Class, Race, and Higher Education in America

"Mass higher education in the United States, with universal access in many places, has many functions that it shares with similar institutions around the world. However, it has one function which is perhaps unique to us: it is the central instrument for the legitimation of a society around the principle of broad (and in principle, equal), opportunities open to all individuals, opportunities to improve themselves and to make their careers and lives through their own efforts and talents. Our 3,500 accredited colleges and universities, offering course work at every level of standard and difficulty to an enormously diverse student body, serve a wide variety of functions for the students and for the society at large. While most of them offer some liberal and general studies, they serve as the chief avenue of entry to middle class occupations--even to quite modest lower-middle class occupations, which in most countries would not require or reward exposure to post-secondary education. These institutions, without the kinds of educational ceilings common in European non-university forms of post-secondary schooling, encourage students to raise their aspirations through further study, full or parttime, and provide the possibility of transfer to advanced studies elsewhere if they do not have such provisions themselves. They thus reflect and reinforce the radical individualism of American values, a set of values deeply opposed to socialist principles which center on cooperative efforts at group advancement, and on the common effort to create a society whose members all profit (more or less equally) from the common effort. American higher education, as a system, both serves and celebrates the American Dream of individual careers open to talents, a dream given much of its institutional reality in the contemporary world precisely by America's system of mass higher education offering a clear alternative to socialist principles of class identification and horizontal loyalty." Source: Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California, Berkeley.

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