Why Is So Little Higher Ed Policy Aimed at Helping College Grads?

There aren’t many programs in place to help college graduates who are still struggling to find long-term employment in the decade since the 2008 economic crisis.

One trend that has captured the attention of data journalists over the past two election cycles is the widening gap between non-college educated and college educated white voters in their party preferences. Once a staple of the GOP, college educated whites are now fleeing the party of Trump for the Democrats, while non-college educated whites continue their decades long exodus from the Democratic Party.

The realignment of college educated white voters to the Democratic Party is believed to be linked to their higher income status, and the kinds of cultural sorting (where and with whom they work, live, and socialize) those incomes afford them. They drive electric cars, live in artsy town homes near city centers, and shop at the Trader Joe’s just around the corner. During Georgia’s 6th congressional district special election last summer, a Clinton aide quipped that the Democratic strategy to turn out these voters “runs through the Panera Breads of America”.

Although I am a college graduate, I have never seen myself in these caricatures of college educated white voters, and it’s not just because I am black. For the most part, I do not share their experience of college as having paved the way for the kind of economic success that would allow me to be mocked by conservative news pundits as a member of the coastal elite. In the nearly four years since I received my master’s degree, I have only been able to find work in retail, usually starting as a seasonal employee and being cut after the holiday rush; or occasionally moving up to part-time status but receiving fewer hours of work than I had as a temp.

In other words, my experience in the job market after college has looked more like those typically associated with the cooks and cashiers at Panera Bread than the well-heeled customers who frequent there.

Such is the case for many college educated blacks, even those raised in middle income households.

Back in 2015, The Atlantic published an article citing data from the Brookings Institution and a 2014 Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago study that concluded black children who are raised in middle class households don’t fare better than their parents. They are more likely to slide back into lower-income status once they enter the workforce.

Another article from The Atlantic from June of this year, citing a study by two researchers at Brandeis University, found that white college graduates have three times the wealth of black college graduates, due in part to “intergenerational financial transfers” — parents giving their children money at pivotal periods in their lives, such as when they graduate from college or purchase their first home. On average, regardless of education level, black men earn 70 percent of the wages of white men, and black women earn 82 percent of the wages of white women.

In general, as college graduates struggle to find jobs that provide the standard of living their middle class parents had, the lack of policy responses to the unique challenges they face in the job market is striking. Federal higher education policy over the last decade has tended to focus narrowly on the front end or the very back end of the college experience — college affordability and student loan repayment.

Few programs exist to address the needs of college graduates who can’t find good-paying jobs in the fields associated with their college major; or who can’t afford to go back to college in order to qualify for higher-paying jobs in other career fields; or who can’t afford the risks of a career change even without going back to school.

According to HuffPost, the post-2008 recovery did little to alleviate the long-term effects of the recession on college graduates who entered the job market just as the recovery began. On the whole, there were fewer middle class jobs available for graduates to obtain, and the ones that were available tended to privilege older workers in the market with more real-world work experience to offer employers than academic credentials. Variations of the “Entry-level jobs be like…” meme floating across social media websites illustrate this problem succinctly.

Upon entering the job market, post-2008 grads also found themselves competing for less secure employment with the rise of “gig” jobs that offer flexibility in work but few of the traditional benefits of full-time employment.

With more Americans earning college degrees than ever before, why has higher education policy remained so disconnected from the realities of finding work in today’s job market? I was stunned to learn while conducting research for this piece that many definitions of the term working class used in policy research do not include those who hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. If our experiences as college grads are not included in the scholarly discourse on the U.S. working class, how can informed policy be crafted to address our needs?

I suspect that the main reason for the disconnect between higher ed policy and the labor struggle is the still-dominant view that a college education serves as a one-way ticket to the middle class. For instance, the Obama-era My Brother’s Keeper initiative, a public-private partnership supporting boys and young men of color from under-served communities, promotes a “cradle-to-college” strategy that centers post-secondary education in saving young men from a life of poverty.

But again, even blacks with college degrees lag behind their white counterparts in building and sustaining wealth. And more college degrees haven’t lessened the challenges black workers face with getting (and staying) ahead in non-diverse workplaces, or with tackling implicit bias in hiring.

There have been a few proposals made to help workers in the disappearing manufacturing industries of the U.S. Midwest that could also help struggling college graduates, such as training in growing career fields like nursing and child care services; but historically, these jobs are held by women and thus face many of the same problems that retail jobs have with lagging wages, unfavorable working conditions, and few employee benefits.

Ultimately, higher ed policy that is truly responsive to the needs of college grads must hold universities more accountable for the welfare of their graduates in the job market. This would likely push universities to become outcome rather than enrollment focused, and make real investments in academic counseling services, networking opportunities, and job placement assistance for every graduate.

The federal government could also invest in more partnerships with employers to offer free supplemental training or post-graduate courses for graduates looking to enter new career fields. This could include means-tested internship programs specific to older graduates with a jobs guarantee at the completion of the program.

All of these proposals would require employers to invest in their workers long-term as well. But in the gig economy, this seems less likely to happen for service workers without pressure from organized labor. Thus whatever long-term policy solutions come about for struggling college grads must be centered on increasing their organizing power, not merely finding a good job.