Marvin Lazerson - Higher Education and the American Dream

http://books.openedition.org

• ISBN: 9789639776791
• Number of pages: 232

Central European University Press, 2010

Terms of use:
http://www.openedition.org/6540

See the USA in your Chevrolet
America is asking you to call
Drive your Chevrolet through the USA
Americas the greatest land of all
(Sung by Dinah Shore in a 1952 television advertisement)

The university has eliminated more than 500 jobs, including deans, department chairmen and hundreds of teaching assistants. Last month Mr. Crow [the university president] announced that the university would close 48 programs, cap enrollment and move up the freshman application deadline by five months. Every employee, from Mr. Crow down, will have 1015 days unpaid furlough this spring.

(New York Times, March 17, 2009)

This is a story of success, unbelievable success, and of the discontents that came with it. Higher education in the United States has been the victim of its own success. As it became the only route to an increasing number of professions and the primary path to economic success, it generated higher and higher expectations, an enormous expansion of enrollments, and money. With these, came discontent and disappointments.

During the last half of the 20th century higher education in the United States triumphed. Few industries grew as fast, or gained such prestige, or affected the lives of so many people. Higher education received remarkable sums of money from federal, state, and local governments. Alumni and foundations gave generously to it. Families reached into their savings, postponed purchases, and went into debt so that their children could go to college. Higher education, even more than elementary and secondary schools, simultaneously embodied both a public good and a private benefit. It served public purposes beneficial to the nations economy, protected the national defense, opened up new avenues of knowledge, developed new technologies, and made palpable the goal of equality of educational opportunity. It provided extraordinary private benefits such that individuals who possessed it improved their access to higher income, status, and security. Along with purchasing a house and buying a new automobile, it was a pillar of the American dream.

For me that dream was real. In 1948 my parents, grandfather, baby sister and I moved from a crowded apartment in New York City to a one-square-mile unincorporated village called Carle Place on Long Island, just outside the city. Our house was built by William Levitt, who took advantage of new technologies and factory-like production processes and guaranteed loans to builders given by the Federal Housing Administration, and low-interest mortgages provided by the Veterans Administration, to create inexpensive tract housing for people like my parents. Although such housing, spreading across the American landscape, would be lampoonedcalled little boxes filled with oppressively conformist people in the song made famous by folksinger Pete Seegerthe critics missed the essential point. Having ones own house was a dream come true.