WASHINGTON – Although a college education has increasingly become the sole path into the shrunken middle class, social stratification within the world of higher education threatens to undermine the American Dream.
That was one of the major points that economist Anthony Carnevale made during a presentation Monday at the annual at the 2012 NCCEP/GEAR UP Conference.
“Our post-secondary system has become highly segregated by class, by race and by ethnicity,” Carnevale, director of the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, said during a workshop titled, “The Growing Importance of Higher Education, Attaining Middle Class Earnings, and the Increasing Stratification of Access.”
“It is more and more the case that the four-year college system is whiter and more affluent, [while] the two-year system is browner and blacker and more working class and some poor,” Carnevale said, noting that, for the most part, four-year degrees trump two-year degrees in terms of the salaries they command.
“In the end, the system is predictably reflecting the advantaged in the society,” Carnevale said.
Though education serves a variety of noble purposes that transcend the needs of employers, Carnevale suggested to the GEAR UP professionals that one of their primary aims should be to prepare students to get education that pays.
GEAR UP (the acronym stands for Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs) is a federal discretionary grant program designed to increase the number of low-income students prepared for college. NCCEP is the National Council for Community and Education Partnerships.
