January-February 2008

by Margaret A. Miller

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.  —Folk saying

Paul Barton and Anthony Carnevale, in their articles in this issue, are in fundamental disagreement about the economy’s need for college-educated workers. What they don’t disagree about, though, are the benefits that accrue to individuals from having a college education. Barton and Carnevale focus on the economic benefits—the wage differentials between those with a high-school education or even some college and those with a bachelor’s degree or higher (which is one reason we need to graduate students, not just admit them). But when it comes to the private benefits of higher education, possibly even more important is how advanced intellectual abilities help people navigate contemporary life.

We have to do so many things that other people used to do for us, from making our own plane reservations to making choices about our health to planning for our security in old age (someone has called this the “democratization of risk,” although with a $30 trillion shortfall projected for Social Security and Medicare, it’s more like the “privatization of risk”). We have to be able to hop from job to job without loss of momentum as we acquire new skills and knowledge. We have to deal with a wider variety of people in this country and in an increasingly constricted world. We need to fill out FAFSA forms for our children (there, even a doctorate may not be enough!)

So I was aware of the stakes when my daughter-in-law told me about a friend of hers who hasn’t been to college—indeed, hasn’t been in this country for long. This friend, while having no collegiate ambitions for herself, is very ambitious for her son and is determined that he will go to college. But when they spend the afternoon together, Beth no-
tices a difference between  herself and the other mother. “She tells him to study,” Beth says, “but she can’t help him with the content, and she doesn’ know that she needs to really push him to do his homework for a certain amount of time after school every day.”

I thought of that story when I opened a chart recently produced by Tom Mortenson, which shows the correlation between parental education and children’s grades. Sure enough, the more highly educated the parents, the higher the grades of their children: 60.6 percent of children whose parents have advanced degrees get mostly A’s, whereas only 27.8 percent of high-school dropouts’ children do.

That differential comes about in innumerable small, intangible ways. For instance, educated parents use a wider vocabulary in speaking to their infants than their less-educated counterparts do. According to ETS’s recently released The Family: America’s Smallest School, “by age 4, the average child in a professional family hears about 20 million more words than the average child in a working-class family.” Children of educated mothers are also almost twice as likely to be read to as those with less-educated mothers. And if my family is any indication, they are also apt to participate in sustained conversations, even debates (in our household, these periodically featured loud-voiced uncles), which help immeasurably when it comes to writing papers in school and college.

With their sense of entitlement, more highly educated parents are more likely to fight for their children in school, and they know what privileges to fight for. They make sure that their children start algebra in the 8th grade, that they take a college-prep curriculum, that they are placed among the “gifted and talented” students who absorb a disproportionate share of school resources, and that they see college as a realistic possibility and worth taking out loans for (indeed, they may be in a position to subsidize those loans). Having been through the system, they are more knowledgeable about its twists and turns and better able to help their children navigate them.

And they continue to hover over their college-going children. However annoying it may be to us, their involvement has, as the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) reveals, a remarkably good effect on their children’s engagement and satisfaction with college, and hence on their ultimate success.

In short, a college education has benefits that ripple down through the generations. Children inherit not just the “sins of the fathers” but their privileges. That’s why it is so important that we focus all our intelligence and resources on attracting to our colleges and universities not the children of the privileged (they will come anyway) but first-generation students, whose success we then must do our best to ensure.

In this country we’ve prided ourselves on a system of higher education by which we, as Carnevale puts it, “mediate opportunity [and] expand merit-based success without surrendering individual responsibility.” But with college-going rates stagnating, completion rates a disgrace, and income gaps widening (consider: the richest one percent of Americans hold a third of the nation’s wealth), we are becoming as caste-bound a society as any in the Old World.

The children of the less educated will be an increasingly large proportion of the college-going pool. Their parents are equally, if not more, determined to see them succeed than those for whom college is a family tradition, but they can’t help them adequately. We need to do for those children what our parents did for us—smooth the way for them to get into college, and once they’re there, make sure that they have the same kinds of experiences that help more-privileged students succeed. Again, the NSSE data are revelatory: First-generation students are less likely than the average student to participate in collegiate activities that lead to student success (learning communities, research with faculty members, study abroad, or capstone experiences). We’re the ones who can steer them towards those experiences the way the “helicopter parents” guide their children. This gives a whole new meaning to “in loco parentis.”

This attention to the success of first-generation students will entail turning many of higher education’s lived values on their heads. Instead of pursuing “the best and brightest,” we’ll need to look out for the most promising first-generation students; instead of running the rankings race, we’ll need to tighten our belts to keep ourselves affordable and spend the resources we have on practices like those that Charles Reed described in the previous issue of Change to attract and retain these students. But we need to get better at this job, and fast, because as Carnevale points out, “ultimately, of course, there are no ‘other people’s children’”—or children’s children, for that matter. We need to want the son of Beth’s friend to succeed as much as his mother does, for his own, his children’s, and our sakes.