How College Broke The American Dream

Fresh Air

NPR

Tv & Film, Arts, Society & Culture, Books

4.4 • 34.4K Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2022

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Journalist Will Bunch says instead of opening the door to a better life, college leaves many students deep in debt and unable to find well-paying jobs. His new book is After the Ivory Tower Falls.

Podcast critic Nick Quah reviews two podcasts about counterculture, Mother Country Radicals and I Was Never There.

Also, we remember radio pioneer Larry Josephson.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. How did college go from being the doorway to the American dream to the nightmare of starting adult life
0:08.1	Deep in debt, unsure of whether your degree will help you get a job that even pays enough to pay off that debt?
0:13.8	How did we go from the 1944 GI Bill which offered World War II veterans or at least white ones?
0:20.1	Easy access to college. To now the stress of today of trying to get into the right college
0:26.0	and how did colleges and universities become a target of the right?
0:30.2	My guest will bunch addresses these and other related questions in his new book
0:34.9	after the ivory tower falls how college broke the American dream and blew up our politics and how to fix it.
0:42.4	Bunches and national columnists for the Philadelphia Enquirer focusing on social injustice, income inequality, politics and government.
0:49.8	The roots of his new book go back about 15 years when he was a reporter at the Philadelphia Daily News
0:55.4	and his two children were in grade and middle school. As he struggled to make ends meet
1:00.3	he wondered how he'd ever be able to afford sending his children to a good college,
1:05.2	especially during the two years when they'd both be in college.
1:09.8	Will Bunch welcome back to fresh air and congratulations on your book.
1:13.4	Thanks so much, Terry. Thanks for having me back. I appreciate it.
1:16.4	So your grandmother started a small college that was the Secretary of College and then a business school.
1:23.4	Your father, your grandmother's son went to college, you went to college.
1:31.4	What did it mean to you? What did college mean to you?
1:35.4	In the 20th century college really became the American dream and it certainly was true in my family.
1:40.4	There was just this innate sense that the path of life was to do better than the generation that came before you.
1:48.4	My grandmother, I think, who always regret it never having the opportunity to go to college herself,
1:53.4	even as she was recruiting kids and building this college in Peoria,
1:57.4	really pushed her kids to go to college. My dad got a full scholarship to go to Trinity College in Connecticut.
	...

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