The Benefits of Going to College: The Case of Joanie

            My last few posts have dealt with issues of vocational education, apprenticeships, and college attendance. In this post, I want to continue this discussion by offering an example of a person who is benefitting in some unexpected ways from going to college.

            I have been mentoring a woman named Joanie who in her late-thirties entered a local community college. She had been working for years as a home health care aide, and was very good at it, but wanted to find employment that would be more secure, less physically taxing, and paid a better salary. As she progressed through community college, the goal of social work solidified, and she is now close to transferring to a state university to pursue a B.A. in social work. Joanie’s reasons for entering community college were overwhelmingly economic. If at the outset there were a non-degree training pathway toward solid employment that would have fit her interests, she would have taken it. And I would have recommended it.

            Joanie’s two years at the community college have yielded an increase in her reading and writing skills, in her analytic ability, and in her general knowledge of some areas in the sciences and social sciences. These are expected – but still welcome – outcomes of a general education curriculum. This mix of skills and general knowledge prepares her for further, more specialized and demanding coursework as she transfers to a four-year institution. There’s been an economic tradeoff, of course, in that she has not been working full time as a home health aide while she’s been in school, surviving off financial aid, campus jobs, and an occasional health care gig. But the long-term economic benefit for her studies is predicted to make up for temporary salary losses, so in terms of economics alone, attending college has been a rational move.

            What is interesting in terms of the debate about college attendance is what else has been happening to Joanie.

            Always a reader, she has developed into an avid consumer of print, reading when she first gets up in the morning, looking for “a good book” to read after the pressure of a big test has passed, consuming political news and commentary on the Internet. She has begun writing in a journal and, on her own, does things like examine the way an author opens a piece of writing in order to imitate the author’s technique. Over the past year, she has been travelling the streets of Downtown Los Angeles and East L.A. taking pictures of Mexican murals and stone work, envisioning a magazine she’d like to create that would feature Mexican and Mexican-American art and culture. And, finally, she is electing a silk-screening class on Saturday mornings, getting a great deal of satisfaction from the craft of it and imagining putting some of her photographs of masonry on t-shirts. Whether or not the impulses to do these kinds of literary and artistic projects have always been present in Joanie, I can’t say, but it’s clear from what she tells me that the energy and skills for doing the projects are related to her classes, and the relationships she’s developed with some of her professors, and just the expansive possibility she feels through her achievement in college.

            I talk to Joanie about once a week, and every time she in some way comments on what college means to her, her changes in self-perception and self-respect, and the sense of direction she has about her life. It wasn’t always that way. It took quite a bit of cajoling and hand-holding to get her to attend her first class, a non-credit Saturday offering for new students. She didn’t like it. But she stuck it out, then enrolled as a regular student, still unsure, still ill-at-ease. But gradually Joanie found her way, relying on the tutoring center, and on programs for students like her, and on some sympathetic teachers. “At first,” she says, “it was torture, and now it’s like family.”

            One more thing. Before entering college, Joanie had a cynically comic take on the world, a view born of hardship and gutsiness. What I’ve noticed over the last year is an embellishment of this comic sensibility. Her reading, her browsing of the Internet, her literary experimentations are making their way into her barbs and commentaries, for example, assuming an English herald’s voice (“Hear ye, hear ye…”) to introduce an imagined encounter in one of her classrooms. One’s humor is quite a personal thing, so it’s telling, I think, that Joanie’s education is affecting it, is going that deep into her life.

            In some ways, Joanie is exceptional, and I don’t want to make broad claims based on her case about the need for everyone to pursue a two- or four-year degree. As I argue in my last post, a number of factors are involved in both individual decisions and public policy initiatives regarding college attendance. But Joanie’s case does illustrate several things worth keeping in mind. One is that for some students the college experience can provide a range of benefits that would not be available in a job training or apprenticeship program alone. The second thing to note is that we might not be able to predict in advance—though we might have some indications—as to who would benefit from the courses and activities a college provides. At the outset, I would not have predicted Joanie’s full-hearted embrace of the college experience. A third thing is that the non-strictly-economic advantages of the college curriculum are potentially available to people across the socioeconomic spectrum and across the types of post-secondary institutions. Too often discussions about, for example, the benefits of the liberal arts are focused primarily on advantaged students in elite colleges.

Finally, let’s return to Joanie’s primary motive for attending college: to improve her economic prospects. It is important to acknowledge this fact, but also to notice all the other interests and motives that have emerged within the push to create a better economic future through college. We tend to be reductive and dichotomous in our discussions of the reasons why people want to (or should) go to college. For most of us, major life undertakings result from a web of motives and circumstances, and what drives and sustains us in that undertaking can change, sometimes profoundly, along the way. The same holds for people like Joanie as she tries to better her lot in life by going to college.


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Untangling the Postsecondary Debate

This commentary appeared in Education Week's "Diplomas Count", June 9, 2011. For a commentary on it, see Jay Mathews' column "Class Struggle" in the Washington Post, June 16, 2011.

Preparing all students for some form of post-secondary training or education is a hugely important issue, but I worry that—as is the case with so much education policy—it will devolve to a binary polemic. The predictable result will be stalemate or a partial and inadequate solution that will not address the web of concerns that underlie this debate or honor the lives of the young people at the heart of it.

As a person who has worked for many years with students who have not been well served by our schools, I am sympathetic to the push to prepare as many as possible for a college degree. Those who advocate an occupational education on strictly economic terms don’t fully appreciate tracking’s material as well as symbolic damage. And right at the point when college is being encouraged for a wide sweep of our population, we have this policy counterforce, which is seen by some parents and civil rights groups as an attempt to protect privilege.

Yet it would be foolhardy to dismiss labor market realities, for many low-income students are in immediate financial need. These students can afford post-secondary education only if it leads to a decent wage and benefits. Furthermore, the record of post-secondary success is not a good one. Many students leave college without a certificate or degree that can help them in the job market, and, in many cases, they incur significant debt.

There is also the pure and simple fact of human variability. Some students of all economic backgrounds are not drawn to the kinds of activities that make up the traditional academic course of study, no matter how well executed. It is true that better teaching and a more engaging curriculum would make a difference for a percentage of disaffected students—but not all.

In a community college fashion program I’ve been studying, I see students with average to poor high school records deeply involved in their work, learning techniques and design principles, solving problems, building a knowledge base. Yet they resist, often with strong emotion, anything smacking of the traditional classroom, including the very structure of the classroom itself. This resistance holds even when the subject (textiles, history of fashion) relates to their interests.

The college-for-all versus pathways debate is typically focused on structural features of the curriculum and on economic outcomes, and not much attention is paid to the intellectual and emotional lives of the young people involved: their interests, what has meaning for them, what they want to do with their lives. A student in a welding program gave succinct expression to all this: “I love welding. This is the first time school has meant anything to me.”

But goals, expectations, and what one imagines for oneself are deeply affected by information and experience. For a pathway approach to be effective and not rigidify into tracking, students will need a lot of information about college and careers and multiple opportunities to visit colleges, work sites, hospitals and courts and laboratories. The differences in cultural and social capital between my UCLA students and the students I work with at that inner-city community college are profound and widening as inequality widens in our country. Pathways advocates will have to confront this inequality head on, for it is as important as the construction of curriculum.

The fundamental issue underlying the debate, and one I don’t hear addressed, is the very divide between the academic and vocational course of study. This distinction emerged out of a cluster of troubling beliefs about knowledge, education, and the social order, and these beliefs continue to blinker our educational imagination.

The comprehensive high school and curriculum tracking was an early twentieth century response to the rapid increase of working class and immigrant children in urban centers, and separate academic, general, and vocational courses of study seemed an efficient way to address their wide range of educational preparation and ability. But conceptions of ability were made amidst the emergence of I.Q. testing and a full-blown eugenics movement. So there was much talk about the limited mental capacity of various immigrant and working-class groups and the distinct ways their brains functioned. As opposed to college-bound students (overwhelmingly white and middle to upper class) who were “abstract minded”, working-class and immigrant students were “manually minded.” We don’t use these phrases today, but there are echoes of them in loose talk about “learning styles,” “kinesthetic learners,” and other terms that reduce and reify cognition—terms heard in contemporary educational discourse.

Sadly such distinctions about cognition reflect broader social biases about kinds o f work (blue collar vs. white collar, hand vs. brain work) and the intelligence of the people in these different occupational categories. Though we are a country built on egalitarian principles, we also hold a number of anti-egalitarian beliefs about cognition, education, and work. We also make weighty status-laden distinctions among levels of post-secondary education—research university to community college—and these distinctions play into the college-occupation debate.

The academic-vocational divide affects both sides of the debate. It limited the practice of vocational education itself. Surveying the history of VocEd, the authors of a report from the National Center for Research in Vocational Education concluded “[V]ocational teachers emphasized job-specific skills to the almost complete exclusion of theoretical content. One result was that the intellectual development of vocational students tended to be limited at a relatively early age.” No wonder that the mere mention of an “occupational pathway” sparks fears of a return to tracking and a watered-down curriculum.

But the divide also has a negative effect on those advocating a college-for-all approach, for it can blind them to the significant intellectual content of occupations and the many ways that occupational study, as John Dewey saw, can give rise to the study of the arts and sciences.

My hope is that keeping the totality of these issues in mind will bring the discussion of post-secondary education close to the complex needs and circumstances of young people as they find their way into the world beyond high school.

Professor X Redux: A Condescending Essay Becomes a Condescending Book

Several years back, Atlantic Monthly published an essay by an anonymous “Professor X” (“In the Basement of the Ivory Tower”) lamenting the quality of “non-traditional” students and questioning our nation’s push to send increasing numbers of people to college, even though they might be academically underprepared. I wrote a series of blog entries on the essay and on the issues it raises (see entries from June 8 to July 24, 2008. As well, see a later entry “Unpacking the College-for-all versus Occupational Training Debate” October 8, 2010.)

I also wrote a letter to Atlantic Monthly which the editors did not publish. Let me print it here, for it turns out that the essay has grown into a book, just published. And the letter suits it.

Dear Editor:

Like Professor X (“In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” June, 2008), I too am frustrated, weary, at my wits’ end—but by the ever presence of articles like his. Almost every time “nontraditional” college students appear in the pages of magazines such as The Atlantic…or Harpers, or the NYT magazine, they are represented as failures who are compromising the integrity of post-secondary education.

I taught writing and literature for a number of years in a variety of programs for nontraditional students. People like Professor X’s open-faced cop and the ill-prepared Ms. L. populated my classes. Some didn’t do so well, but many did. And my experience is not at all unique.

Professor X seems well intentioned and attuned to the struggles his students have with his curriculum—and he is on the money in his criticism of his institutions’ culpability in his students’ dilemma. But he never turns a critical eye to his own curriculum. Take, just as one example, his use of the traditional research paper, an assignment that, in his words, few people would ever have to replicate in their workaday lives. If what he wants his students to achieve is some skill in doing systematic research and a sense of the complexity of history, there are a lot of other assignments he could devise, ones that draw on—rather than resist—his students’ backgrounds and career goals, that bring the humanities more meaningfully and deeply into their lives.

Since the professor teaches literature, let’s also consider his depiction of the characters in his set piece. His students have no, or severely limited, mental lives. Their emotions register on their faces, they groan or quip in boredom, they struggle haplessly, they haven’t read many books. But these people solve problems daily; navigate work and school and family; write and read (despite the professor’s characterization of them as semi-literate) as part of their jobs, hobbies, religious observations, and interactions with the state. None of this is tapped in the professor’s tale, and some of it could be turned to literary ends.

There are a lot of people who enter some form of post-secondary education poorly prepared. But their stores are more complex, more varied, richer than the chronicle of despair that we so often get. Please do better by them.

Mike Rose

Los Angeles

I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I get guilty pleasure imagining the publicity campaign for the book. Will the author’s publicist arrange masked book signings? Will he appear behind a curtain on television or have his voice disguised on the radio? This kind of anonymity befits a spy, or a high-class madam, or a whistle-blower (though movies have been made about Erin Brockovich and the guy who revealed price-fixing at Archer Daniels Midland). But a college professor who can’t connect to his students and criticizes the state of higher education?

There’s a slew of books and reports that are brutal on the state of higher ed. Professor X’s observations are hardly new; in fact, it seems almost ritualistic for college faculty to wring their hands about the sorry preparation of their students. “Students frequently enter college almost wholly unacquainted with English grammar.” That line could easily come from In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, but it was voiced by the president of Brown University in 1841.

The thing—the gimmick really—that makes the essay and now the book tangy is the sense that we’re getting the real inside scoop, the un-politically-correct but accurate assessment from the front lines—an assessment so bold that anonymity is required.

Professor X’s experience—his love of his subject and his frustration in trying to teach it to those who don’t share his background or passion—is a legitimate story to tell. And he can tell it in as snarky a way as he wants. It’s a free country. What is exasperating is that we rarely, if ever, read accounts in high-brow media of teachers facing the same kind of class who develop ways to reach their students or of students like Professor X’s who succeed. One reason for this absence, I’ve come to believe, is that most editors don’t come from the classes Professor X teaches. They don’t see the world from those desks. They can more easily identify with Professor X and the story line he offers. They have no reason to doubt it or to see it in a different light.

There are moments in Professor X’s account where he finds a kind of common ground with his students. Like him, they are trying to make ends meet. Like him, they have had their share of disappointments. And both professor and students don’t have much power in their compact. He, after all, is an adjunct faculty member. He would claim his status as justification for his anonymity—and, ok, he might be right. (Though if colleges are as indifferent as he claims, they might not care as long as they can staff one more section of freshman comp.) I only wish that these moments of emotional and existential connection could have translated into an intellectual grasp of the real pedagogical challenge before him and led him to a more generous and creative response to the students struggling to make sense of Joyce, and Faulkner, and the traditional research paper.