By Buck Goldstein and Eric Johnson

CHAPEL HILL (September 1, 2022) –Toward the end of the 2020 book Deaths of Despair, about the startling decline in life expectancy that began in the United States even before the Covid pandemic, Princeton economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case identified a troubling chasm in American society.

“The sharp bachelor’s degree cutoff in America is divisive and unproductive,” they wrote. “Those who do not make it risk being branded as failures and left feeling either that they themselves are at fault or that the system is rigged, or both.”

Count Will Bunch among the disenchanted. The longtime columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer is convinced that the growing gap between degree holders and everyone else — in income, lifestyle, political preferences, even health and life expectancy — isn’t just a symptom of what ails America, but a primary cause. 

“We are still clinging to the fast-melting permafrost of a now no-longer-new idea that college is the American Dream,” he writes in After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics — and How to Fix It. “We are refusing to admit that somewhere in the middle of a long and stormy post-industrial night, the dream has morphed into a nightmare.”

The collapse of the middle class, the polarization in our politics, the cynicism and despair of our youth, everything Donald Trump has ever said or done — there’s very little in Bunch’s tale of American decline that can’t be laid at the door of our colleges and universities. He traces the arc of America’s college experiment from the post-World War II optimism of the GI Bill and nearly free public universities to the modern scourge of ballooning student debt and PhD-holding baristas, blaming a college-or-bust mentality for growing income inequality and harsher partisanship. 

There’s no question that higher education plays a role in those trends, but it’s not clear how much colleges and universities have accelerated the big forces gnawing at America’s social fabric or how much they’ve been coping with those challenges like everyone else. 

Bunch is nostalgic for a time when high-school graduates could get a solid, family-sustaining job at the local factory. But college didn’t kill manufacturing employment — NAFTA, automation, the rise of China and other seismic economic forces saw to that. He rightly laments the size of the economic divide between society’s careerist winners and dead-end-job losers, but fails to note that astronomical healthcare and childcare costs have eaten into working-class stability as much or more than college tuition.

Similarly, it’s true that elite college graduates tend to cluster in like-minded urban areas and that white-collar professionals now identify more strongly with Democrats. But the annual count of Ivy League graduates isn’t big enough to fill the football stadium at Michigan State, and the decades-long rise in the percentage of Americans with a college degree (from 4.6 percent of Americans in 1940 to about 38 percent today) has hardly proven fatal to the Republican Party. As others have observed, if colleges are trying to churn out highly indoctrinated liberals, they’re really bad at it.

Bunch contrasts Bill Clinton and Rush Limbaugh to illustrate college as a political dividing line. Both were small-town Southern boys who rose to prominence: Clinton via Yale and a Rhodes Scholarship, Limbaugh by dropping out of college and tuning in to right-wing radio. But the comparison doesn’t tell us much. Clinton went to Yale? So did Josh Hawley, John Bolton, Ben Carson and half the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe. (Roberts and Gorsuch had to settle for Harvard, Barrett for Notre Dame.)

As for Limbaugh and his famously salt-of-the-earth audience, fully one-third of them held college degrees, according to a 2009 Pew Research survey. Right in line with the national average. 

Like so many books in the college-is-ruining-America genre, Bunch mostly fails to distinguish the vastly different experiences that fall under the heading of “college.”

Anyone stepping onto a regional public campus — places that turn out future police officers, teachers, nurses and data analysts — will still find the political and economic diversity Bunch is hungry for. It’s true that getting into Brown, Bunch’s alma mater, is much harder now than it was when he enrolled. But there are a whole lot more kids (and adults) earning diplomas at places like UNC Charlotte and East Carolina than there were a few decades ago, and that’s been an excellent thing for the country’s economy and public life.

Bunch is right about the corrosive effects of student debt and the idea that college is the only ticket to a truly successful life. He calls for lowering the risk of pursuing a degree by keeping costs low and debt in check, and for thinking about alternatives for hardworking young people who don’t relish four more years in the classroom.

“The United States needs a better, different conversation about fixing all the pathways into adulthood,” Bunch writes. That’s absolutely true, but in his zeal to tar all of higher education with lazy stereotypes, Bunch missed the fact that a better and different conversation is happening.

It’s happening on the right at places like American Compass, where Oren Cass and his merry band of family-first conservatives are calling for apprenticeships, huge investments in community colleges, and the end of senseless credentialing requirements from employers. It’s happening on the left at places like New America and the Urban Institute, which are calling for more employer training and rebuilding high school career and technical programs.

And it’s happening within higher education itself, where remarkable projects like Raj Chetty’s Opportunity Insights are giving greater weight to social mobility and scrambling how policymakers think about the hierarchy of universities. If you measure by the capacity to vault first-generation and low-income students from poverty into upper-middle-class success (Bunch’s fading “American Dream”), North Carolina A&T beats the pants off of Harvard.

Both policymakers and college leaders should feel more urgency about that work. Bunch is at his best cataloging the damage “college for all” has done to those who can’t afford or aren’t ready for a four-year education, and the need to try all kinds of experiments — from national service programs to free trade schools — to ensure a rising generation doesn’t end up adrift.

“The K12 education system is largely designed to prepare people to go to college, although only a third succeed in doing so, something that is both wasteful and unjust,” Case and Deaton write in Deaths of Despair. “We think that the US must consider alternatives.” 

Absolutely. College should remain a valuable, important path to a flourishing life — one among many.

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Eric Johnson is a writer in Chapel Hill who works for the College Board and the University of North Carolina System. Buck Goldstein is University Entrepreneur in Residence and a professor of the practice at UNC Chapel Hill, and co-author of Our Higher Calling: Rebuilding the Partnership Between America and Its Colleges and Universities.