Generational change is coming to campuses, but this time it’s not the students who are changing. It’s the parents. This is the final year that most students will have parents who grew up as baby boomers. Next fall, according to census figures, the majority of freshmen will have Gen-X moms, born between 1961 and 1981. Two years later, a majority will have Gen-X dads. And four or five years after that, most of the proud moms and dads of graduating seniors will be Gen Xers.
A number of those seniors will go on to graduate and professional schools. As they and their Gen-X parents become more prevalent, postgraduate institutions will face increased scrutiny and encounter some of the same public pressures that undergraduate colleges now confront. No national commissions have been convened, no heated public discussions have begun, no probing questions are being asked — yet. But graduate and professional schools will soon enter a turbulent new era.
The basic reason is that Gen Xers often hold different attitudes toward college and postgraduate education than their boomer counterparts, largely because of the economic environment in which they came of age. College was generally less of a financial burden for boomer students than Gen Xers. Starting in the early 1980s and throughout the Gen-X college era, however, tuition began to outpace inflation, forcing students to incur increasingly large student loans.
Thus, more than boomers, Gen Xers viewed college as a calculated market choice, with large rewards (obtaining the right credentials for a globalizing economy) but also with large risks (coping with big debts). Whereas boomers reveled in the whole college “experience,” Gen Xers engaged in an energetic search for the right combination of courses, degrees, skills, and contacts that would give them a material edge. Whereas boomers wanted a way out of the “system,” Gen Xers wanted a way in.
The first Gen Xers entered the labor force during the “Reagan Revolution.” In public policy, that meant deregulation, tax cuts, and skimpier safety nets. The generation didn’t experience the same real personal-income growth as previous generations did at the same age. Since the late 1970s, adjusted for inflation, the median annual earnings of full-time male workers 15 years and older have failed to grow at all. To get ahead, Gen Xers have had to work longer hours, take extra jobs, become dual-income families, go into business for themselves, or find new ways to economize.
As a result, many Gen Xers have taken a pragmatic approach to the education of their children, the Millennial generation. As parents, they have demanded accountability from elementary and secondary schools, as well as bottom-line cash value — the confidence that, in the end, what has been provided has been worth the investment of time and money. They have wanted standards for schools, teachers, and students, along with clear data to measure the achievement of those standards. And, as Gen Xers replace boomers in the ranks of collegiate parents, they will apply that same rigorous evaluation to colleges and graduate schools.
What’s more, five or six years from now — just about when Gen-X parents will have a significant influence on graduate and professional schools — large numbers of Gen-X legislators will have replaced boomers in Congress and statehouses, putting even more emphasis on standards and accountability. Also around that time, Gen-X entrepreneurs are likely to be creating new market-driven challenges to traditional institutions, including less costly routes to professional licenses and credentials.
Those parents and legislators may well demand sweeping changes in how postgraduate institutions operate. They, along with the competition from Gen-X entrepreneurs, will pressure professional and graduate schools to justify exactly what they are offering for the price they charge and the length of time their degrees require.
Over the past two generations, tuitions at graduate and professional schools have risen at least as fast as tuitions at undergraduate institutions, and sometimes faster. At Harvard University, tuitions at several postgraduate schools are more than three times higher than they were in the late 1960s, after adjusting for inflation. At state universities, many postgraduate programs that once were free now come with substantial costs. Many of the largest increases have been recent. From 1990 to 2005, in real dollars, according the American Bar Association, tuition more than doubled at public law schools and jumped by two-thirds at private law schools.
Some colleges have found in recent years that they could enhance their brand value in the eyes of boomer parents — and increase the number of applications — by raising their tuition. Yet Gen-X parents will bring competition back to the pricing of high-end expenditures, including graduate schools. In partnership with Crux Research, we recently released results from the Datatel 2006 College Parent Survey and Chartwells 2006 College Student Survey. A key finding is that Gen-X parents have focused on their children’s college future for a longer time than boomers — usually starting in elementary school. In addition, Gen-X parents and their high-school children rank the cost of attendance, students’ debt levels, and graduates’ earning capability as the three most important factors when choosing a college. Expect the same in graduate-school choices.
Every postgraduate field will face such questions: Why must it take so long and cost so much? Why is each step of schooling necessary for competence in a field? Why should high-tuition programs provide the only entry into certain professions? Moreover, within each field, institutions should be prepared for other questions: Do you have strong ties with employers? What jobs do graduates get? How much do they earn? How large are their debts, and how long does it take to pay them off? What’s the graduation rate? What happens to dropouts?
Doctoral programs often provide free tuition and stipends in return for teaching or research duties. Still, universities will face probing questions about what their grad students are accomplishing from one year to the next. Many Ph.D. programs require a minimum of four years to complete, but often that stretches to six or seven years. More Gen-X parents and their Millennial children, and perhaps even legislatures, will start asking why. In time, institutions may be pressed to establish formal timetables for graduate education that have a clearer connection to what is required to advance in a field. Perhaps signaling this trend, the University of Chicago recently announced that it will improve stipends and benefits for graduate students to help them complete their degrees more quickly.
The pressure to justify costs and provide accountability may be particularly great for law schools, given workplace attrition, cloudy prospects for traditional partnerships, and the growing number of students who want a law degree for nontraditional reasons. Nearly all lawyers in their mid-60s and older left law school with no debts whatsoever, having enrolled before the enactment of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which created the Guaranteed Student Loan Program and other financial-aid programs. (Before then, loans for students attending private institutions were rare, and for those attending public institutions were nonexistent.) Today debts approaching $100,000 are common. Prior generations of law students broadly assumed that a legal education would pay for itself in time, but Millennials and their Gen-X parents will start carefully evaluating the benefits and the risks — and asking themselves whether the added learning justifies the cost and time. The necessity of the third year in law school may come into question.
Even more than for undergraduate education, the core issue for graduate and professional schools will be job placement. Students and their Gen-X parents will expect institutions to provide opportunities for clinical work, apprenticeships, and career-related community service. The stakes will be even higher than they are for undergraduates when the time comes for the “first real job.” Most graduate programs already help students in their employment searches, both for summer and permanent positions, but not many provide the structure that students will want — or the accountability that Gen-X parents will eventually demand.
In fact, in all fields of graduate education, members of this generation and their parents will want structure, supervision, and feedback. Employers are noticing that new graduates seek constant monitoring and positive reinforcement in their activities. Such coaching is uncommon in today’s graduate-level education, where professors expect substantial self-direction from graduate students, many of whom feel isolated and drift without supervision for months at a time. Uninvolved or absentee advisers will become more controversial, perhaps even unacceptable.
In addition, as growing numbers of women graduate from college and seek higher degrees, graduate and professional schools may face more pressure to accommodate new mothers. That could increase discussions about the appropriate length, cost, and debt burden of degree programs.
Finally, Gen-X parents and their Millennial children may pressure graduate schools to change how they teach the teachers. If they expect professors to be more classroom-oriented and less research-driven, the credentials required for college teaching may need revision.
Four years ago, we warned about boomer “helicopter parents.” Since then, the sound of those parental rotary blades has become common on campuses. It’s now the era of the “Gen-X stealth-fighter parents.” You may not see or hear them, but they will always be within one text message of changing their children’s choices. Often, the stealth-fighter parent will strike at home, with the simple decision that a daughter or son may not attend a particular graduate school because its standards or data are too poor.
What is an institution to do? Simple. Make sure you’re worth the money.
William Strauss and Neil Howe are the authors of Millennials Rising (Vintage Books, 2000) and Generations (Morrow/Quill, 1991). This essay was adapted from the second edition of Millennials Go to College, being published this month by LifeCourse Books.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 53, Issue 30, Page B16