Higher education and the economy.

Abstract

In higher education across the world, and the American sector in particular, in the present era there is overwhelming emphasis on the economic benefits of higher education. It is the legacy of the optimistic human capital narrative that evolved in the 1960s. If Clark Kerr did not buy into the full implications of the economic narrative, with its notion that everything in life could be usefully modeled in terms of scarcity and rational choice, in the first decade of the Master Plan he rode with the easy harmonization between educational, social, and economic outcomes that typified the time. Since then that easy harmonization has fractured, but the emphasis on the expected economic benefits of higher education has increased—despite the nagging sense that for some, education does not deliver those benefits. Research finds that graduates mostly continue to be optimistic about their prospects.1 This optimism is accentuated by higher education marketing, in which many institutions oversell themselves.2 In reality, graduate vocational prospects are often unclear—more so perhaps in the United States, where higher education is less closely coupled with the labor markets,3 than in some other countries, such as Germany with its tradition of early streaming into advanced vocational education. While Martin Trow’s observation still stands, in that graduates are always better placed than nongraduates (with the exception of nongraduates from very wealthy backgrounds), American higher education is far from providing either certainty or financial security for all, whether at the two-year level, the four-year level, or above.4 Higher education is only one of the elements at play. The transition between higher education and work is complex. These are two different social sites with very distinctive requirements, rhythms, and drivers. 21