicity, and geography. A kind of reshuffling of social class takes place in higher education that isn’t found in primary and secondary schools, based as the latter are in economically and racially segregated neighborhoods.

Because they spend anywhere from a few months to eight entire years together, college students represent a loosely defined cohort, not fully separate from the rest of society, but with experiences unique only to themselves. This is as true for full-time undergraduates at Queens College in New York, as it is for graduate students at Stanford University in California, part-time certificate seekers at Alvin Community College in Texas, and returning adult students at Pinnacle Career Institutes in Missouri and Kansas.

College students are also perceived differently from every other sector of society. Great expectations surround each of them, no matter where they attend or what field of study they pursue. Aeronautical engineering is as invested in hope for the future as is court stenography.

Education and upward mobility are considered synonymous by just about everyone with whom a student comes into contact. Education defines who you are and how you are seen by others. “As a student,” said one undergraduate, “I have a future. This is more important than any identity as a part-time employee.” To be a college student is an identity to be embraced with pride, a testament to the special abilities and talents that the student has developed along their way.

But education can bring with it a certain kind of naivety about self and society. Policy discussions have focused on the factors that have thwarted students from achieving higher levels of education, income, success, and social harmony. Among the culprits: the defunding and partial collapse of the public school system, the continuing orientation of elite private schools towards the children of their alumni, the bloated claims that accompanied the expansion of the charter and faith-based educational systems, and the for-profit, proprietary school sector’s rapaciousness. Teachers and parents have also come into their share of blame.

To examine more precisely the ways that colleges and universities sometimes replicate and sometimes rearrange traditional class patterns is one of the aims of this book.

* * *

Despite common assumptions about upward mobility, college students are also filtered back into all levels of society. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports that two out of every five graduates from four-year institutions work in jobs which don’t require a college education. These figures cover all graduates between the ages of 22 and 27, a substantial group to find itself underemployed.³

Still other graduates are thrust into “precarious” work, the so-named “gig economy” that includes part-time and fixed-term employment contracts. Estimates peg this segment between 10–35 percent of the workforce nationwide, depending on whether the data is limited to primary employment or includes incomes based on part-time and multiple sources.⁴ Even more depressing outcomes await college students who don’t graduate or who receive a credential less than a four-year degree.

Taken as a whole, the gig economy with its underemployment and precarious work schedules now defines reality for the majority of graduates. Some find that they are unable to duplicate the lifestyle and career trajectories of their parents. For them, downward mobility has become a by-product of higher education.

In the case of information specialists working on short-term contracts, for instance, a college education can open the way to a stalled mobility. Without the degree, these high-paying but limited forms of employment would not be possible. Six months at $2,000 per week is a great salary for a 24-year-old who has no dependents and is still covered through her parents’ health insurance. But what happens when the gig is over?

For others, upward mobility has been forestalled, as if they exist in a permanent holding pattern. Higher education represents a road to nowhere, a glass ceiling separating graduates from tantalizing opportunities that cannot be reached. A college graduate working as a barista at a coffee shop suffers from both underemployment and precarious work. This isn’t a gig, but instead represents life itself. As one college graduate expressed it, serving coffee and sandwiches on weekends was fine when he was still a student, but once he had graduated, he needed a “real” job, one with steady pay, health benefits, paid vacations and time off—and a career trajectory that led into the future.

The fate of college students is only one element in the shift of social classes currently under way. The entire socioeconomic spectrum is experiencing a fast-paced realignment that has major ramifications for just about everyone. The expansion of the upper class is another such piece. The wealthy are more numerous, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population, and more affluent. The result: a huge and ever-growing divide between them and everyone else.

How the rich got richer is well documented, with extensive coverage in scholarly journals and the popular press.⁵ Speculative markets that favor stock ownership and certain types of real estate, combined with realignment of the tax system and periodic enhancements of governmental funds to save the banking system and infuse a sluggish economy, were the principal means of wealth acquisition. Added to this is the ability of the rich to increase their own salaries, perks, bonuses, and benefits in a winner-take-all situation that finds various marketplace rationalizations.

Nothing so favorable has benefited middle-income families, whose earnings have barely risen in a half-century. Certain segments have been peeled off rather dramatically, with considerable hardship on the part of everyone caught in any of the recent economic upheavals. The mortgage crisis and Great Recession of 2008 mostly affected new entrants into homeownership. For the first time, rather than paying a fixed monthly rent, homeowners sent monthly payments to banks through a process that obscured the real costs of debt. Because of foreclosures, the number of home-owning households dropped by several million over a five-year period.

Deindustrialization and the loss of full-time, benefit-bearing, and relatively well-paid employment in manufacturing has been a second major avenue of downward mobility. These jobs were replaced by lower-paid and mostly part-time work in the service sector, a by-product of the fundamental shift taking place both domestically and globally. Some tens of millions of employees have been caught in these dynamics ever since the last decades of the twentieth century in a process that is still ongoing.

For these two groups, economic difficulties reaffirmed their roots within the working class. College graduates are a third peg in this free-fall, comprising something of an upper crust within that renewed constellation. Here too, the number of underemployed graduates counts in the millions. The final chapters of this book explore this new proletariat in greater detail. First, though, we need to investigate the relationship between higher education and class.

Education as stratification

Today, the educational system is as much a sorting machine as it was once a vehicle for upward mobility. At each step of the process, people are left behind, sometimes because of their own inclinations, sometimes because finances are too thin or do not support time away from the workforce, and sometimes because educational institutions require academic proficiencies that they lack. For our purposes, the results of this sorting process are its most significant aspect. Who is shed along the way, and who succeeds?

A half-century ago, attempts to create a critical “political economy of education” fell short because of assumptions about the unitary nature of society. The authors of one of the most influential books within this genre wrote that “the school system is a monument to the capacity of the advanced corporate economy to accommodate and deflect thrusts away from its foundations.”⁶

This is of course true, except that the “advanced corporate economy” results from the very same social forces that created the modern system of education. The one does not explain the other. Instead, class and education mirror the economy, each developing in piecemeal fashion as society responds to specific conditions that seem both urgent and realistic at any particular time. These are complicated dynamics if only because of the ad hoc nature of how these different facets of society evolve on their own terms and also interact with one another.

Theorizing about education and the economy developed incrementally over the past century, as has data collection regarding educational attainment and social background.⁷ Theory and research have accompanied the build-out of the governmental sector. Each decade, especially from the 1930s on, witnessed major leaps...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Higher education and class
• 2 The overproduction of intelligence
• 3 Class in transition: historical background
• 4 Underemployment through the decades
• 5 Class status and economic instability
• 6 Into the future
• Notes
• Index