The message is familiar. Colleges are youth ghettos. They promise more than they deliver. They serve as great social sorting machines and not as institutions of higher learning. Their students are pressured to attend by parents or peers and do not know what else to do. Their diplomas cost more—and are worth less—than ever before.
This sort of thing has been said before by academics, federal task forces and foundation reports. But the message is likely to have more impact on the public when it is pronounced by a best-selling author. That is precisely what Caroline Bird (author of Born Female and The Invisible Scar) has done in her new book The Case Against College (McKay; $9.95).
Bird has no credentials in education other than her degrees from the universities of Toledo and Wisconsin, but she apparently has done her homework. She writes that "College is good for some people, but it is not good for everybody." The problem, she says, is that for the past decade or so, in a great wave of democratization, society has made college available—if not imperative—to most of the youthful population. Fully half of all U.S. high school graduates now go on to some form of higher education, and the percentage is climbing every year.
Fuzzy Function. The greatest growth has been in public two-year community colleges, but the function of these well-meaning institutions is fuzzy at best. "There are too many people in the world of the 1970s already," says Bird, "and we do not know where to put newcomers. The neatest way to get rid of a superfluous 18-year-old is to amuse him all day long at a community college while his family feeds and houses him. This is not only cheaper than a residential college but cheaper than supporting him on welfare, a make-work job, in prison or in the armed forces."
The dilemma that Bird underscores in dozens of interviews with students, parents and college administrators is that "the great majority of high school graduates aren't sure what they want to do." Indeed, there is no reason why they should be, or why a college freshman has to sign up for a major that from the day he sets foot on campus narrows his possible options and his choice of careers. Most young people simply have not experienced enough variety in jobs or life-styles to be able to make an intelligent choice about then-adult career when they graduate from high school.