Volume 4, Issue 2: March - April, 2003

Contents Cover Story     Risky Behavior Articles     President’s Pen     Sue’s Review     Cartoon Features     Letters     News Links     Redirect

Sue’s Review by Susan Wishnetsky, Secretary, ASFAR Beyond College for All: Career Paths for the Forgotten Half James E. Rosenbaum, 2001 in hardcover Rosenbaum, James E.  Beyond college for all : career paths for the forgotten half. (American Sociological Association Rose series in sociology.)  New York : Russell Sage Foundation, 2001.   The 1990s saw a continuous decline in the relative value of a high school diploma.  Good economic times enabled ever-higher percentages of students to put off wage-earning in order to graduate.  As a result, the high school diploma, once seen as the ticket to a good job, began to be considered the absolute minimum requirement for any job at all.   The low unemployment of the mid- to late-1990s might have provided a great opportunity for these brand new high school graduates to demand higher wages and better benefits in entry-level jobs.  But government and school administrators decided to steer these students toward an even higher aspiration: a college degree.  (What better way to make sure unemployment stayed low than to keep these young people off the job market a while longer?)   As a result, in our current economic downturn, many of these young adults who set out for college with such high hopes are struggling for their very survival.   James Rosenbaum lays out the sad facts.  In 1982, 71% of high school seniors planned to get a college degree; only 37.7% actually achieved this goal (p. 66).  A 1992 survey found 95% of high-school seniors in that year planning to attend college (p. 57); only 62% actually enrolled in some post-secondary school (p. 55).  And a 1996 study (p. 57) reveals that only about half of all college enrollees—even in community colleges—succeed in attaining a degree.   The author also cites a 1995 study revealing that, among students with poor grades, the wages of those who manage to achieve a bachelor’s degree are scarcely higher than the wages of their non-degreed counterparts, and those with associate’s degrees earn less money than those with no degree at all!   If everyone did complete college, then “degree inflation” would continue to escalate, to the point where, for example, a master’s degree would be required to operate a cash register!   Instead of guiding students into valuable vocational training, providing help with job-seeking and interviewing skills, and assisting in “school-to-work transitions” with job matching and placement services, schools now send students on a wild-goose chase which, for many, will end in failure and disillusionment.   Rosenbaum compares the promise of “college-for-all” to a con game—a swindle—on the part of schools (p. 56): ... students are promised college for very little effort.  Lured by the prospect of easy success, students choose easy curricula and make little effort.  Just as some high schools implicitly offer students an undemanding curriculum in return for non-disruptive behavior ... high schools enlist students’ cooperation by telling them that college is the only respectable goal and that it is easily attainable by all .... Because students usually do not realize that their expectations were mistaken until long after they have left high school, high schools are rarely blamed for their graduates’ failures in community college.   The most interesting chapter was on the vastly changed role of high school guidance counselors.  Criticized in the 1960s for heavy-handed control of students’ decisions, often guided by personal biases based on the students’ race, gender, or social status, counselors now seem to occupy a role of near-total impotence.  While many would like to be honest with students about their future college and career prospects, school administrators, parents, and often students themselves demand that counselors parrot the “college for all” mantra, even for the most academically ill-equipped.  Rosenbaum reports (p. 92-93): Studies of occupations often find that role occupants exaggerate their own influence and importance .... However, counselors in the 1990s .... now emphatically belittle their own influence .... Counselors even downplay their ability to help students make wise choices, making arguments like, “I don’t give advice; I give information.”  In many ways, they mimimize their role in helping students make the transition from high school .... In regard to the task of dissuading students from making unrealistic college plans, counselors report that they do not want to do it, they cannot make students do it, parents will not let them do it, and they do not have the authority.   The information in Beyond College for All is important.  A book as well-documented as this should be taken seriously, and its findings are serious enough to warrant a major re-examination of our public policy regarding education.  However, the book’s presentation is pretty dry, consisting, for the most part, of dispassionate recitations of studies and findings.  I fear this book can’t possibly capture the interest of our current government administration, headed by the “college for all” poster boy: a poor student who beat the odds, made it through college, and “made good”, the supreme counterexample to Rosenbaum’s research and the new champion of the “college for all” myth.