Will Bunch - After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics―and How to Fix It

M y grandmother never got a chance to go to college.

Yet she started one.

Thats a slight oversimplificationshe actually took over a small, struggling secretarial school and turned it into an accredited college awarding bachelor degrees to the middle class of Middle Americabut still, her unlikely story tells us a lot about what college became during our bold twentieth century. And what it no longer is today.

By the time Arline Hammond Bunch passed away in 1987, at eighty years and one week of age, shed handed out thousands of diplomas from Midstate College in Peoria. To Central Illinois farm girls dreaming of taking flight in the heyday of Pan Am. To Caterpillar assembly-line refugees seeking a pathway to the American Dream inside the ledger book of accounting, and to the tempest-tossed victims of 1980s layoffs yearning to learn computers. The degrees she conferred on others had once been an impossible dream for a farmers stubborn daughter like her.

ARLINE WAS BORN IN LOWRY CITY, MISSOURI, POPULATION ROUGHLY 460, almost dead-center U.S.A. The year was 1907, and a booming industrial nation was finding its confidence that each generation should, and would, do better than the one before it. Lowry City is located in St. Clair County, a place where the Ozark Mountains surrender to endless American flatlands, where the options for even the smartest girls were few, or maybe noneeven if your late-life father had been the most prosperous cattle farmer in town.

I can only imagine Arline Hammond, eighteen-year-old high school grad in 1925, as a younger version of the Grandma Arline I got to know decades latera big-boned, cattle-calling-loud, determined woman, with maybe a dollop of the entitlement that came as a Brahman living among the cows of west-central Missouri. After high school, she taught in the local one-room schoolhousethe only possible job for a bright young womanuntil the first pangs of wanderlust sent her to an out-of-town secretarial school. There, one day, she had her lightbulb moment while working the keys on her manual typewriter. She could teach this stuff so much better than her instructors, she thought. It was the beginning of an odyssey that took her all the way to California and back, where the vision would become reality as Midstate College.

Like any good yarn, there are many places where this saga could have run off the rails. In 1929, after her brother-in-law had a bizarre run-in with lawmen in Lowry City who accused him of selling the same cows to two different men, hed fled to California. So Arline, her sister Thelma, Thelmas two young kids, and the sisters mom all piled into a Ford Model T and headed West, Beverly Hillbilliesstyle. Arline thought the Golden State could be a golden opportunity for a secretarial school. She hadnt anticipated the sizzling hot day when the Ford overheated on the first dusty iteration of Route 66 in the desert of the American Southwest, and she had to ask a band of local Native Americans on horseback to lead them to a mechanic. Or what happened when they finally reached the Pacific coast on October 29, 1929the exact day of the great Wall Street Crash. Or that the young man that Arline married out westa pump jockey from the newfangled gas station named Russell Frenchwould learn his stomach pains on their honeymoon were in fact terminal cancer. Eventually, thered be small secretarial schools in Anaheim and St. Louis and Peoria and points in between that came and went. Her early business partners also came and went, including one who took the money and ran off to Mexico. And yet through the decades of raising her three kids and nursing my occasionally ill grandfather, A. B. Bunch, along with everything else, the dream of Midstate College persisted until finally it happened. There was a momentum in mid-twentieth-century America, always pointing skyward.

Arline and A.B. finally bought that small, struggling business school in Peoria in 1966, and renamed it Midstate College. She was dean of students, and she didnt correct people who understandably assumed that she herself must certainly have a bachelors degree. After all, postwar America had changed so quickly from Arlines youth that now anybody with a little gumption could go to collegea point that Arline and A.B. hammered home as they sat in the living rooms of Illinois farmers and pleaded with them to send their daughters to Peoria, despite its (well-deserved) reputation as a rum-soaked Sin City. Grandma Arline recruited new college students with an almost evangelical fervor, earning commissions that got her and her three kids through some lean years when A.B. was sick, and filling Browns Business School with so many upwardly mobile girls that it started to look like a good future investment.

After America helped win World War II, it seemed like any farmers daughter or son of the assembly line at East Peorias massive Caterpillar tractor plant had a shot at doing even better, of working with their brains instead of their hands, of becoming not just smarter folks but more civic-minded ones. College had once been a narrow pathway to success for the pampered eliteshanding out bachelors degrees to just one of every twenty U.S. young peoplebut in this new age of mass higher education, college had transubstantiated to become the living embodiment of the American Dream, and Arline and A.B. sold that notion to the rural gentry and their wide-eyed daughters with the zeal that less scrupulous hustlers used to sell encyclopedias.

Its no surprise, then, that Arline drummed it into her childrenespecially her oldest, Bryan, a brainy proto-beatnik who was listening to his Charlie Parker records when the other kids at Peorias Central High Schools Class of 1953 were at football practice or the drive-inthat they would be the first Bunch or Hammond offspring to actually go to college.

So when Bryan Hammond Bunch jumped the ladder a couple of rungs and won a full scholarship to go east and attend a small, elite private institutionTrinity College in Hartford, Connecticutan idea became firmly cemented in my family, never to fade away. Collegeand what college could do for youwas indeed the American holy grail. Bryan went back to Peoria long enough to literally marry the girl next door, then zigzagged back to New York, where he worked in publishing while the oldest of his three childrenmewas born in 1959. At some point very early in my childhood consciousnesseven before any inkling of sex or death and all that existential jazzcame an almost instinctual awareness that success, as a human being, would hinge on where I went to college.

More than a half century after the baby booms and economic booms and the atomic booms of the 1950s and 60s, we are still clinging to the fast-melting permafrost of a now no-longer-new idea that college is the American Dream. So much so that we are refusing to admit that somewhere in the middle of a long and stormy postindustrial night, the dream has morphed into a nightmare. That a ladder greased with a snake oil called meritocracy has changed from joyous kids climbing higher than their parents to a panicked desperation to hang on to the slippery middle rungs. And that even at the polluted top, neither bewildered parents nor stressed-out graduates are quite sure what theyve just bought for all that cash (or, increasingly, a mountain of debt).

Thats why Ive been thinking so much lately about the journey from my Grandma Arline and Midstate College all the way through my own kids, and how and why higher education came to mean so much to my familyand quite likely yoursover the course of an American century. Because I sensed that understanding this slippery ladder would be one small step toward getting my arms around an even bigger story Id been pondering for years. That one only starts with looking at how the American way of college went off the rails. All those modern ailmentsthe unfathomable tuition bills, the massive student debt that collectively has risen to $1.7 trillion (or more than the nation owes on all its credit cards), the elite schools with the single-digit admission rates that today resemble luxury spa hotels more than academies of learning, the growing number of middle-middle-class kids forced to eat from food pantries or even experience homelessness in a desperate paper chase for college credentialshave had profound consequences extending far off campus.