Education divides us, and more than some of my students and colleagues realize.
When I ask classes to estimate the percentage of citizens in the United States with bachelor’s degrees, they consistently guess more than two-thirds. My colleagues estimate half, usually. Neither is correct.
Only about a third of adults in the United States, 33.4 percent, have earned a bachelor’s degree. Though this is an incredible increase from 4.6 percent before World War II, it remains true that a minority of adults have four-year college degrees. Less than 10 percent of adults have earned graduate degrees. This means that professors are the slimmest of slices… the “one percent” of educational attainment.
More Americans Have College Degrees
April 2017
Just over a third of American adults have a four-year college degree, the highest level ever measured by the U.S. Census Bureau.
In a report released Monday, the Census Bureau said 33.4 percent of Americans 25 or older said they had completed a bachelor’s degree or higher. That’s a sharp rise from the 28 percent with a college degree a decade ago.
When the Census Bureau first asked respondents about their education levels, in 1940, just 4.6 percent said they had a four-year degree.
About a quarter of American adults, 26 percent, have a high school diploma. Another 21 percent have attained a bachelor’s degree, while 9.3 percent of adults over 25 have a master’s degree. Almost 2 percent of Americans have a doctoral degree, and 1.5 percent have earned a professional degree that requires study beyond a four-year bachelor’s course.
Younger Americans are more likely to have attained a four-year degree than older groups. Among Americans between the ages of 25 to 34, 37 percent have at least a bachelor’s degree.
There is a further division, within academia, between the tenure-track and contingent (part-time and annual contract) faculty. This makes full-time faculty professors yet more rarefied, sitting atop the ivory towers.
I am not currently a tenure-track professor, but I do posses two master’s degrees (including a terminal MFA) and a doctorate. I know others with more than three graduate degrees, including a few MBAs with Ph.D.s in various disciplines. One colleague has two doctorates, and the number of medical doctors with doctorates impresses me.
Educational attainment results in a cultural divide, one that’s more pronounced within the humanities and social sciences.
Computer programmers I meet speak the same language, regardless of educational attainment. Business people with MBAs might reference some buzzwords a bit more, but they generally sound like every other top-level manager. (Curiously, CEOs sound more like most people to me than the MBAs do — even when the CEO does have an MBA.)
The humanities seem to encourage an increasingly obfuscated jargon with each unit earned. We speak less and less like other people we might meet, especially within the halls and offices of our institutions and at conferences. Our journals need magic decoder rings.
Speaking differently correlates within thinking differently and believing differently.
A business person, especially an entrepreneur, is going to be “pro-business” regardless of educational attainment. Within the humanities, political ideas either change or they filter out with each step up the educational ladder. Political scientists and social science instructors are more likely to be self-identified Marxists, for example, than undergraduate in those fields. Maybe only the ideological committed pursue the degrees because they are the individuals attracted to university posts.
We associate with people like ourselves. The college educated live in communities with other college-educated professionals. People with graduate and professional degrees further sort from the general population. Our values and perspectives are reinforced by the unconscious assumption more people are like us than not.
We need to work within our larger communities and be certain to engage socially with people unlike ourselves. Our social circles are too small, too insular, and we’re spending too much energy reflecting back to each other.
I’m not arguing that ignorance is better than education. I’m arguing that we must recognize our isolation from other communities and work to ensure we don’t act like the condescending elites many of our fellow citizens dislike. Those of us with humble roots still become more like the people with whom we interact, leaving behind some of (but not all) our class markers.
How many people in your daily life are like you, including their education levels?
Sadly, even this blog post is composed for the elites, not the masses. That’s probably problematic, too.