Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1980

higher incomes; but then, as industrial society expands with more and more education, properly earned income becomes more equal. This has happened in the United States. At the present time it has gone sufficiently far so that it now barely pays to get a college education: the amount of additional income to be expected over a life time by a college graduate barely pays for the cost to go into college and the lost years of income that a person undergoes by going to college. So in the area of equality of opportunity and also greater equality of earned income, higher education has had some of the consequences which were initially expected. What is at work of course is that many people get educated out of being willing to undertake manual labour in the modern processes of higher education. One reason incidentally to rather overdo it is that you then have comparatively more people willing to undertake white collar jobs over a period of time. You educate people out of common labour. And so, as in the United States, we are constantly seeing people engaging in factory labour having their income go up faster than those engaged in white-collar work. I expect some day in a country like the United States the wage and salary structure to almost be turned upon its head, and that rather than moving in the direction of more equalization of earned income, we are working in the direction of equalization of net satisfaction. By and large manual work is less satisfying to people than white-collar work or more professional work, and we are now moving in the direction of having people doing the disagreeable work with little education, receiving as much or more income than people with more education but doing more agreeable work. Our coal-miners, once upon a time very lowly-paid people, now do really quite well. A garbage collector in San Francisco will have an annual income a little bit above that of a full professor at Berkeley. I know of no faculty member at Berkeley that would trade positions. There is this consequence of the expansion of higher education, at least to the extent we have undertaken it in the United States--to bring about in the long run work in the direction of equalization of net satisfaction. But the one thing that is really holding us back in the United States now, as in some parts of Western Europe, is that, with the higher wages that we now pay for disagreeable work, we are drawing in these vast numbers of workers from across the Mexican border (we have the longest border in the world between an underdeveloped nation and a highly developed nation, and something around a million or 2 million illegal aliens are coming in each year), and this will help perpetuate the inequality between the earned incomes of manual workers and white-collar workers. But if we were a closed system, what I am talking about would now be happening very rapidly in the United States with this enormous expansion of higher education. On the last of m y four points, it had once been expected that, in the United States and Western Europe and to some extent around the world, we were engaged in this historic process of going from elite higher education, say with 1 or 2% attending, to mass higher education, whatever that meant, to universal higher education. W e had a presidential commission under President Truman right after World War II which set this forth as almost a social law. W e have found in the United States, however, and we are also finding in Western Europe, that there is a stop- ping point, far short of universal higher education, at some level that might be called mass higher education ——certainly beyond elite higher education but far from universal. And there are various reasons for this. First of all, the labour market will only absorb and reward a certain proportion of the population for taking advanced education, perhaps about one quarter. W e have also found that it is much more difficult to draw people out of some social groups in the United States, and out of the so-called working class in Western Europe, to get them to have their expectations rise, than was once thought to be the case. And also just a matter of taste. It was assumed once upon a time that anybody given the chance to undertake higher education would quite obviously want to do so. This was just considered to be a basic fact. But at least in the United States we have found that vast numbers of people do not want a higher education. And there are current subsidies——there is no young person in the United States who needs to be denied access to higher education for financial reasons. W e now have federal and state subsidies which are adequate to pay the way, not to an expensive college, but to a college, for every young person in the United States. W e have really been surprised at how small an additional number of people this has drawn forth; that given this chance, with the financial barriers removed, and even sometimes facing as the alternative unemployment, how many young people will just choose, out of a matter of taste, not to go on into higher education. So this great law of movement from elite to mass to universal education gets stopped at a rather early stage along the way. We are finding that at a level of attendance of about 30 or 40% of our youth group, we have reached about the maximum that we can expect. N o w I suppose you could keep on raising the subsidies until it paid so well to go to college that it was practically an offer that nobody 7