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During the first 2015 Democratic presidential debate, Senators Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders struggled to outdo each other with grandiose visions for free public university and greatly enhanced loans and bursaries for students from poor families. On October 21, 2015, Joe Biden, vice-president of the United States, outlined his devotion to college education, while announcing his decision not to run for the presidency. North of the border, Justin Trudeau, during his successful campaign to become prime minister of Canada, extolled the virtues of expanding access to universities. If there is consensus about anything in North America, it is that a college or university education is a “good thing” for contemporary youth.

Indeed, heading off to college is one of North America’s signature rites of passage. Everyone knows the routine: evaluating colleges, cramming to get the high-school grades necessary to get into the best universities, waiting for the admission (or rejection) letters, tearful farewells for those leaving, and move-in day at the college residence. And then the studying begins.

What happens after that is also well known: four or five years of college (with the bright ones staying on for graduate school or a professional degree), the stress of job applications, the choice of employer, and settling into a career. Traditionally, the career-work continuum is followed by marriage, house purchase, and children.

This new American Dream is founded on a firm belief in the efficacy of a Learning = Earning formula where the number of years of post-secondary study provide an assurance of an ever-higher income. It appears to be a worthy successor to the dreams of earlier generations who built their futures and fortunes on agriculture, industrial labour, entrepreneurship, or the combination of unionized and government work that propelled prosperity in the post–World War II era.

But what if this belief is not true? What if the formula is wrong? What if the actual experience of North American students deviates dramatically from the image that has sustained the optimism and dreams of young people for the past three generations? For those who have saved for years to pay for a college education, who have pinned their hopes on the career potential of a university degree, the formula is intensely personal. What if Learning does not equal Earning?

Rumblings are getting louder that all is not well in college-land. Sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa have provided an invaluable service to the research-based understanding of contemporary post-secondary education in their provocative studies of the actual experiences of American college students. Their first book on this theme, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, examined how much students actually took away, intellectually, from the college experience. Their depressing study argued that most students showed surprisingly little gain, even after they had completed their degrees.

In Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates, Arum and Roksa looked at the employment experiences of a group of university students who graduated in 2009, a time of serious economic difficulty in America. The book observed that college graduates did much better than those without a college education, but also documented the severe challenges facing young adults. The researchers found that for those unemployed at the time of the spring 2011 survey, 40 percent had been unemployed for six months or more. Almost a quarter of the respondents who were unemployed in 2011 had also been unemployed when surveyed in the spring of 2010. Others were underemployed, with 4 percent working fewer than twenty hours per week. The remaining 89 percent of graduates had found either full-time employment or close to it, but many were in low-paid jobs. Fifteen percent of college graduates were in full-time positions that paid less than $20,000 per year, and 15 percent were in positions that paid between $20,000 and $30,000 per year. Considered as a whole, 53 percent of the college graduates who had not re-enrolled full-time in school were unemployed, employed part-time, or employed in full-time jobs that paid less than $30,000 annually.

College and university has never been one thing or a single kind of institution. In his excellent and affectionate commentary on the American college, called simply College, Andrew Delbanco, a Columbia University professor, observed:

For a relatively few students, college remains the sort of place that Andrew Kronman, former dean of Yale Law School, recalls from his days at Williams, where his favorite class took place at the home of a philosophy professor whose two golden retrievers slept on either side of the fireplace “like bookends beside the hearth” while the sunset lit the Berkshire Hills “in scarlet and gold.” For many more students, college means the anxious pursuit of marketable skills in overcrowded, under-resourced institutions, where little attention is paid to that elusive entity sometimes call the “whole person.” For still others, it means travelling by night to a fluorescent office building or to a “virtual classroom” that exists only in cyberspace. It is a pipe dream to imagine that every student can have the sort of experience that our richest colleges, at their best, provide. But it is a nightmare society that affords the chance to learn and grow only to the wealthy, brilliant, or lucky few. Many remarkable teachers in America’s community colleges, unsung private colleges, and underfunded public colleges live this truth every day, working to keep the ideal of democratic education alive.[1]

But the actual outcomes should give us pause. Consider the following information. These figures are for the state of Missouri, admittedly not the economically strongest part of the United States. For every hundred students who enter high school, seventy-eight will graduate, of whom forty-seven will enter college. Of these, only sixteen will earn a Bachelor’s degree, with another six earning an associate degree. Unless you read the statistics, you would never guess that only about a third of those entering college would reach the Holy Grail of a degree in a timely fashion.

But, as the TV pitchmen say, there’s more. Among college graduates in the United States, with the number varying according to the vagaries of the national and global economy, around 10 percent cannot immediately find work at all. And it gets worse from there. Go back to our sixteen college graduates. Of these, fully a third will end up underemployed, meaning that they will have a job that does not require a four-year degree to hold down the position.

Of one hundred high school graduates, only sixteen will finish a first degree and only eleven will be employed in a job appropriate to their college education. Think about it. From a hundred high school graduates, we are down to eleven young men and women who completed their degrees in a timely fashion, moved into the workforce, and found a job commensurate with their education and experience.

Look for depressing statistics like these ones in the recruitment and promotional literature for a college or university close to you. Look really hard. You will rarely find them. Show us the political platform that proudly proclaims that the world’s largest, most comprehensive, and best post-secondary education system produces a positive outcome for as many as a third of those who attend it. Sounds a little underwhelming, doesn’t it? The Canadian results are better, in part because of a strong high school system and a lower participation rate. But the general direction is much the same.

Of course, this being contemporary North America, opportunity and outcomes are not equally shared. The percentage of students at elite universities who experience desired outcomes—quick passage through college and a shift into paid employment in a decent job—is much higher, probably in the order of 60 percent or more of the total. (Following the Missouri example, if a hundred high school graduates go to an elite institution, at least ninety will complete their first year, close to eighty will finish their degrees, and at least sixty will find promising work.)

The opposite is true at the weaker, open-entry institutions and many of the for-profit places. Here, dropout rates in the first year can reach 50 percent or more. In the worst examples, as few as 15 to 20 percent will actually complete a degree in institutions of this type. And these graduates are likely to have greater difficulty translating a degree from a little-known and low-ranked school into a stable career with a decent income. If 60 percent of elite students achieve the twenty-first-century version of the American Dream, it is probably less than half that at the much more numerous, lower-ranked institutions.

Colleges and universities have numbers of their own. For years, they have boasted that their graduates earn much more over the course of their careers than non-college graduates. There are serious problems with this assertion (which we will discuss later), some of them obvious, others less so. First, individual ability, family circumstances, and motivation account for a significant portion of the income differential between high school graduates and college graduates. Second, people with degrees are on the whole—but of course not always—smarter, harder-working, and more talented than those without them. Is it the degree that produces income, or is it the abilities of the individuals that matter most? It seems that income for college graduates is strongly correlated to parental income. Not only that, but it’s possible that rich people’s kids are actually smarter, as a study recently argued.[2] Ask the disadvantaged in North America. Will they be surprised that rich kids stay rich and even get richer?

Data put out by universities conveniently leave out those who start a college degree, but don’t finish it. (Remember that this accounts for about 10 to 40 percent of the total, depending on the institution.) In any other field of public policy evaluation, this is called cooking the books. Always remember that averages are just averages. They encompass the high earnings of doctors, Wall Street minions, a handful of millionaire professional football players, and a minority of lawyers. These numbers offset the hundreds of thousands of university graduates working for rental-car companies and retail stores. Average tells you what happens to a broad, diverse cohort and provides a vague guide for the individual student.

Ah, Canadians say with standard sanctimoniousness, the situation is better north of the border. And so it is, but only by a little, and mostly because the preoccupation with university is not as strong in Canada as in the United States, and not as high a percentage of the population goes to college, although the gap seems to be closing. Canadians at elite private schools and the best public schools share a passion for the top-ranked American colleges and universities and are well served at home by the country’s best schools. Canada also has an excellent set of polytechnics, or high-quality technical schools, which have strong connections to the major employers. But Canadians have little to boast about, and the same job dynamics hold in this country too.

College and university propaganda often fails to acknowledge the impact of additional training and education on the outcomes they so glowingly advertise. Some graduates stay in the academy and go on to either graduate school or professional studies programs, particularly in Education or Master of Business Administration. Others go back to a community college or a polytechnic to get a more career-oriented credential. When a student who failed to find a good job based on his BSc gets an electrical technician’s diploma at a community college, he shows up in the employment and income statistics as a “success” for the university credential. As always, statistics have to be read with great care.

Maybe institutions and governments consider these career outcomes to be acceptable. Perhaps the purpose of the university system in North America is to give people a chance to test their potential to see what they are capable of achieving. It is an awfully expensive way—for students, families, governments, and institutions—to indulge a young person’s over-estimation of his or her abilities, interests, and motivation. Our point is this: young adults and their parents rarely have this information in front of them when they consider college or university as an option. If they had it, perhaps they would make different choices.

Here’s another statistic that you won’t hear from American colleges and universities: of those who enter them, 53 percent don’t complete their degrees. Some countries do worse: the figure for Italy is 55 percent, while others, notably Japan at 10 percent, do better. The average for the OECD is 31 percent. What a sad result from the expenditure of all that hope and effort and money.[3]

The USA and Italy are real outliers, with Canada doing considerably better, but the university dropout rate in Canada is still close to three times the rate for Japan. (The data are not directly comparable, so precise comments are impossible.) Studies of the Canadian and American situations point to two main issues, one of which can be readily fixed and another that is more intractable. First, students admitted with low high school grades (under 75 percent) do poorly, with the dropout rate increasing as the entering grades fall. The solution to this problem is to raise entrance standards or create separate entry and/or remedial programs for students who have failed to perform at an acceptable level. Second, poorer students tend to drop out more often, in part because of financial difficulties and shortcomings in earlier education. The solution in this case is to improve the quality of high school education and provide more financial assistance for students from less-advantaged families.

The situation is, of course, very complicated. Some students drop out and then re-enter later, in a different program or at a different institution. Mobility is the hallmark of youth educational explorations.

These numbers bother us profoundly, and they should bother you as well. They should make us think seriously about the role and value of the modern university. College degrees are completely worthwhile if the goal of earning them is education, learning, and citizenship—and if students actually capitalize on the intellectual and social opportunities that are available to them. (Of course many don’t and didn’t, even in the legendary ivory-tower days of previous generations.) On the other hand, if university attendance is seen primarily as a ticket to middle-class prosperity and security, then its value has seriously weakened over the last decade or two. The problem is that the universities haven’t told this to their customers. That’s what this book is about. Like Paul Revere, we ride to shout an alert: colleges are increasingly turning into factories selling a dream that is disconnected from reality. Be warned!