Generation on a Tightrope

A Portrait of Today's College Student

Arthur Levine, Diane R. Dean

• Editorial: Jossey-Bass
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118233832
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Bildung
• Categoría: Studentenleben

Today's college students feel as if they are crossing an abyss between their dreams and the reality of an uncertain future. They are a generation seeking stability in a time of profound and accelerating change. They want government and our other social institutions to work in a time when they're broken; they cling to the American Dream in an age of diminished expectations. They are walking a tightrope, attempting to balance digital connectedness and personal isolation, global citizenship and local vision, commonality and difference in the most diverse generation in American history, and a desire to be treated as mature adults while being more dependent on their parents than previous college students. Generation on a Tightrope offers a compelling portrait of today's undergraduate college students that sheds light on their attributes, expectations, aspirations, academics, attitudes, values, beliefs, social lives, and politics. Based on research of 5, 000 college students and student affairs practitioners from 270 diverse college campuses, the book explores the similarities and differences between today's generation of students and previous generations. The authors examine the myriad forces that have shaped these students and will continue to shape them as they prepare to meet the future.

The first two volumes in this series exploring the psyche of college students, When Dreams and Heroes Died (1980) and When Hope and Fear Collide (1998), offered thoughtful and accurate profiles of the students of the 1980s and 1990s. As Generation on a Tightrope clearly reveals, today's students need a very different education than the undergraduates who came before them: an education for the 21 st Century, which colleges and universities are ill-equipped to offer and which will require major changes of them to provide.

Painting a realistic picture of today's college students, the authors offer guidance to higher education professionals, researchers, practitioners, policymakers, employers, parents, and the public. The book's insights can help them equip students for the world they face and the world they will help to create.

Chapter 1

The Past Is a Foreign Country

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

—hartley (1953)

This is a portrait of the students who attended college between 2005 and 2014. They grew up at a time of profound, swift, continuing, and disruptive economic, demographic, technological, and global change and have lived their lives in a very different world than their parents. The world of their parents and professors was dying and their world was being born simultaneously.

This generation faces a situation reminiscent of an optical illusion commonly found in books of children’s brain teasers and introductory psychology textbooks called faces and vases. It is a black-and-white picture in which one can see either two faces or a vase, never both at the same time. The faces are black and the vase is white. If one sees the white as background and the black as foreground, two faces appear on the left and right sides of the picture with a white space separating them. If one views the black as background and the white as foreground, a vase appears at the center of a picture bordered in black. The worlds of today’s college students and their parents exist in a similar fashion. For each, the world they grew up in is foreground. For adults there is an increasing realization that their world is receding into the background, often accompanied by a sense of loss, and that their children’s world is emerging in the foreground. The parents have begun to live their lives straddling both worlds. Their children have less appreciation for what is happening; their parents’ world was never foreground. It never existed for them.

The Worlds of the Class of 2012 and Their Parents

America’s traditional undergraduates, represented by the class of 2012, were born in 1990.1 A chronology of the major events in their lifetime can be found in Appendix A. Technologically, the parents of the class of 2012 are products of an analog world and their children grew up in a digital age, using a numerical rather than wave technology, which is cheaper, faster, more reliable, more accurate, and more productive. Apple, Microsoft, and AOL already existed when the class of 2012 was born. There were already personal computers, CDs, mobile phones, e-mail, instant messaging, and the Internet. By the time they were in kindergarten, texting, web browsers, smart phones, DVDs, Yahoo!, and the dot-com bubble were realities. Before they finished elementary school, Google, Napster, music file sharing, and the iPod had come onto the scene. Middle school brought Skype, Myspace, and Facebook. They had to wait until high school for YouTube, Twitter, and the iPhone.

Globally, the parents of the class of 2012 grew up in a time of nation states with two superpowers and a cold war. Their children were born into a world that was flattening as Thomas Friedman would proclaim when they were fifteen years old (Friedman, 2005). By the time the class of 2012 was three years old, the old world order was collapsing. The Cold War, Soviet Union, and Berlin Wall were gone. The countries of East Germany, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist. The Maastricht Treaty, creating a European Union, had been signed. There was no Red China; the United States and China had normalized relations. A Muslim state had been established in Iran and the State of Palestine had been created. The Arab-Israeli conflict and initiatives to end it had been going on for four decades.

In contrast to their parents, the class of 2012 grew up in a global society, bounded together by the movement of information, money, jobs, trade, investment, and business, facing many common challenges. The United States was inextricably intertwined to that world. The independence of nation states was waning and national borders were becoming increasingly porous. The degree to which this was true was demonstrated vividly by the worldwide recession when class of 2012 turned eighteen.

The changes in the world caused different dangers and fears for parents and children. The parents grew up with the persistent threat of nuclear war by nation states. Their children lived with the reality of insurgent terrorism at home, carried out by networks rather than nations, fighting globalization and the fear that these organizations might detonate weapons of mass destruction in the United States. Before today’s college students were born, their parents witnessed terrorism abroad, targeted at Americans. But their children saw terrorism come to the United States. When they were three, terrorists attempted to blow up the World Trade Center. Two years later, Americans carried out the then-worst terrorist attack in US history, bombing the Oklahoma City federal building, killing 168 people and injuring 450. The next terrorist attack was larger and more horrible. When they were eleven, terrorists belonging to al-Qaeda flew jumbo jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing nearly three thousand people. They watched it again and again and again on television—the planes hitting the towers and the towers collapsing. Later, there were headlines trumpeting terrorist attacks in Madrid, London, Mumbai, and around the globe, continually reminding them of what might happen again at home. They heard accounts of failed terrorist attacks including a shoe bombing on a Detroit-bound plane and a car bombing in New York City’s Times Square. They also witnessed another form of domestic terrorism in which students massacred fellow students at Columbine High School in Colorado when they were ten and at Virginia Tech seven years later. The United States has been at war since they were eleven years old for reasons ascribed to terrorism.

Economically, the parents of the class of 2012 were the products of an industrial society that was shifting to an information economy whereas their children grew up in an information economy still transitioning from the industrial society. By the time this generation of college students was born, jobs in the manufacturing sector were declining and moving abroad. The historic manufacturing regions of the United States were commonly called the rust belt, a term popularized in the 1980s. There was already little economic future for high school dropouts. The jobs that paid salaries adequate to support a family required more education and greater knowledge and skills than ever before. High-paying jobs, demanding high levels of education, were on a steep rise.

Demographically, the class of 2012 grew up in a nation that was populated differently than their parents. In 1960, when many of their parents were born or soon would be, a majority of Americans lived in the Northeast and Midwest (56 percent). By the time the class of 2012 was born, the numbers had flip-flopped—55 percent lived in the South and West and the disparity continued to grow. The impact of the change is that parents came of age at time in which the United States was dominated by blue (and liberal Republican) states and their children grew up in an era in which the balance of power shifted to the red states (Gibson & Jung, 2002).

The US population aged between the parents’ and children’s generations. In 1960, slightly more than one out of eight Americans (13 percent) was over the age of sixty. In 2010, the proportion rose to nearly one in five (18 percent). By 2050, when the class of 2012 turns sixty, the numbers are projected to grow to one in four (26 percent). The result is that today’s college students are facing a mounting financial burden for their parents’ and grandparents’ Social Security, Medicare, and other senior programs and the likelihood that these programs will be significantly changed by the time they are eligible for them (US Administration on Aging, 2008).

Current students live in a society in which immigration has reached the highest numbers in modern history, more than three times the rate their parents experienced growing up. During the 1960s, 3.2 million immigrants entered the country as legal residents. During the 1990s, the number jumped to 9.8 million and in the first decade of the twenty-first century it reached more than a million a year—10.3 million. The makeup of the immigrant population changed dramatically as well. In the 1960s, 35 percent of the immigrants came from Europe, 11percent from Asia, and 21 percent from Latin America. Between 1990 and 2009, Europeans dropped by nearly two-thirds (13 percent) whereas Hispanics more than doubled (45 percent) and Asians tripled (32 percent) (Office of Immigration Statistics, 2011).

One of the consequences of legal and illegal immigration as well as varying fertility rates of different ethnic groups is that the class of 2012 lives in a far more diverse society than their parents. In fact, they are the most diverse college generation in US history. In 1960, 85 percent of the nation’s population was white, 12 percent was black, 4 percent was Hispanic, and 1 percent was Asian. In 2010, the proportion of non-Hispanic whites dropped by a quarter (65 percent), blacks remained constant (13 percent), Hispanics quadrupled (16 percent), and Asians quintupled (5 percent). By 2050, whites are projected to make up a minority of the population (46 percent) in a nation in which Hispanics (30 percent), blacks (13 percent), and Asians (8 percent) constitute the new majority (Humes, 2011; US Census Bureau, 2002).

The parents of the class of 2012 were born into an America that had anti-miscegenation laws in sixteen states until 1967. In contrast, their children are living in a country in which 5.6 percent of children under the age of eighteen are multiracial (Mather, 2011).

With these changes, the class of 2012 watched as racial and gender ceilings cracked. Blacks and women had run for president and vice president before the class of 2012 was born. Women and people of color had served in legislatures, statehouses, and city halls. After the class of 2012 was born, they made further advances. When the class of 2012 was seventeen, the first woman was elected speaker of the US House of Representatives. A year later, a black-skinned, multiracial man was elected president of the United States; the Democratic nomination for president came down to a white woman and a black man and the Republican Party nominated its first female vice-presidential candidate. The year after that a Latina was appointed to the US Supreme Court.

In contrast to their parents, today’s college students are a more diverse, digital generation living in an information economy with an aging, increasingly immigrant, migrating population, a majority of whom reside in the South and West. Their world is flat, financially troubled, and inflamed by religious, economic, and political differences. See Table 1.1 for a description of today’s college students and their parents.

Table 1.1 Today’s College Students and Their Parents

	Parents	Students
Technology	Analog	Digital
Globe	Dominated by nation states with two superpowers and a cold war	Flat with weaker nation states and terrorist opponents
Economy	Industrial economy transitioning to an information economy	Information economy transitioning from an industrial economy
Demographics	White, majority of population in Northeast and Midwest with middle-aged baby boomers	Diverse with majority of population in the West and South, aging baby boomers, and increased immigration

In When Hope and Fear Collide, the college students of the 1990s were described as a transitional generation, with one foot in the world of their parents and the other in the world being born. In contrast, the students of the twenty-first century have both feet in the new world, with an important caveat: their parents’ generation is still largely in control of the nation’s social institutions—government, health care, education, finance, and to a lesser extent media.

In that book, the story of Rip Van Winkle was used as metaphor for the extraordinary pace of change our society was experiencing, that in a very short period of time an overwhelming amount of change can occur. That story also gives insight into the generational differences we are experiencing today. Washington Irving’s 1819 tale is the story of a man who sleeps for twenty years and wakes up believing he’s slept a single night. He walks through the village where he lives and not surprisingly does not rec...