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Using data from the 2008 University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey, we show that study time and academic conscientiousness were lower among students in humanities and social science majors than among students in science and engineering majors. Analytical and critical thinking experiences were no more evident among humanities and social sciences majors than among science and engineering majors. All three academically beneficial experiences were, however, strongly related to participation in class and interaction with instructors, and participation was more common among humanities and social sciences students than among science and engineering students. Bok’s (2006) influential discussion of “underachievement’ in undergraduate education focused on institutional performance. Our findings indicate that future discussions should take into account differences among disciplinary categories and majors as well.

This article discusses three major contributions of Eliot Freidson to the sociology of professions: (a) Freidson's work introduces a new concept of the professions rooted in the social organization of labor markets. This concept is far more harmonious with the contemporary situation of professions than any previous effort to conceptualize the differences between professions and other occupations. (b) The work provides an analysis of the spheres of professional control that result from the knowledge monopolies and gatekeeping activities of the professions. In this analysis, Freidson provides a new perspective on the meaning and social consequences of applied knowledge. (c) In a more humanistic vein, the work provides a measured defense of professions in the face of critics who see their powers as unnecessary, harmful, or both. The article concludes by commenting on a paradox suggested by Freidson's work. This paradox concerns the simultaneous strength and weakness of the contemporary professions, their strength as market shelters and their weakness as a status category and as activities connected to the larger political economy.

This paper first surveys the four principal positions in the debate about the policy influence of professional experts — technocracy, extensive mandates, limited mandates, and “servants of power” — and finds none entirely satisfactory. While the limited mandates position is the best general characterization of the policy influence of experts, many instances reveal more extensive influence. The papers argues for shifting the discussion from general characterizations to the systematic analysis of variation in the extent and significance of professional influence. A framework for analyzing this variation is proposed. The framework highlights the importance of depoliticization, the framing of issues as narrowly technical or involving the protection of a central cultural value, political situations that encourage the informal capture of power by professional experts or the delegation of power to experts, and the differing level of legitimacy enjoyed by professional occupations, based on their centrality in social regulation.

The American system has been distinguished from schooling in the rest of the industrialized world by its decentralized organization, its resistance to separating students by institution tracks, and the high average number of years students remained in school. Institutional analysts during the height of the Cold War era explored the unintended consequences of achievement as the dominant focus of the system and the role of peer groups in providing balance in the schooling experience. As college attendance became expected for the majority of adolescents in the 1970s, institutional analysts began to turn a skeptical eye on the idea that achievement played a central role in the system. Studies describing the educational system as giving rise to a ‘credential society’ and of education as ‘myth and ritual’ date from this period. Although institutional analysis is widely appreciated for its foundational importance, the primary focus of social scientists concerned with American schooling has been on the role of education in perpetuating and ameliorating social inequalities and on school and classroom-level influences on cognitive achievement. Neither social reproduction nor meritocracy theories have been corroborated by social scientific studies of educational attainment. Both family background and measured ability are important influences on that part of the variation in educational attainment that can be explained statistically. Although some school-level factors do influence average achievement levels among students, studies confirm that the individual and family-related differences children bring to school account for the vast majority of variation in student performance.

Die «community colleges» und die Politik der Ungleichheit. Das amerikanische junior oder community college (zwei-jährige Ausbildung), dessen Gründung Anfang des Jahrhunderts den Einstieg in Langzeitstudiengänge im Hochschulbereich (vier Jahre) ermöglichen sollte, hat sich in den letzten zwanzig Jahren in eine Institution für berufliche Kurzausbildung verwandelt. Als Erkiärung für diesen Wandel schlagen die Autoren ein «Institutionsmodell» vor, das zeigt, daß sich die Entwicklung der community colleges, insbesondere die von den Lehrern und den Administratoren praktizierte Professionalisierungsstra- tegie, sich innerhalb eines spezifischen Organisationsfeldes mit je eigenen Zwängen und eigener Logik vollzieht. Im Kontext der Devaluierung des Titels graduate auf dem Arbeitsmarkt zielt diese Strategie auf Aneignung eines stabilen Marktanteils innerhalb der komplexen Organisationsökologie des amerikanischen Hochschulsystems, unter Vorwegnahme der auf Staatsebene und von den Großunternehmen getroffenen Dispositionen. Der Artikel untersucht schließlich die Implikationen dieser Transformation und zeigt, daß eine forcierte Professionalisierung dieser Colleges dadurch, daß sie die Mobilitatschancen für eine große Zahl ihrer Absolventen aus Arbeiterkreisen oder von Minderheitsgruppen reduziert, den demokratischen Idealen zuwiderliefe, auf die sich diese Colleges berufen und die ihnen öffentliche Unterstützung einbringen, die verstärkte Einrichtung von Übergängen zwischen den Ausbildungswegen diesen Idealen dagegen starker entspräche, vorausgesetzt, die von diesen Hochschulinstitutionen ausgeübte soziale und schulische Selektionsrolle würde transparent gemacht. Die Geschichte der community colleges zeigt, daß sie fort-währenden undwidersprüchlichen Pressionen des Kapitalismus und der Demokratie, privilegierte Orte von Konflikten zwischen gegensätzlichen Kräften, ausgesetzt sind., The Community College and the politics of inequality. The American two year "junior" or "community" college, which originated at the turn of the century as a liberal-arts institution oriented to transfer to four-year colleges, has in the past two decades become transformed into a predominantly terminal vocational institution. Rejecting both "consumer-choice" and "business-domination" models of the sources of this transformation, the authors propose an "institutional model" which emphasizes that organizations can take on a logic of their own and pursue their own distinctive interests. Within this framework, community colleges are seen as operating within a specific organizational field which shapes and constrains patterns of institutional development. Within these constraints, the ideologies and interests of educators and administrators are seen as crucial factors in shaping the strategy of vocationalization as a means of insuring a stable market niche within the complex organizational ecology of American higher education. This strategy, which was realized in the context of the objective downturn in the labor market prospects of college graduates which oc- curred in the 1970s, acknowledged the structural power of the state and especially big business. The vocationalization of the community college is thus cited as an example of anticipatory subordination, the tendency of dependent institutions to channel their development along lines compatible with the perceived preferences of more powerful institutions. This article concludes with a discussion of the implications of this transformation for the democratic ideals which are the source of much of the popular support for the community college. Further vocationalization, it is suggested, will have negative effects of the mobility chances of the large number of minority and working-class students who attend two-year institutions. Instead, transfer programs should be strengthened and the role that institutions of higher education, including community colleges, play in the process of educational and social selection should be rendered more transparent. Buffeted throughout its history by the contradictory pressures of capitalism and democracy, the community college is -and will remain- an arena of conflicting forces., Les community collèges et la politique de l'inégalité. Le junior ou community college américain (formation en deux ans), dont la création au début du siècle devait permettre d'offrir une voie d'accès vers les filières longues de l'enseignement supérieur (en quatre ans), s'est transformé au cours des vingt dernières années en une institution dispensant une formation professionnelle courte. Pour expliquer cette transformation, les auteurs proposent un "modèle institutionnel" montrant que c'est à l'intérieur d'un champ organisationnel spécifique avec ses contraintes et sa logique propres que s'opère le développement des community colleges, notamment la stratégie de professionnalisation mise en oeuvre par leurs enseignants et leurs administrateurs. Dans le contexte de la dévaluation, au cours des années 70, du titre degraduate sur le marché du travail, cette stratégie vise à s'approprier une part de marché stable à l'intérieur de l'écologie organisationnelle complexe de l'enseignement supérieur amé- ricain, en tenant compte, de manière anticipée, des orientations qui sont prises à l'échelle de l'Etat et surtout des grandes entreprises privées. L'article examine enfin les implications de cette transformation en montrant qu'une professionnalisation excessive de ces collèges, en diminuant les chances de mobilité pour un grand nombre de leurs étudiants d'origine ouvrière ou venant des minorités, irait à l'encontre des idéaux démocratiques dont se réclament ces collèges et qui leur valent le soutien du public, tandis qu'un renforcement des filières-passerelles serait plus conforme à ces idéaux, à condition de rendre parfaitement transparent le rôle de sélection scolaire et sociale joué par ces institutions d'enseignement supérieur. L'histoire du community college montre bien qu'il est sans cesse pris entre les pressions contradictoires du capitalisme et de la démocratie, lieu privilégié de conflits entre forces opposées., Los community colleges y la política de la desigualdad. El junior o community college americano (formación en dos años), cuya creation al principio del siglo debia permitir que se ofrezca un acceso a las ramificaciones largas de la enseñanza superior (en cuatro años), se transformó durante los últimos veinte años en una institución que dispensa una formación profesional corta. Para explicar esta transformación, los autores proponen un "modelo institucional" que demuestra que en el interior de un campo organizacional específico con sus coacciones y su propia lógica es donde se opera el desarrollo de los community colleges, especialmente la estrategia de profesionalización puesta en marcha por sus profesores y sus administradores. Durante los años 70, en el contexto de la devaluación del título degraduate en el mercado del trabajo, esta estrategia tiende a apropiarse de una parte del mercado estable al interior de la ecología organizacional compleja de la enseñanza superior americana, teniendo en cuenta, de manera anticipada, las orientaciones que se toma a escala del Estado y sobretodo de las grandes empresas privadas. Finalmente, el artículo examina las implicaciones de esta transformación mostrando que una profesionalización excesiva de estos colegios, al disminuir las oportunidades de movilidad para un gran número de sus estudiantes de origen obrero o provenientes de las minorias, iría en contra de los ideales democráticos de los cuales se valen estos colegios y que les vale el sostenimiento del público mientras que un fortalecimiento de las ramificaciones-pasarelas fuera más conforme a estos ideales, a condición de volver completamente transparente el papel de selección escolar y social desempeñado por estas instituciones de enseñanza superior. La historia del community college hace ver que él esta tomado sin césar entre las presiones contradictorias del capitalismo y de la democracia, lugar privilegiado de conflictos entre fuerzas opuestas., Brint Steven, Karabel Jérôme. Les community colleges américains et la politique de l'inégalité. In: Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Vol. 86-87, mars 1991. Éducation et sociétés. pp. 69-84.

Based on new data and new analytical frameworks, this book assesses the forces of change at play in the development of American universities and their prospects for the future. The book begins with a lengthy introduction by Clark Kerr that not only provides an overview of change since the time he coined the phrase "the city of intellect" but also discusses the major changes that will affect American universities over the next thirty years. Part One examines demographic and economic changes, such as the rise of nearly universal higher education, private gift and corporate sponsorship of research, new labor market opportunities, and increasing inequality among institutions and disciplines. Part Two assesses the profound influence of the Internet and other technologies on teaching and learning. Part Three describes how the various forces of change affect the nature of academic research and the organization of disciplines and the curriculum. Part Four analyzes the consequences of change for university governance and the means by which universities in the future can maintain high levels of achievement while maintaining high levels of autonomy. The contributors include many of today's leading scholars of higher education. They are Andrew Abbott, Steven Brint, Richard Chait, Burton R. Clark, Randall Collins, David J. Collis, Roger L. Geiger, Patricia J. Gumport, Clark Kerr, Richard A. Lanham, Jason Owen-Smith, Walter W. Powell, Sheila Slaughter, and Carol Tomlinson-Keasey.

Discussions of the research process, even when they focus on histories of research projects rather than on formal methods, do not sufficiently emphasize the personal qualities, skills, and associations that make for excellence in research. In this essay, which is intended for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students, I use examples of well-known researchers to discuss the qualities of passionate commitment, persistence, ingenuity, and self-discipline that are essential to a researcher. I also discuss the significance of files, multiple data sources, and personal associations to success in research.

Using the tools of organizational analysis, this article presents a framework for understanding the volume and content of socialization messages expressed in 64 primary school classrooms. This framework specifies five levels of classroom and school organization in which socialization messages are embedded. It links the behavioral ideals expressed at two of these levels—teacher-initiated interactions in the classroom and schoolwide programs—to the schools’ organizational interests in maintaining order and work effort and encouraging students to identify with the school. It links the values expressed at two other levels—the formal curriculum and the routine practices of everyday classroom life—to a blending of old and new cultural influences. The framework specifies two ways in which new values can enter the schools—through the influence of social movements institutionalized with governmental support or the adoption of pedagogical philosophies consistent with changes in adult middle-class life experiences.

This 1996 essay reviews three books: Anthony T. Kronman, 'The Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession' (Belknap 1993); Steven Brint, 'In an Age of Experts: The Changing Role of Professionals in Politics and Public Life' (Princeton 1994); and Christopher Lasch, 'The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy' (WW Norton 1995). The review essay argues that lawyers in the United States should be seen as part of the professional New Class who use the law as a monopoly in the management by elites of the rest of society. The review examines the history of New Class theory - especially as criticized by Steven Brint - and locates lawyers within it as a group characterized by claims to expertise. The essay suggests that, contrary to Kronman, the dissatisfactions of American lawyers has to do less with the loss of calling of a profession than with the simultaneous demand of New Class lawyers to be simultaneously therapeutic-legal managers of society while commanding market rate compensation for apparent legal expertise that consists in large part of rent-seeking for access to the public-private divide that the law polices. The requirements of the older form of the lawyer as respected authority within a particular community restricts the mobility essential to securing market compensation for expertise and access. The unhappiness that Kronman identifies within the legal profession is, according to the conclusion of the article, best explained that it is not a glorious profession because it is not a glorious class, and lawyers are right to be unhappy. This article predates the increasing focus of social theory on the globalized professional - lawyers, managers, NGO workers - but it points toward a form of critical analysis in social theory of the horizontal integration of a globalized bourgeois class that seeks to manage global masses at the expense of vertical leadership and integration with particular national and local communities.

Las profesiones y los profesionales están diferenciados en sus posiciones en el mercado y en sus posiciones de poder. Este artículo discutirá las razones que hacen que algunas profesiones y algunos profesionales estén mejor situados en el mercado y mejor pagados que otros. Argumento que las fuentes principales de valor y poder en el mercado son la capacidad de las profesiones para organizarse en el ejercicio privado, la contribución a los intereses de producción y eficacia de las organizaciones, el sector en el cual los profesionales están mayoritariamente empleados, y la composición por género de la ocupación. A pesar de la importancia de los mecanismos tradicionales de protección, estas cuatro fuentes de poder tienen una mayor capacidad para explicar la posición especial de las profesiones en la sociedad contemporánea así como las diferencias entre profesiones y entre sectores profesionales.

This paper is about structural sociology as practiced by one of the more important sociologists and social thinkers of our day-Harrison White, lately of Columbia University. I have chosen this topic because structuralist thinking is an important, perhaps the most important, feature of contemporary social thought; because Professor White's approach to the study of social structure is particularly influential; and because, frankly, I have misgivings about certain features of the structuralist program. It seems to me, in general, a good principle that critical questions ought to be raised about views that are on the verge of becoming accepted orthodoxy. In this paper I intend mainly to probe a line of thinking to see what sorts of dubious notions might actually be involved, but I will also suggest a few alternatives and improvements as I go along. There can be little doubt that the analysis of social structures as networks of relations among persons and positions is of decisive importance in contemporary sociology, and that Professor White plays an important role in current thinking about these matters. In the index of Collins's (1988) Theoretical Sociology-perhaps the best guide to the current state of scientifically oriented thinking in sociological theory-the word structure and words related to it take up an entire column, whereas words such as culture, social control, stratification, institutions, and social change take up half as many lines or fewer. White's name occupies 10 lines in the index. Of living sociologists, he is mentioned less often than Peter Blau (another structuralist), Jonathan Turner, and Harold Garfinkel, but he is cited more often than Robert K. Merton, Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Mary Douglas, Arthur Stinchcombe, or Immanuel Wallerstein, among others. Apart from an uncharacteristic book (written with Cynthia White) on institutional and stylistic change in the French art world (White and White 1965), White has attempted for the last 30 years to work in a rigorously "structuralist" frame, which is to say that he has focused on the form of fundamental patterns of interaction that link individuals and larger social units to one another or provide the essential, underlying channels within which behavior occurs (Mullins 1973, pp. 256-57). In this sense, White has been unusually faithful to perhaps the single most distinguishing project of our discipline since the classical period: the effort to demonstrate how social structure constrains and in some instances even determines human behavior. This emphasis on underlying structures is evident in White's early mathematical studies of kinship organization (White 1963) and in his mature conceptualizations of "vacancy chains" as the channels of social mobility in organizations (White 1970), of "blocks" as positions in social networks (Boorman and White 1976; White, Boorman, and Breiger 1976), and of

Recent discussions of political divisions in American society have sometimes highlighted the rise of a "new class" of salaried professionals and technically trained managers. New-class theorists have depicted these "knowledge workers" as engaged in a contest for power and status with traditionally powerful business elites. However, the liberal attitudes of knowledge workers may also be interpreted as the result of a conjunction of several general trends in American society that have had little to do with class antagonisms. According to this paper, even though left-of-center attitudes are not uncommon in the salaried professional categories, these attitudes tend to be more ferormist than antibusiness in character. Such dissent as exists is concentrated in particular occupational, cohort, and sectoral categories and has varied considerably over time. Only the younger specialists in social science and arts-related occupations beging to fit the image of an "oppositional intelligentsia" used by the theorists t...

In the 1960s and 1970s, political events and polling data indicated a significant rise in liberal and dissenting political attitudes among American professionals. These data seem to run counter to the historically typical connection between social privilege and conservative politics. The major purpose of this paper is to provide a descriptive portrait of the politics of professionals since 1960, through a review of American survey research. Business executives and nonprofessional workers are used as the principal comparison categories. Professionals are conservative on most economic policy issues and on commitments to American “core values.” Like business executives, they are comparatively liberal on civil rights and civil liberties issues. Like nonprofessional workers, they are comparatively liberal on welfare state and business support issues. They are more liberal than either business executives or nonprofessional workers on personal morality and military force issues. Within the professional stratum, important lines of political cleavage exist by occupational category, cohort, and type of employing organization. The anomaly of relatively high levels of liberalism in this high status group is explained with reference to two factors: (1) The rise and fall of issue-based political coalitions; and (2) cumulative changes in the occupational and class structure.

The focus of this chapter is on the shift toward predominantly vocational enrollments in the 1970s, brought on by the combined pressures of market decline, state fiscal crisis, and the political ascendance of conservative business leaders. Nevertheless, it would be misleading to suggest that contrary forces were not in evidence at least in the first few years of the 1970s. The most important of these contrary pressures was the sheer growth of the community college and university systems, which, for a time, encouraged an increase in the absolute numbers of transfers. The community colleges in Massachusetts proved to be at least as attractive in a period of economic retrenchment as they had been in better times. Low-cost, close-to-home two-year colleges were a practical alternative to more expensive higher education. Between 1970 and 1973, the community colleges’ full-time enrollment increased by over one-third, and the other two tiers grew slightly less rapidly. As the system became more vocational in the late 1960s, it also grew. Because of this growth, the absolute number of community college students who transferred to four-year colleges increased, even though the transfer enrollment rates were slowly declining. The number of community college students transferring to the University at Massachusetts at Amherst, for example, increased from just 80 in 1964, when only seven community college campuses were open, to 425 in 1970 and then to 950 in 1972, when twelve campuses were operating at full capacity. In 1973, at the peak of transfer enrollments, 1,165 public two-year college students enrolled at the University of Massachusetts; 680 enrolled in the state colleges; and 525 enrolled in four-year private colleges in Massachusetts.2 Although never more than a small fraction of total community college enrollments, transfer rates did rise dramatically, from approximately 12.5 percent of the sophomore class in 1964 (a rate congenial to the original planners) to nearly 30 percent of the sophomore class in 1973 (Beales 1974). The nationwide decline in the market for college-educated labor in the early 1970s hit Massachusetts with slightly greater force than in other states, being reinforced by a recession in the newly emerging high-technology belt around Boston that was related to the winding down of the war in Southeast Asia.

Since its origins at the turn of the century, the junior college has had a complex, and at times uneasy, relationship with a public that has looked to the educational system as a vehicle for the realization of the American dream. Despite its self-portrayal as “democracy’s college” and its often heroic efforts to extend education to the masses, the two-year institution has faced widespread public skepticism. For to most Americans, college was a pathway to the bachelor’s degree, and the junior college—unlike the four-year institution—could not award it. Moreover, the early public junior colleges were often tied administratively and even physically to local secondary schools, a pattern that compounded their problems in gaining legitimacy as bona fide institutions of higher education. The two-year institution’s claim to being a genuine college rested almost exclusively on its promise to offer the first two years of a four-year college education. Yet the junior college was never intended, despite the high aspirations of its students, to provide anything more than a terminal education for most of those who entered it; indeed, at no point in its history did even half of its students transfer to a four-year institution. Nonetheless, for at least the first two decades of its existence, almost exclusive emphasis was placed on its transfer rather than its terminal function. As the early leaders of the movement saw it, the first task at hand was to establish the legitimacy of this fragile institution as an authentic college. And this task could be accomplished only by convincing the existing four-year institutions to admit junior college graduates and to offer them credit for the courses that they had completed there. If the pursuit of academic respectability through emphasis on transfer dominated the junior college movement during its first decades, by the mid-1920s a countermovement stressing the role of the junior college as a provider of terminal vocational education began to gather momentum. Arguing that most junior college students were, whatever their aspirations, in fact terminal, proponents of this view saw the institution’s main task not as providing a platform for transfer for a minority but, rather, as offering vocational programs leading to marketable skills for the vast majority.

At the end of World War II, a sense of expectancy pervaded America’s colleges and universities. Enrollments had dropped during the war years, and many institutions looked forward to the return of millions of veterans. These veterans were themselves eager to get ahead in civilian life after the hardships of war, and the nation was eager to reward them for the sacrifices that they had made. Already in 1944, as the war was coming to a close, the prestigious Education Policies Commission of the National Education Association and the American Association for School Administrators came out with a report entitled Education for All American Youth. Though focused more on secondary than higher education, the report sounded some themes that were to shape thinking about education for veterans as well. Perhaps the most powerful of these themes was the belief that the war had called on all of the American people to make sacrifices and that efforts must be made to see that no segment of the population would be excluded from the rewards of American society. For higher education, in particular, this meant that new measures would be required to realize the traditional American dream of equality of opportunity. Alongside the idealistic impulse to extend to veterans unprecedented educational opportunities, there was also the fear that the nation’s economy would be unable to provide work for the millions of returning soldiers. The massive unemployment of the Great Depression had, after all, been relieved only by the boost that war production had given the economy. The end of the war therefore threatened—or so it was widely believed at the time—to send the economy back into a terrible slump. With so many soldiers returning home, the possibility of such a downturn frightened policy elites and the public alike, for it was almost certain to revive the bitter social and political conflicts of the 1930s. Together with more idealistic factors, this concern with the effects of the returning veterans on domestic stability led to one of the major higher education acts in American history: the G.I. Bill of 1944.

In the twentieth century, Americans have increasingly looked to the schools--and, in particular, to the nation's colleges and universities--as guardians of the cherished national ideal of equality of opportunity. With the best jobs increasingly monopolized by those with higher education, the opportunity to attend college has become an integral part of the American dream of upward mobility. The two-year college--which now enrolls more than four million students in over 900 institutions--is a central expression of this dream, and its invention at the turn of the century constituted one of the great innovations in the history of American education. By offering students of limited means the opportunity to start higher education at home and to later transfer to a four-year institution, the two-year school provided a major new pathway to a college diploma--and to the nation's growing professional and managerial classes. But in the past two decades, the community college has undergone a profound change, shifting its emphasis from liberal-arts transfer courses to terminal vocational programs. Drawing on developments nationwide as well as in the specific case of Massachusetts, Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel offer a history of community colleges in America, explaining why this shift has occurred after years of student resistance and examining its implications for upward mobility. As the authors argue in this exhaustively researched and pioneering study, the junior college has always faced the contradictory task of extending a college education to the hitherto excluded, while diverting the majority of them from the nation's four-year colleges and universities. Very early on, two-year college administrators perceived vocational training for "semi-professional" work as their and their students' most secure long-term niche in the educational hierarchy. With two thirds of all community college students enrolled in vocational programs, the authors contend that the dream of education as a route to upward mobility, as well as the ideal of equal educational opportunity for all, are seriously threatened. With the growing public debate about the state of American higher education and with more than half of all first-time degree-credit students now enrolled in community colleges, a full-scale, historically grounded examination of their place in American life is long overdue. This landmark study provides such an examination, and in so doing, casts critical light on what is distinctive not only about American education, but American society itself.

No analysis of the history of the community college movement in Massachusetts can begin without a discussion of some of the peculiar features of higher education in that state. Indeed, the development of all public colleges in Massachusetts was, for many years, inhibited by the strength of the state’s private institutions (Lustberg 1979, Murphy 1974, Stafford 1980). The Protestant establishment had strong traditional ties to elite colleges—such as Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Williams, and Amherst—and the Catholic middle class felt equally strong bonds to the two Jesuit institutions in the state: Boston College and Holy Cross (Jencks and Riesman 1968, p. 263). If they had gone to college at all, most of Massachusetts’s state legislators had done so in the private system. Private college loyalties were not the only reasons for opposition to public higher education. Increased state spending for any purpose was often an anathema to many Republican legislators, and even most urban “machine” Democrats were unwilling to spend state dollars where the private sector appeared to work well enough (Stafford and Lustberg 1978). As late as 1950, the commonwealth’s public higher education sector served fewer than ten thousand students, just over 10 percent of total state enrollments in higher education. In 1960, public enrollment had grown to only 16 percent of the total, at a time when 59 percent of college students nationwide were enrolled in public institutions (Stafford and Lustberg 1978, p. 12). Indeed, the public sector did not reach parity with the private sector until the 1980s. Of the 15,945 students enrolled in Massachusetts public higher education in 1960, well over 95 percent were in-state students. The private schools, by contrast, cast a broader net: of the nearly 83,000 students enrolled in the private schools, more than 40 percent were from out of state (Organization for Social and Technical Innovation 1973). The opposition to public higher education began to recede in the late 1950s. Already by mid-decade, a large number of urban liberals had become members of the state legislature, and a new governor, Foster Furcolo, had been elected in 1956 on an activist platform.

From the earliest days of the Republic, Americans have possessed an abiding faith that theirs is a land of opportunity. For unlike the class-bound societies of Europe, America was seen as a place of limitless opportunities, a place where hard work and ability would receive their just reward. From Thomas Jefferson’s “natural aristocracy of talent” to Ronald Reagan’s “opportunity society,” the belief that America was—and should remain—a land where individuals of ambition and talent could rise as far as their capacities would take them has been central to the national identity. Abraham Lincoln expressed this deeply rooted national commitment to equality of opportunity succinctly when, in a special message to Congress shortly after the onset of the Civil War, he described as a “leading object of the government for whose existence we contend” to “afford all an unfettered start, and a fair chance in the race of life.” Throughout much of the nineteenth century, the belief that the United States was a nation blessed with unique opportunities for individual advancement was widespread among Americans and Europeans alike. The cornerstone of this belief was a relatively wide distribution of property (generally limited, to be sure, to adult white males) and apparently abundant opportunities in commerce and agriculture to accumulate more. But with the rise of mammoth corporations and the closing of the frontier in the decades after the Civil War, the fate of the “selfmade man”—that heroic figure who, though of modest origins, triumphed in the competitive marketplace through sheer skill and determination—came to be questioned. In particular, the fundamental changes then occurring in the American economy—the growth of huge industrial enterprises, the concentration of property less workers in the nation’s cities, and the emergence of monopolies—made the image of the hardworking stockboy who rose to the top seem more and more like a relic of a vanished era. The unprecedented spate of success books that appeared between 1880 and 1885 (books bearing such titles as The Law of Success, The Art of Money Getting, The Royal Road to Wealth, and The Secret of Success in Life) provide eloquent, if indirect, testimony to the depth of the ideological crisis then facing the nation.

An atmosphere of amiable routine now surrounds North Shore Community College in the Boston suburb of Beverly. Still located on a main downtown thorough-fare, as it has been since it opened in 1965, the college serves an economically varied region, including both the affluent oceanside towns of Marblehead, Swampscott, and Gloucester to the north and the chronically depressed old mill towns of Lynn and Peabody to the southwest. By the mid-1980s, enrollments were heavily occupational, and both staff and students seemed to like it that way. “There’s more demand than there are seats in the technical programs,” said one counselor. “In allied health, there’s a very heavy demand—three or four to one. But generally in liberal arts, we can accept people until the first week of classes.” The staff tended to view the history of their college as a natural unfolding. “The original intent,” observed one dean, “was to provide something for everyone, and that’s what we’ve done.” But vocational education did not always predominate at North Shore. Indeed, in 1965, the college’s first year of operation, over 80 percent of North Shore’s students were enrolled in liberal arts-transfer programs, and many of the faculty were committed to keeping the college’s distinctively academic image. According to one long-time member of the faculty, “At first, some of the faculty . . . had the idea that we were some kind of elitist thing. For them, the important thing was having the smartest students. . . . Quite of few of them were from universities. They didn’t know anything about community colleges.” “Yes, there were some internal battles,” one dean acknowledged. “The occupational programs were a concern to some liberal arts faculty.” The faculty’s grumbling had little effect on Harold Shively, the first president of North Shore. Shively, a long-time associate of William Dwyer in New York, shared Dwyer’s commitment to building a vocationally oriented system, and he did not wait long to press his plans for transforming North Shore in the direction suggested by this commitment.

During the 1970s, the community colleges were finally able to realize the vocationalization project that visionaries in the junior college movement from Koos to Gleazer had favored for almost half a century. Since the 1920s, as we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, the advocates of junior college vocationalization pursued their project in the face of persistent student indifference and occasional overt opposition. But in the early 1970s, a complex concatenation of forces—among them, a changed economic context and an unprecedented degree of support for vocational education from key institutions—including private foundations, the federal government, and business—tilted the balance in favor of the vocationalizers. A key factor behind the sharp increase in vocational enrollments at the community college, we shall argue, was the declining labor market for graduates of four-year institutions. But the objective change in the structure of economic opportunities for college graduates was not, as the consumer-choice model would have it, the sole factor responsible for the shift in junior college enrollments; indeed, the impact of such objective changes is, of necessity, mediated through subjective perceptions—perceptions that, we shall attempt to demonstrate below, tended to exaggerate the economic plight of college graduates. Moreover, the community college itself, driven by a powerful organizational interest in expanded enrollments and in carving out a secure niche for itself in the highly competitive higher education industry, actively shaped its economic environment by pursuing those segments of its potential market—in particular, adults and part-time students— most likely to enroll in occupational programs. By almost any standard, the rise in vocational enrollments during the 1970s was remarkable. Between 1970–1971 and 1979–1980, for example, the proportion of A.A. degrees awarded in occupational fields rose from 42.6 percent to 62.5 percent (Cohen and Brawer 1982, p. 203). With respect to total enrollments (full-time and part-time) the picture was similar: between 1970 and 1977, the proportion of students enrolled in occupational programs rose from less than one-third to well over half (Blackstone 1978). In the midst of a long-term decline in the liberal arts, Cohen and Brawer (1982, p. 23) observed, “occupational education stands like a colossus on its own.”

Of all the changes in American higher education in the twentieth century, none has had a greater impact than the rise of the two-year, junior college. Yet this institution, which we now take for granted, was once a radical organizational innovation. Stepping into an educational landscape already populated by hundreds of four-year colleges, the junior college was able to establish itself as a new type of institution—a nonbachelor’s degree-granting college that typically offered both college preparatory and terminal vocational programs. The junior college moved rapidly from a position of marginality to one of prominence; in the twenty years between 1919 and 1939, enrollment at junior colleges rose from 8,102 students to 149,854 (U.S. Office of Education 1944, p. 6). Thus, on the eve of World War II, an institution whose very survival had been in question just three decades earlier had become a key component of America’s system of higher education. The institutionalization and growth of what was a novel organizational form could not have taken place without the support and encouragement of powerful sponsors. Prominent among them were some of the nation’s greatest universities—among them, Chicago, Stanford, Michigan, and Berkeley—which, far from opposing the rise of the junior college as a potential competitor for students and resources, enthusiastically supported its growth. Because this support had a profound effect on the subsequent development of the junior college, we shall examine its philosophical and institutional foundations. In the late nineteenth century, an elite reform movement swept through the leading American universities. Beginning with Henry Tappan at the University of Michigan in the early 1850s and extending after the 1870s to Nicholas Murray Butler at Columbia, David Starr Jordan at Stanford, and William Rainey Harper at Chicago, one leading university president after another began to view the first two years of college as an unnecessary part of university-level instruction.