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Folks:
In this month's Carnegie Perspectives looks at the importance
of access to higher education for all. It is by Ray Bacchetti,
scholar-in-residence at the Foundation. The posting is #33 in
the monthly series called Carnegie Foundation Perspectives. These
short commentaries exploring various educational issues are produced
by the CFAT<http://www.carnegiefoundation.org>. The Foundation
invites your response at: CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org.
© 2007 The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching,
51 Vista Lane, Stanford, CA 94305 Reprinted with permission.
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Collegiality: The Tenure Track's Pandora's Box
Tomorrow's Academia
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Birthright
Introduction by Lee S. Shulman, March 2007
All across the U.S. this spring, students are making graduation
plans. Their institutions will soon send in the names to be printed
on this year's diplomas. According to the Census Bureau, a diploma
really matters. On the average, during an adult's working life,
college graduates earn nearly one million dollars more than those
who only finish high school (Day and Newburger, 2002). They will
be more engaged as citizens, will contribute much more to the
general good through their taxes and philanthropic efforts, and
be less reliant on government services. Moreover, they also enjoy
a higher quality of life, putting aside more savings, enjoying
more leisure time and career flexibility.
In this month's Perspectives, Ray Bacchetti puts all these statistics
into a much more personal context. He reminds us how recently
access to college became commonplace for so many Americans. In
a moving account, he tells the story of his family's educational
experiences over three generations. Ray is a scholar-in-residence
at the Foundation who served as vice president of Stanford University
and senior program officer for education at the Hewlett Foundation.
I must confess that Ray's account resonated strongly with me,
since only one of my immigrant parents even graduated from high
school. Ray reminds us that access to higher education is one
of the blessings that every American should expect as a birthright,
not a special privilege. As we continue to be a nation of immigrants,
those doors must remain open.
Birthright
Ray Bacchetti
How many of your relatives have college degrees? It's easy for
those of us inside higher education to take it for granted, but
I like to remember that none of my grandparents had the opportunity
to go to college, let alone graduate. My mother, father, and six
aunts and uncles earned one degree among them, my mother's bachelor's
degree from Framingham Normal School in Massachusetts, class of
1929. While going from zero to one is an improvement, it's not
a sea change.
The change occurred in the next two generations, in my family
and in millions more American families like mine. My wife and
I and our three children have ten degrees among us-from Southern
Oregon University, Stanford, Rutgers, Douglass, Amherst, and UC
Berkeley. Two of them are Ph.D.s and three masters.
When I first did this calculation, my reaction was, "Is
this a great country, or what!" Sure, but there was also
a lot of luck involved. We caught the wave: the GI Bill and the
subsequent knowledge explosion created both opportunity and demand
for learning. And we were lucky to have teachers who believed
in us and created an atmosphere of expectation that, "of
course you're going to go to college." In addition, college
was a lot cheaper for us than the roughly $200,000 to be paid
out over the next four years by parents and grandparents when
our granddaughter goes to Brown. In our years, government invested
heavily in the education of youth, whereas today most support
comes in the form of loans.
There was individual luck, too. When I was going to evening college
for a master's in education at Rutgers, a newly minted assistant
professor from some place called Stanford showed up to teach.
He represented a subject I knew nothing about, philosophy, and
a world, academic, that was nowhere on my cognitive map. With
his help, I learned to love philosophy and nailed a scholarship
to Stanford. I graduated nine years-and three children-later,
in 1968.
My wife and I are white, which was a big deal for our generation
in terms of college aspirations. Whatever impediments we faced,
they did not include counselors advising us to settle for a lower-than-college-prep
track in high school, having to live in towns or neighborhoods
with poor schools, or in other ways having always to stay aware
of systemic racism. Just as fish don't notice water, we didn't
notice the sea of unearned white privilege we swam in.
The civil rights movement of the 1960s and all that followed
from it enriched the lives of our children enormously. Two met
their spouses in college, one Chinese-American, the other African-American.
Our grandchildren will be attractive candidates at many colleges
precisely because of their different sensibilities and perspectives
(and it doesn't hurt that they're bright and work hard).
But, while their educational aspirations remain high, many American
families today cannot look forward to that upward spiral found
in my own family history. Just three years ago, it was estimated
"that at least 250,000 prospective students were shut out
of higher education due to rising tuition or cutbacks in admissions
and course offerings." Nothing suggests that that number
will shrink in the normal course of events. In the nation at large,
roughly 72 percent of whites graduate from high school, while
the number for Hispanic and African-American students is 20 percentage
points lower at just over 50 percent. According to data from the
National Governors' Conference, "Only 18 percent of African
Americans and 9 percent of Hispanics complete a bachelor's degree
by age 29, compared with 34 percent of whites."
It's been roughly 80 years since my mother went off to college
to study home economics and become a teacher. There are many today
like her-the first in their families to go to college. Some want
to be teachers, too (God bless them!). For many, their menu is
full of possibilities, including graduate work. But many others
are stuck in elementary, middle, and high schools that are not,
for a variety of reasons, doing a good job. They are also in families
with hopes but no means or in neighborhoods where signs point
to the streets, to jail, or to subsistence wages, not to college
and economic self-determination.
Education is irreversible. Once you've tasted the pleasure and
hard work of learning, the joy of knowledge, you cannot thereafter
imagine yourself without it. You're different, and so will your
children be. After World War II our country made education a birthright.
This happened not because the older generation wanted to make
a noble gesture toward the younger. Rather, it was because we
had learned and now, 50 years later, know in our bones that the
education of any enriches all. Our task on the front edge of a
new century is to make sure that young people get the opportunity
to attend and complete college. And that it doesn't take 80 years
for a family to go from one degree to ten.
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