This post is an opinion essay that appeared in a recent Newsweek. Here’s a link to the original. And here’s a link and another and yet another for somewhat different spins on the subject.
In the belief system of the American meritocracy, pursuing higher levels of formal education is the route to upward mobility and the epitome of fairness. If you attain more degrees, you acquire higher levels of skill, which thereby makes you more economically productive and justifies your enhanced levels of monetary compensation and public respect.
But as Ruby Nicole Day spells out below, this neat formula doesn’t work for a lot of people. For one thing, there’s credential inflation, where employers start requiring college degrees for jobs that didn’t used to have this requirement and where the value added of a college degree is not obvious. This doesn’t promote upward mobility; instead, it means you have to get more degrees in order to stay at the same level.
For another, children of parents with college degrees have a big advantage in the economic, cultural, and social capital that facilitates getting into and succeeding in college.
And yet another problem is if you don’t go to college right away after high school — which is the path with the highest probability of success — and instead you enter the workforce and then later try to pursue college. As the author points out, this is a fiendishly difficult trick to pull off. At this point you have family and responsibilities that make it hard to afford taking time off from work or trying to cram college classes into your evenings and weekends. In these cases the admonition to go back to school so you can get ahead feels very much like a fool’s game.
Why can’t employers consider following Day’s advice in evaluating people for higher positions?
Give us a chance and let us prove what we can help your company accomplish. Give the person who’s been with your company for five years a chance to prove they can be a manager, or a supervisor, instead of passing them over for someone who has no understanding of the culture of your company but got a piece of paper from an institution.
In short, diplomas may be killing the American dream.
See what you think of her story.
The American Dream Is Dead for Us Working Class Americans
Ruby Nicole Day
One of the strangest things of being a working-class American is hearing politicians talk about the American Dream, when everyone I know knows the truth: The American Dream is dead, at least it is for us.
Of course, everyone defines the American Dream in their own way. For some people, it’s probably a big house and a fancy car, a country club membership and a closet full of designer clothes. But most of us want something much more simple.
For me, the American Dream would be to have my own home so I don’t have to worry about being evicted by my landlord, enough money to pay for electricity, water, and internet for my homeschooled child, a car so I can get to work, and a bit of savings in case the car breaks down.
So far, this has eluded me, though not for lack of trying. I work three jobs and pick up any extra work when asked. But I still make just under what my bills come out to each month. I’ve thought a lot about why that is, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that it’s because I don’t have access to real opportunity.
That’s what I’ve learned as a lower income American: You can’t have the American Dream without opportunity.
Who would disagree with the idea that every American should have the same opportunity as the next? And yet, to those of us at the bottom, this is not just a dream—it’s a fantasy. Equal opportunity means everyone has an equal chance to reach the height of their ability. But this hasn’t been the case for many years now, if it ever was.
If you grew up lower income in the 1980s like I did, you didn’t get to go to college and get a degree. 40 years later, that means you’re stuck working a job that doesn’t have the benefits that diploma-requiring jobs do. Meanwhile, the cost of living went up—but wages stayed the same. Many like me are stuck in a dead end job with low wages and no way out. The American Dream has became an American nightmare.
People say it’s never too late to go back to school, but for many of us, it is. Imagine you’re working full time. Imagine you’re working more than full time like I am—two or three jobs, because that’s what it takes to make ends meet in America in 2023. But let’s say you find a way to invest all this time (and money!) into furthering your education. There’s always the fear of not getting a job with the degree you have spent so much time and money on and then having no way to pay back a student loan. Now you’re worse off than before.
It’s just not true that all Americans are given the opportunity to pursue the American Dream. Good jobs often require a college degree, even if they don’t require any skills you would learn at college. But we in the working class get locked out of those opportunities over a formality, a piece of paper.
Why aren’t knowledgeable, hard-working Americans that have a dream seen as intelligent and given the opportunity to achieve that dream? We don’t get the chance to show the world what we can accomplish and what we can bring to the table. A piece of paper shuts us out.
Give us a chance and let us prove what we can help your company accomplish. Give the person who’s been with your company for five years a chance to prove they can be a manager, or a supervisor, instead of passing them over for someone who has no understanding of the culture of your company but got a piece of paper from an institution. They have never missed a day’s work in five years. They have risen to every possible occasion to become the best employee they could be and they get passed over for every promotion simply because they do not have a college degree. It doesn’t matter if they know every possible solution to your issues or company problems. It doesn’t matter that they can bring in the right employees to train them correctly for you.
At the end of the day, we don’t want handouts. We want opportunities to work hard and thrive, instead of working hard and sinking.
The American Dream is harder than ever to accomplish, especially with the rising cost of living in 2023. People living in poverty or who are low income are even further down the pole now. The divide is only getting bigger. And it’s hard to see how we will ever have a shot at the American Dream.
Ruby Nicole Day is a 41-year old married mother. She homeschools her son and drives for DoorDash. She lives in South Lebanon, Ohio.
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 