Op-Ed By DAVID BROOKS
Published: September 25, 2005, NYTimes, Section 4,
page 11
Especially in these days after Katrina, everybody laments poverty
and inequality. But what are you doing about it? For example, let's say you
work at a university or a college. You are a cog in the one of the great
inequality producing machines this country has known. What are you doing to
change that?
As you doubtless know, as the information age matures, a new sort
of stratification is setting in, between those with higher education and those
without. College graduates earn nearly twice as much as high school graduates,
and people with professional degrees earn nearly twice as much as those with
college degrees.
But worse, this economic stratification is translating into social
stratification. Only 28 percent of American adults have a college degree, but
most of us in this group find ourselves in workplaces in social milieus where
almost everybody has been to college. A social chasm is opening up between those
in educated society and those in noneducated society, and you are beginning to
see vast behavioral differences between the two groups.
For example, divorce rates for college grads are plummeting, but
they are not for everyone else. The divorce rate for high school grads is now
twice as high as that of college grads.
There are other behavior differences, large and small, which
reflect the different social norms in the two classes. High school grads are
twice as likely to smoke as college grads. They are much less likely to
exercise. College grads are nearly twice as likely to vote. They are more than
twice as likely to do voluntary work. They are much more likely to give blood.
These behavioral gaps are widening.
We once had a society stratified by bloodlines, in which the
Protestant Establishment was in one class, immigrants were in another and
African-Americans were in another. Now we live in a society stratified by
education. In many ways this system is more fair, but as the information
economy matures, we are learning it comes with its own brutal barriers to
opportunity and ascent.
In an agricultural or industrial society, you might grow up in a
poor or disorganized family, but you could get a job in a factory and with some
grit and determination work your way to respectability. But in an information
society, college is the gateway to opportunity. Crucial life paths are set at
age 18, which means family and upbringing matter more.
Educated parents not only pass down economic resources to their
children, they pass down expectations, habits, knowledge and cognitive
abilities. Pretty soon you end up with a hereditary meritocratic class that
reinforces itself generation after generation.
You see the results in the college graduation data. In the 1970's,
when the information age was young, kids from poorer, less educated families
were catching up to kids from more affluent families when it came to earning
college degrees. But now the gap between rich and poor is widening. Students in
the poorest quarter of the population have an 8.6 percent chance of getting a
college degree. Students in the top quarter have a 74.9 percent chance.
The most damning indictment of our university system is that these
poorer kids are graduating from high school in greater numbers. It's when they
get to college that they begin failing and dropping out.
Thomas Mortenson of the Pell Institute for the Study of
Opportunity in Higher Education has collected a mountain of data on growing
educational inequality. As he points out, universities have done a wonderful
job educating affluent kids since 1980. But they "have done a terrible job
of including those from the bottom half of the family income distribution. In
this respect, higher education is now causing most of the growing inequality
and strengthening class structure of the United States."
Part of the problem is that kids from poorer families have trouble
affording higher education. But given the rising flow of aid money, financial
barriers are not the main issue. A lot of it has to do with being academically
prepared, psychologically prepared and culturally prepared for college.
I'm going to come back to this subject and write about what some
colleges are doing to help these students and how most colleges are neglecting
them. But let me conclude with the thought that while we have big political
debates in this country about equality of results, all those on the left and
right say they believe in equality of opportunity.
This is where America is failing most.