Higher education, social mobility, and unequal outcomes in the United States

Abstract

This chapter surveys the history of higher education in the United States from the twin perspectives of social mobility and unequal outcomes. This history of improvement and setback can be divided into three distinct periods, each roughly coinciding with the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Each period is correlated with a unique type of educationally driven social mobility. If lateral mobility were the educational outcome characteristic of the nineteenth century, it was eventually overtaken by the upward mobility of the late twentieth century and the downward mobility that has become a dominant educational outcome of the last few decades. Over time, discrimination within higher education based on gender, race, and ethnicity eased, while socioeconomic distinctions strengthened. Each of the three periods entails a radically different relationship to government funding. In the first period, government played a minimal economic role beyond the resource grants devoted to infrastructure—the land and buildings needed to launch a collegiate enterprise. During the mid-twentieth century, however, government spending became all important for the creation of the modern middle class and for the rapid, unprecedented expansion of higher education. The retreat of government spending over the last half-century accounts for the most recent period of turmoil and decline.