From the Nation: Democracy and Education: On Andrew Delbanco

http://www.thenation.com/article/167679/democracy-and-education-andrew-delbanco?page=full

Democracy and Education: On Andrew Delbanco

Richard Wolin 

May 2, 2012  

"In retrospect, the GI Bill, as the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act is called, was one of the greatest democratizing forces in American history. Delbanco rightly remarks that the bill “brought onto campuses throughout the nation—including the most elite—students whose fathers would have once set foot there only as janitors.” Of 15 million returning veterans, just over half took advantage of the bill’s generous incentives and provisions in order to satisfy their aspirations for self-cultivation and professional advancement. By 1948 veterans counted for nearly 50 percent of all college students, thus fulfilling the promise of the land-grant public university system, mandated by Congress with the Morrill Act in 1862. Thereafter, both university life and American society were transformed by a seemingly irreversible process of democratic inclusion and upward social mobility. Most colleges and universities ceased being bastions of privilege, the exclusive preserve of a moneyed, Protestant elite. For the first time, men and women of diverse social backgrounds were afforded the opportunity to cultivate the knowledge and self-understanding necessary to surmount the oppressive constraints of class, race and gender.

The postwar project of democratic expansion is steadily being reversed, to the point where today, as Delbanco convincingly demonstrates, the college admissions process serves to reinforce the prerogatives of class and economic privilege rather than diminish them. Many qualified and aspiring students are deterred from attending college, fail to complete their degree in a timely manner, if at all, or must assume onerous levels of debt to meet the spiraling costs of an education. Among the current crop of college students, about two-thirds will be forced to borrow money for tuition, and upon graduation will owe on average nearly $34,000—twice as much as the average debt ten years ago. Americans now owe more in student loans than they do on credit cards."