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Graduate study in a higher education program at Penn over the last year was an exercise in existential confusion for me. In my courses, we alternately derided higher education as either hopelessly corrupt and ineffectual or exalted it as crucially important to individual and national prosperity. We talked about the college degree as a catalyst for social mobility and a determinant of financial well-being, while at the same time we criticized American higher education for being unquestionably biased toward the wealthy and the white.
The fact that I am both of those things has exacerbated that confusion. Throughout my life I’ve been educationally privileged: I went to a Quaker high school and then to Yale, where I had a wonderful experience despite the fact that I initially found it to be stodgy, pretentious, and conservative. Once my post-college friends and colleagues get to know me, I believe they think I am not at all the conceited and arrogant person they expect would come from a place like Yale. At the same time, I’ve unquestionably benefited from the kind of inborn privilege that does, in fact, typify a disproportionate number of the students that graduate from Yale and other socalled elite colleges.
One of the first things we learned in Penn’s higher education program this year is that as the gap between the rich and the poor continues to grow, so too does the difference in families’ relative ability to afford a college degree. Making matters worse, federal and state funding policies continue to be mind-bogglingly complex, and, in the current fiscal crisis and despite attempts to bolster Pell grants, financial aid funds remain vexingly scarce. The lesson to be learned from all of this is that access to higher education in America is far from being universal. While it is true that almost any adult can enroll in college if he or she wishes, American higher education is no egalitarian utopia.
My grandmother lives on Cape Cod, in a large, two-story house looking out over Buzzards Bay and west towards mainland Massachusetts. What this means in practical terms is that she and whomever she happens to be hosting on a particular evening get to watch the sun set over the water. This is a rare privilege on the east coast, one that only enhances the value of the land upon which my grandparents built their dream home roughly forty years ago.
So when I received my summer reading assignment from the Penn higher education faculty last July—Bill Moyers’ On Democracy—I had the luxury of reading it with my toes in the sand on the beach down the road from my grandmother’s house. I had very little to occupy my time in August (having left my full-time job at the end of July), so I had saved that month for Moyers.
I would like to think that I am not spoiled. But the truth is that I am. Perhaps not in the tantrum-throwing, bratty, devoid-of-character sense of the word, but certainly in the sense that throughout my life I have been treated with immense kindness, generosity, and entitlement. And crucially, student loans or work that crowds out time for reflection are not facets of my everyday existence.
If I were to reduce Moyers’ most steadfast beliefs into one sentence—a disservice to those who have not read his important work—I would say that he believes all Americans deserve an equal chance at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But far from simply parroting the Declaration of Independence, Moyers weaves a convincing argument that democracy might indeed be in peril in America. Importantly, he argues that higher education’s traditional role as an enabler of opportunity has changed because college is now more than ever the exclusive province of the wealthy.
So in order to protect the fundamental promises of democracy, cooperation and coordination between institutions, government, and the public has never been more imperative. Unless we can do a better job of educating an increasingly diverse pool of students with increasingly fewer financial resources, our vaunted network of colleges and universities may be on the verge of losing its standing as the world’s best system of higher education. And more important, the United States may at the same time lose its long-held claim as the world’s preeminent democracy. In that, we all— poor and rich alike, my grandmother included—will be the losers.
James Kingham was a master’s student in the University of Pennsylvania’s program in higher education. He attended George School in Newtown, PA, before enrolling at Yale University and completing a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 2003. He graduated from Penn on May 16, 2009.