The Obama administration’s vision of social mobility in America is bound up with a story about higher education. According to this story, elite colleges and universities are engines of American opportunity. They select the most talented and hardworking people, from across all backgrounds, and provide them with the training to achieve even the most “impossibly big dreams,” as Michelle Obama would say. There is truth to this account. Indeed, Barack Obama’s lived experience speaks to the possibility of meritocratic achievement. He is the multiracial child of a single mother from a middle-class background, who through skill and determination made it to top universities and eventually rose to the highest echelon of political power.
But this familiar story of higher education as a spur to social mobility blinds us to both what is pernicious and what is worth defending about the modern American university.
In this special issue of The Chronicle Review, we turn our attention to the accomplishments and disappointments of the past eight years. See the whole issue here.
For starters, the meritocratic image of elite universities is troubling in theory and in practice. Even at its most idealized, social mobility — the chance for the naturally talented to rise to professional status through educational advancement — is deeply inegalitarian. This is because professional and high-status positions are inherently exclusive. For every person who makes it, many others cannot and are instead consigned to lower-status and lower-income work. Meritocracy, even without racial, gender, or intergenerational barriers, would produce a society in which power flows up to the few at the top. It rejects more-inclusive notions of opportunity and aptitude, and is ultimately nothing less than aristocracy by another name.
But just as problematic, in practice elite higher education does far more to facilitate old-fashioned class inequality than it does to aid social mobility. In recent decades, top incomes have risen disproportionately, with the top 10 percent of the population now capturing more than half of pre-tax income, and the top .01 percent of families owning roughly the same share of wealth as the bottom 90 percent. Most of these rising salaries are for elite professional jobs, almost all of which are accessible only to those with elite diplomas. And crucially, family income remains the best marker of whether or not you get admitted and eventually graduate from a top university.
Perhaps the central function that meritocracy plays — complete with SAT exams and other presumptively objective testing mechanisms — is in normalizing the growing class disparities in money, power, and resources. Top universities have been the essential building blocks of our new Gilded Age, facilitating the transfer of wealth and opportunity from one privileged generation to the next — and doing so while cloaking the extent to which today’s meritocratic elite are really the beneficiaries of a modern version of an “old boys’ club.”
What’s worse, the trappings of objective excellence allow the beneficiaries to imagine that their disproportionate wealth and influence are somehow deserved, the natural reward for their talents. The modern elite university is in this sense an innovation out of the feudal past — an engine not of social mobility but of class rule, which goes largely unrecognized.
At its best, higher education is a profound instrument of social power.
But the problem with Obama’s story is not only that it blinds us to the structural inequality generated by higher education. The story also makes it difficult to appreciate what’s worth defending about even our deeply flawed university system.
The Obama years have been marked by the near-catechistic linking of college and opportunity, and also by a sustained assault from conservatives on the intellectual independence of higher education. Across the country, students and scholars committed to thinking of public education as more than an economic investment in human capital are facing program cuts, tenure threats, and intrusive political oversight. In North Carolina, for example, the governor has railed against “subsidizing” courses in gender studies and Swahili, arguing that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill should be focusing instead on those “skills and subjects employers need.”
It is not a complete surprise that as the language of social mobility has come to dominate our conversations about higher education, so, too, has emerged a focus on universities as handmaidens of business. Both the Obama administration and its conservative critics emphasize the instrumental value of the university as a motor of individual economic advancement (though they disagree vehemently on what this means for the autonomy of colleges). If universities are primarily mechanisms for professional success, why shouldn’t teaching to the needs of the employer trump all?
It is not clear that the familiar meritocratic account has much of an answer, and, indeed, it participates in displacing other ways we might think about higher education.
For all the flaws of our university system, it is hard to imagine a free and equal society today — one that allows citizens to collectively decide the fate of their institutions — that does not have independent centers of higher learning, centers that are not reducible to the whim of government or business. Beyond the critical value of knowledge for its own sake or for scientific advances, universities are essential as repositories of dissent and as mechanisms for ensuring that all individuals have the cultural resources to pursue their own political and personal interests.
The value of a college education is more than market success for those few Obamas — and Bill Clintons, for that matter — who can escape their class position. (These individuals are exceptions that too often have been employed to justify a far more troubling rule.) Instead, at its best, higher education is a profound instrument of social power, one that can project values independent of state and corporate demands and offer its students and community members a space for their own cultivation. The dilemma is that our universities, in particular our elite ones, are doing less of this work and far more of the invisible work of class reproduction.
