After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream

My grandmother never got a chance to go to college.

Yet she started one.

That’s a slight oversimplification—she actually took over a small, struggling secretarial school and turned it into an accredited college awarding bachelor degrees to the middle class of Middle America—but still, her unlikely story tells us a lot about what college became during our bold twentieth century. And what it no longer is today.

By the time Arline Hammond Bunch passed away in 1987, at eighty years and one week of age, she’d handed out thousands of diplomas from Midstate College in Peoria. To Central Illinois farm girls dreaming of taking flight in the heyday of Pan Am. To Caterpillar assembly-line refugees seeking a pathway to the American Dream inside the ledger book of accounting, and to the tempest-tossed victims of 1980s layoffs yearning to learn computers. The degrees she conferred on others had once been an impossible dream for a farmer’s stubborn daughter like her.

ARLINE WAS BORN IN LOWRY CITY, MISSOURI, POPULATION ROUGHLY 460, almost dead-center U.S.A. The year was 1907, and a booming industrial nation was finding its confidence that each generation should, and would, do better than the one before it. Lowry City is located in St. Clair County, a place where the Ozark Mountains surrender to endless American flatlands, where the options for even the smartest girls were few, or maybe none—even if your late-life father had been the most prosperous cattle farmer in town.

I can only imagine Arline Hammond, eighteen-year-old high school grad in 1925, as a younger version of the Grandma Arline I got to know decades later—a big-boned, cattle-calling-loud, determined woman, with maybe a dollop of the entitlement that came as a Brahman living among the cows of west-central Missouri. After high school, she taught in the local one-room schoolhouse—the only possible job for a bright young woman—until the first pangs of wanderlust sent her to an out-of-town secretarial school. There, one day, she had her lightbulb moment while working the keys on her manual typewriter. She could teach this stuff so much better than her instructors, she thought. It was the beginning of an odyssey that took her all the way to California and back, where the vision would become reality as Midstate College.

Like any good yarn, there are many places where this saga could have run off the rails. In 1929, after her brother-in-law had a bizarre run-in with lawmen in Lowry City who accused him of selling the same cows to two different men, he’d fled to California. So Arline, her sister Thelma, Thelma’s two young kids, and the sisters’ mom all piled into a Ford Model T and headed West, Beverly Hillbillies–style. Arline thought the Golden State could be a golden opportunity for a secretarial school. She hadn’t anticipated the sizzling hot day when the Ford overheated on the first dusty iteration of Route 66 in the desert of the American Southwest, and she had to ask a band of local Native Americans on horseback to lead them to a mechanic. Or what happened when they finally reached the Pacific coast on October 29, 1929—the exact day of the great Wall Street Crash. Or that the young man that Arline married out west—a “pump jockey” from the newfangled gas station named Russell French—would learn his stomach pains on their honeymoon were in fact terminal cancer. Eventually, there’d be small secretarial schools in Anaheim and St. Louis and Peoria and points in between that came and went. Her early business partners also came and went, including one who took the money and ran off to Mexico. And yet through the decades of raising her three kids and nursing my occasionally ill grandfather, A. B. Bunch, along with everything else, the dream of Midstate College persisted until finally it happened. There was a momentum in mid-twentieth-century America, always pointing skyward.

Arline and A.B. finally bought that small, struggling business school in Peoria in 1966, and renamed it Midstate College. She was dean of students, and she didn’t correct people who understandably assumed that she herself must certainly have a bachelor’s degree. After all, postwar America had changed so quickly from Arline’s youth that now anybody with a little gumption could go to college—a point that Arline and A.B. hammered home as they sat in the living rooms of Illinois farmers and pleaded with them to send their daughters to Peoria, despite its (well-deserved) reputation as a rum-soaked “Sin City.” Grandma Arline recruited new college students with an almost evangelical fervor, earning commissions that got her and her three kids through some lean years when A.B. was sick, and filling Brown’s Business School with so many upwardly mobile girls that it started to look like a good future investment.

After America helped win World War II, it seemed like any farmer’s daughter or son of the assembly line at East Peoria’s massive Caterpillar tractor plant had a shot at doing even better, of working with their brains instead of their hands, of becoming not just smarter folks but more civic-minded ones. College had once been a narrow pathway to success for the pampered elites—handing out bachelor’s degrees to just one of every twenty U.S. young people—but in this new age of mass higher education, college had transubstantiated to become the living embodiment of the American Dream, and Arline and A.B. sold that notion to the rural gentry and their wide-eyed daughters with the zeal that less scrupulous hustlers used to sell encyclopedias.

It’s no surprise, then, that Arline drummed it into her children—especially her oldest, Bryan, a brainy proto-beatnik who was listening to his Charlie Parker records when the other kids at Peoria’s Central High School’s Class of 1953 were at football practice or the drive-in—that they would be the first Bunch or Hammond offspring to actually go to college.

So when Bryan Hammond Bunch jumped the ladder a couple of rungs and won a full scholarship to go east and attend a small, elite private institution—Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut—an idea became firmly cemented in my family, never to fade away. College—and what college could do for you—was indeed the American holy grail. Bryan went back to Peoria long enough to literally marry the girl next door, then zigzagged back to New York, where he worked in publishing while the oldest of his three children—me—was born in 1959. At some point very early in my childhood consciousness—even before any inkling of sex or death and all that existential jazz—came an almost instinctual awareness that success, as a human being, would hinge on where I went to college.

More than a half century after the baby booms and economic booms and the atomic booms of the 1950s and ’60s, we are still clinging to the fast-melting permafrost of a now no-longer-new idea that college is the American Dream. So much so that we are refusing to admit that somewhere in the middle of a long and stormy postindustrial night, the dream has morphed into a nightmare. That a ladder greased with a snake oil called meritocracy has changed from joyous kids climbing higher than their parents to a panicked desperation to hang on to the slippery middle rungs. And that even at the polluted top, neither bewildered parents nor stressed-out graduates are quite sure what they’ve just bought for all that cash (or, increasingly, a mountain of debt).

That’s why I’ve been thinking so much lately about the journey from my Grandma Arline and Midstate College all the way through my own kids, and how and why higher education came to mean so much to my family—and quite likely yours—over the course of an American century. Because I sensed that understanding this slippery ladder would be one small step toward getting my arms around an even bigger story I’d been pondering for years. That one only starts with looking at how the American way of college went off the rails. All those modern ailments—the unfathomable tuition bills, the massive student debt that collectively has risen to $1.7 trillion (or more than the nation owes on all its credit cards), the elite schools with the single-digit admission rates that today resemble luxury spa hotels more than academies of learning, the growing number of middle-middle-class kids forced to eat from food pantries or even experience homelessness in a desperate paper chase for college credentials—have had profound consequences extending far off campus.

Our current conversation about “the college problem” in America doesn’t cover the half of it. Even if the revolution actually comes in the 2020s and we adopt a far-left, Bernie Sanders–style vision of free public universities that also wipes away most or even all of that mountain of student debt, those fixes will only work for the roughly half of Americans attending—or at least trying to attend—college. Why aren’t we talking more about what happens to the folks who never left Lowry City like my Grandma Arline did, or people in a place like Peoria who thought they were following the footsteps of men like my Grandpa A.B., by signing on with Caterpillar—only to become one of the company’s twenty thousand union workers in central Illinois whose jobs have vanished since the 1990s? Our leaders give patronizing lectures to America’s youth that college is their only way to survive in a twenty-first-century “knowledge economy”—and yet that system is effectively walled off from half the public.

ME? IT TOOK AWHILE FOR ME TO RECONCILE THE BIG ISSUES I WAS writing about as a journalist for the Philadelphia Daily News and as a part-time author with the stuff I was increasingly doing to make ends meet. I had to overcome some self-inflicted personal setbacks at the turn at the millennium that made me wonder how on earth I would ever send my own two kids away to a good school, especially the two years they’d be in college at the same time, as tuition and board at private universities raced past $50,000 a year. My only “hobby” in mid-adulthood was spending my weekend on drudgery freelance writing projects for OK-but-not-great pay—a history of a local bank, endless profiles of small-time CEOs—to ward off the moral failure of not being able to afford the right college. But even though this Hail Mary strategy kind of worked out in the end, and my offspring did go to very good private institutions, the experience still felt totally different from how I’d imagined. The excitement that my high school friends and I shared in the 1970s when we snuck into bars and spent hours nursing a beer and talking about which college we thought we were going to get into had become the twenty-first century’s existential dread of whether higher ed was even worth it.

My son was a college senior in the fall of 2016 as that year’s intense presidential election unfolded. The previous year, I’d become obsessed with the upstart bid of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who clearly inherited the mantle of Occupy Wall Street, and who made eliminating that $1.7 trillion college debt a core promise of his campaign. His message didn’t resonate with my generation of baby boomers thrilled to see a woman whacking on the White House glass ceiling in Hillary Clinton—and who didn’t think twice when she called Republicans rallying to the reality-TV demagoguery of Donald Trump “a basket of deplorables.” Trump seemed to know just one thing about politics, which was how to stoke voters’ resentment against look-down-their-noses elites. At a rally in Nevada, Trump blurted out, “I love the poorly educated!”

And they loved him back . . . all the way to the White House.

Trump’s stunning upset victory on November 8, 2016, launched a cottage industry of trying to figure out what the hell just happened. News organizations like the New York Times kept sending reporters to run-down diners in southern Ohio or West Virginia again and again and again, determined to find the magic answer. Was it “economic anxiety,” or racism, or something else? Their antennas picked up the resentment, but no one dug deeper into who resented whom, or why. As a now-veteran political journalist, I saw everyone still dancing around the problem. No one wanted to contemplate the collateral damage from a rigged system where college now locked in America’s gross inequality—meaning a gilded adulthood for a select few and backbreaking debt for millions more, while everybody else locked out of this “knowledge economy” were told they must be a sucker or a loser.

I wanted to tell this story because its root cause demands to be no longer ignored. While the nation’s political journalists remain largely locked into the tropes of the twentieth century, a few academics were doing yeoman’s work about “the college problem” of the twenty-first century, but missing the connection to America’s political breakdown. I wanted to start back in those heady, optimistic years after World War II to tell the entire history of how college became the American Dream . . . only to instead crush it. And I wanted to see what was happening on today’s campuses with my own eyes. The United States needs a better, different conversation about fixing all the pathways into adulthood, and understanding how we got here is the first step. And there was that one other thing. Thanks to my Grandma Arline, I thought the story of college was in my DNA.

WHEN ARLINE AND A.B. BOUGHT BROWN’S BUSINESS COLLEGE, AND renamed it Midstate, their timing seemed terrible. As the New Deal became LBJ’s Great Society, government was expanding its support for public education, including a wave of new community colleges that would offer a similar curriculum but at little or no cost, thanks to taxpayer subsidies. What eventually became Illinois Central College opened in East Peoria, near the biggest Caterpillar plant, in 1967. During that era, a lot of so-called business colleges shut down. But Midstate grew. Arline pushed for Midstate to gain a higher accreditation, to offer four-year bachelor’s degrees, and—after she died, under the leadership of my Uncle Dale (Arline’s other son)—to move from its downtown quarters to a roomier campus on the edge of the city.

How’d they succeed? Partly, I think, because Arline and Midstate clung to the notion—then popular, now quaint—that education was a tool of self-betterment and not just rote career training. Students training to become executive assistants didn’t just learn typing and shorthand but were required to take general education, even a course on how to comport one’s self in the world of business. “There was always a feeling,” recalled my dad (who eventually served on Midstate’s board), “that you had to have skills but also had to have a general education, and learn how to be a better employee.”

But Midstate also rode the changing zeitgeist of what college in America meant. When community college and expanded public universities gave those farm girls coming out of high school more, cheaper options, Midstate changed its recruitment and its schedules to attract more midlife adult students. By the late twentieth century, a college diploma was less an academic trophy and more an admission ticket to an increasingly dog-eat-dog workforce, and grown-ups who hadn’t gotten the memo at age eighteen now needed to get back in the game. But the game kept slipping away from them.

When faith in the American way of college began to wane after years of runaway tuition, Wall Street smelled blood in the water. The growing pressure on the nation’s working classes for a credential to earn a living wage created a huge opportunity for grift. It was filled by an avaricious new breed of for-profit college chains, backed by big-time financial equity. In the 2000s, these sharks competed for students, and when Washington tried to impose new rules to crack down on the abuses (which had left hordes of young people deep in debt, for often worthless diplomas), the good guys like Midstate suffered every bit as much as the bad guys.

On July 22, 2019, Meredith Bunch—my first cousin, and the school’s then-president—announced the inevitable: Midstate was closing for good, in a matter of days. Its values forged in the optimism that burned brightly after the New Deal and World War II were crushed by the cold realities of the twenty-first century. The campus would be sold off to a blood-disorder clinic.

In the end, it wasn’t crazy for Arline Bunch with her high-school diploma and her Route 66 dreams to start a college, though maybe it was a little insane to think it could last forever. But what about her vision, and her seemingly ancient notions about the power of higher education, and the unexpected doorways it could open, and not just for country-club heirs? If the American Dream isn’t college anymore, can we start working on a better one? And could that Next New Thing arrive before political rage and resentment trigger a new civil war? In the spirit of a dusty, nearly forgotten 1929 road trip, this is my expedition into the world of college. I like to think Grandma Arline would be proud.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

College Like My Grandma Used to Make

Chapter 1

Life During Wartime in Knox County, Ohio

Chapter 2

When College in America Almost Became a Public Good

Chapter 3

Why the Kent State Massacre Raised Your Tuition

Chapter 4

Yuppies, Dittoheads, and a “Big Sort”: College and the Culture Wars

Chapter 5

The “Whole College Thing” Awkwardly Enters the 2020s

Gap Year

The Quad:

The Four People You Meet in Today’s America

Chapter 6

A College Debt Crisis, Occupy Wall Street, and the Rise of a New New Left

Chapter 7

From Resentment of College to America’s Rejection of Knowledge

Chapter 8

The Soul of a New Truman Commission

Chapter 9

A Bloodless War to Save America’s Youth

Acknowledgments

Notes on Sources

Index

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher