Money is increasingly a barrier for college.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: A recent study published in the Journal of Poverty juxtaposed the outlooks of high school seniors from the 1990s against those graduating in the modern day and age. The research found that young Americans’ perceptions on social mobility has gotten bleak, indicating confidence in the American Dream has waned considerably.
“In [the current] version of the American Dream, anyone can go to college IF they have the resources, are ok about going into debt, can somehow get the coveted scholarship, are willing to go to community college, or come from a family of means,” wrote the study’s authors: Carol Hostetter, Sabrina Williamson Sullenberger, and Leila Wood.
They call it the “the American Dream 2.0,” or “meritocracy with an asterisk,” as Reuters described it.
Both the 1996 and 2011 subjects saw the decision to attend college as a choice, but in 2011, students were more cognizant that money is a barrier for some.
“When you are lower class I don’t think that you get that downpour of, ‘Here’s how you pay for college,’ ‘You’re going to college,’” noted one student, according to Reuters.
Their study took interviews that Hostetter collected in 1996 for her dissertation and set them alongside surveys they administered in 2011 that contained the exact same prompts and questions. While the study’s samples aren’t representative, gauging young people’s attitudes in the face of shifting economic dynamics is still useful in a sociological context.
In a 2012 interview with U.S. News, reporter Hendrick Smith, author of “Who Stole the American Dream,” explained that the country is starkly divided by money, political power, and ideology.
“We have enormous, gaping inequalities of income,” he stated. “And along with that, we have exaggerated and unequal political power exercised by corporate America and by the wealthy, particularly between elections, through masses of lobbyists working in Washington,” he continued.
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