There is nothing for you.., p.19
There Is Nothing for You Here, page 19
In the United States, the gender wage discrepancy is mirrored by a racial salary gap. Black women are doubly disadvantaged, by gender and race, when it comes to their earning capacity and even further disadvantaged by where they are most likely to live—in postindustrial and impoverished neighborhoods with inadequate affordable day-care facilities, underresourced schools, and limited job opportunities in the immediate vicinity. All of these factors constrain single Black mothers’ ability to work and thus limit the prospects for their children.
Another Brookings colleague, Rashawn Ray, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, focuses on the role that families play in shaping Americans’ lives and how race affects opportunity and social mobility. Rashawn himself was raised by a single mother in Tennessee, whose job opportunities underscored the central themes of his work. His own career success was the result of growing up embedded in a matriarchy of nurses—mother, aunts, and his grandmother—who all worked at the local hospital and formed a mutually reinforcing social network for child-rearing and economic support. Despite the obvious differences, Rashawn’s childhood experience was strikingly similar to mine in the way that a woman’s nursing career provided a good salary, paid for a house, and opened up all kinds of social connections. Just as it did for my mother in the UK, nursing offered a good, solid, dependable career path with transparent wage scales and benefits for a single Black mother in the United States.
Even before the challenges of work and child care kick in, having a baby creates all kinds of difficulties for working women. When I started out on my career, none of my jobs came with paid maternity leave as part of the benefits. In this respect, the United States is an outlier among advanced countries, including the United Kingdom, in having no national mandate for parental leave. Universities, think tanks, and other nonprofits pushed new mothers to use up accrued sick leave and then vacation time and to return to work as quickly as possible. This was the case even at Brookings.
When I found out that I was pregnant in 2006, I was fortunate that I was working at the National Intelligence Council, not at Brookings, especially because I had to have an emergency C-section. I needed more time off to recover than planned, and the U.S. government had better overall benefits and a more enlightened approach to childbirth and child care than the think-tank world. I was also a “function,” not an individual, in my role as NIO. A deputy could step in and fill in for me. Although I was the only pregnant NIO (mainly because I was the only woman), all my colleagues at the NIC, including women in other positions, seemed to have lots of children relative to the general population. The government offered maternity and paternity leave coverage and assistance with child care. This enabled government employees, including single mothers, to have families, still do their jobs, and serve the country.
Brookings introduced maternity leave after I returned in 2010. As the demographics of the institution changed, more women of childbearing age came on board. When I had started in the early 2000s, the Brookings Institution was the bastion of men. Only a handful of older women had managed to make it past all the gender barriers. By the time these women made it to the top as senior fellows, they were often well into their fifties and past the time when paid maternity leave would have made a difference. Even having moved beyond all my early socioeconomic challenges, as a woman of childbearing age I was still an outlier.
8
Unlucky Generations
Despite all the complications of gender, the United States gave me opportunities that I would never have had in the United Kingdom. By coming to America, I changed my geographic place and social class and shed the stigma of my accent. I benefited from an education at Harvard University. I became a citizen; and eventually I had the unique opportunity to work for the government of my adopted country.
But over time I came to understand that the opportunities from which I was benefiting were time- and even generation-specific. Younger generations of Brits and Americans from similar backgrounds could not replicate my success in overcoming the obstacles to socioeconomic mobility in subsequent decades. They were being thwarted both by critical changes in the existing infrastructure of opportunity—especially in education—and by the effects of a serious economic crisis, the so-called Great Recession: the December 2007–June 2009 collapse of the U.S. housing market and subsequent global financial crisis.
Despite the hardships of my childhood, I had managed to overcome adversity thanks to a confluence of factors that played to my advantage. My education in the UK had been subsidized by the government. I had arrived in America just as the country embarked on a run of prosperity in the 1990s, with the Cold War rapidly receding in the rearview mirror. And I had come to Harvard University through the two-year Knox Scholarship: everything was initially paid for, even my transatlantic flight. I was not encumbered by debt when I graduated, and my university education became the key to my professional success in both the UK and the U.S. thanks to a persistent interest in my field of specialization, Russia.
In this regard, I mirrored the experience of millions of young Americans after World War II, who found college to be the door to a job and a better life than their parents’. But in contrast to the prevailing perception in the United States that anyone can go to college if they study hard, when I began work on this book, I found that 72 percent of students (men and women) at the 150 top colleges in the United States, including Harvard, came from the richest 25 percent of American families. Only 3 percent came from the poorest, and yet this was the stratum in which I had started out in life in the United Kingdom.
Money was, of course, a major part of the problem. Those in my cohort of Generation X, born in the 1960s and 1970s in both the UK and the U.S., had to contend with the upheavals of deindustrialization and the economic difficulties this created for their parents. But they often found some kind of state support for their education. For those born in the 1980s, in contrast, the opportunities to apply for a student grant when their time for higher education came around were dramatically reduced.
By the end of the 1990s, the expectation in the United States was that young Americans should and would have to pay for their own education because of the personal advancement it promised. In keeping with the post-1980s focus on individual responsibility and attainment, the state would provide neither a handout nor a hand up; instead, students should take out loans that they could pay off later. Armed with their degrees and other qualifications, they would surely find higher-skilled, better-paid jobs in the new knowledge economy than their parents had found in the old industrial sectors.
In short, a college degree and other advanced or technical training were individuals’ personal investments in their own future, not part of the state’s investment in its population’s education or in the country’s future. The ethos of Thatcherism and Reaganism had spread from economics to education. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else, their influence would eventually prove disastrous on both a human and a political level.
Vicious Circles
As the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s—Millennials—reached adulthood, they suddenly found their much-anticipated employment opportunities dramatically constrained. This was the case even for those with a college degree (about 47 percent of the cohort). Suddenly the entire premise of the new educational paradigm collapsed: students who had taken out loans to support their educations could no longer afford to pay them off and sank into debt. Rather than a springboard to opportunity, advanced education suddenly seemed like a millstone around this generation’s neck.
Given their relatively high level of educational achievement, it is a testament to the toughness of the times that Millennials have been deemed the “unluckiest generation” in American history. In the early 2000s, which was supposedly “their era,” Millennials were hit by economic setbacks from which they never recovered. These included the Great Recession, which struck just as they were either entering or trying to establish themselves in the job market. Ten years after that crisis, Millennials had still not recovered. They generally had fewer savings and assets than previous generations. Most of those who identified themselves in this group in social surveys told pollsters in 2018 that they would be unable to cover $1,000 in emergency expenses.
In interviews that I conducted for this book, Millennials described feeling economically and politically insecure and were acutely aware of their inequality. My nieces, nephews, and younger cousins in the United States all fell into this category. In fact, people born in the 1980s and 1990s had only a 50 percent chance of making more money than their parents. Millennials were doing worse than my parents’ and in-laws’ Silent Generation of 1925–1945, which was held back by the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Second World War.
In his seminal 2015 book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, Harvard professor Bob Putnam, with whom I worked when he was dean of the Kennedy School of Government, lays out in detail the consequences of socioeconomic divisions and inequality for Millennials and Generation Z—the two generational cohorts spanning birth dates from the early 1980s to the early 2010s, which have primarily driven demographic change in the United States. In his work, Putnam drew on extensive interviews with residents of his hometown, Port Clinton, Ohio, at the mouth of the Portage River on Lake Erie, where he grew up in the 1950s. He demonstrated that in this century it was no longer “self-evident” that all children in the United States, irrespective of their family and economic background, could expect to go to college or improve their position in life by finding a well-paid job right out of high school. He described a situation of stark class and generational divides, shaped by economic changes as well as shifts in family structures and parenting and declines in the quality of schools and neighborhoods over a seventy-year period. American youth in the generations that would shape the twenty-first century, Putnam concluded, faced the prospect of low absolute and relative socioeconomic mobility. Unlike their parents and grandparents, they had no assurance of a better life.
I had seen these developments in both the United Kingdom and the United States, and my experiences growing up in the North East of England led me to predict more of the same there in the decades ahead. But when I arrived in the U.S. in 1989, I had assumed that America was the land of opportunity, not a country with places like Port Clinton, Ohio—bigger versions of Bishop Auckland, where people’s prospects were in decline and children could not expect to do better than their parents educationally and economically. And even as I began to comprehend the unfortunate parallels between my home country and my adopted one, I could not have predicted where this shortfall of opportunity would lead the United States.
There had been signs that Millennials’ enormous gains in education were resting on a shaky foundation in both the U.S. and the UK. In the years after I left St. Andrews, for instance, the UK student body had become more diverse in terms of both class and race, in line with the shifts in the country’s demographic profile. The Labour government increased places at university through the Further and Higher Education Act of 1992, which removed the distinction between universities and polytechnical colleges and increased entry for poor and working-class students. These changes were not, however, matched by a significant boost in funding for higher education. Compounding the paucity of new funding was the fact that local education authorities could no longer afford to pay all the fees and provide full maintenance grants for low-income students, as they had in the 1980s. The infrastructure of opportunity had seemingly expanded, but without a critical component. More university places simply meant more student demand for scarce public resources.
Thirty years later, unlike in the 1980s, a university education was no longer the guarantee of a good job—certainly not one that could pay off high levels of accumulated student debt. The expansion of education in both the United Kingdom and the United States increased the competition for jobs and thus employer expectations of higher qualifications for entry-level positions. With more graduates with bachelor’s degrees, a master’s plus other experience, such as internships and language or other special skills, became the norm for entry-level research assistant positions at places like the Brookings Institution, for instance. But undertaking additional years of study for a master’s degree comes with a high opportunity cost.
When students stay in college and out of the workforce longer, they accrue more debt and lengthen the repayment schedule. The prospect of accumulating debt could easily become another barrier to entry into elite universities as well as every other college program for aspiring low-income students. Indeed, a series of reports on higher education in 2020 revealed that student debt in the United States had reached $1.6 trillion in total—more than tripling since 2006—as increasing numbers of students pursued master’s degrees and other qualifications. Although a Brookings Institution analysis in October 2020 demonstrated that most of this debt was held by former students who were now in the highest U.S. income brackets, it also underscored that these students were themselves from higher-income households. In other words, students from more affluent families were more likely to go to college in the first place than those with less affluent family backgrounds.
Brookings colleagues who focused on the differential impacts of student debt across racial groups noted the high negative impact of debt on Black students in particular. Black college graduates owed substantially more on average than whites, and the debt gap tripled in the years following graduation. Student debt had now become another obstacle to wealth creation for Black Americans. High accruing levels of debt were a contributing factor to Black students dropping out of college because of ongoing financial and family issues, further exacerbating inequality in educational attainment and incomes. Data from the U.S. Department of Education in 2016–2017 showed that 60 percent of Black students who started college in 2010 did not finish within six years. Their loans were not forgiven when they dropped out. Those loans became a lost investment and an additional financial burden, limiting their prospects. It was a vicious circle.
In the United Kingdom, unlike the United States, students who take out loans for their education pay them back based on what they earn, not on the sum they owe. In theory, if they are in a low-paid job, they can defer the debt indefinitely. No one hounds them and puts liens on their earnings and property. Nonetheless, the idea of taking on a debt that you may never pay off is a daunting prospect for low-income students, no matter who or where they are, holding them back from enrolling in college. The provision of student grants, in particular for minority and low-income students, would greatly expand their opportunity to enter university as well as the chances to improve their life and material circumstances.
Based on my own family circumstances in the 1980s, I would certainly have thought twice and adjusted my sights to cheaper college options closer to home if I or my parents had had to go into debt. I went to St. Andrews because it was affordable thanks to government funding. Neither I nor my parents had to take out a loan or a second mortgage, as many of my friends’ parents did in the United States, to cover costs. It was the same with Harvard, because of the possibility of the Knox and other scholarships. If there had been no grants, I would never have come to America. I never would have found my way into the pipeline that funnels academics into the U.S. government. And I never would have had a front-row seat for what came next.
The Rise of the Populists
The decrease in government grants put higher education out of reach for many Americans. Coming on top of reduced employment opportunities after the Great Recession, this helped create the deep-rooted separation between low-income workers and college-educated elites. This cleavage in turn fueled worsening social divisions and political polarization in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century. Despite all the purported social progress of the twentieth century, the top of the political hierarchy in both the U.S. and the UK in the new century was as much the bastion of the wealthy and upper classes as it had been in the 1980s and in earlier periods. With a few notable exceptions, it was also still predominantly male and white.
The absence of someone like you at the top completely undercuts the idea, supposedly embedded in modern societies, that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed. You seem stuck in place, while others—a privileged few—are always moving up and improving their situation. For many women, Black Americans, and members of other marginalized groups, this becomes so discouraging that they abandon the fields that they have worked so hard to break into. Outliers in the lower ranks find the obstacles to moving up simply too daunting, and few want to find themselves as the token representative of their group, thrown into sharp relief at the top, with no one else coming up behind to join them.
My pedigree of a Harvard PhD and decades of work in universities and think tanks certainly made me an unlikely representative of the working class or a disadvantaged minority in America. Academics in the United States, and especially tenured faculty, are predominantly white and rooted in the country’s more economically privileged socioeconomic strata. They are rarely the first people in their family to go to college. And although women have made significant inroads over the course of the past twenty years, many academic fields are still dominated by men in the professorial ranks. This is the same in the United Kingdom.
This lack of a direct relationship between ordinary people and prominent intellectual and political elites leaves the playing field open for others to step in and present themselves as advocates for the entire working or middle class or other distinct underrepresented groups. Indeed, politics since 2000 has been marked by the rise of populists—politicians who spurn “out-of-touch experts” and who claim to speak on behalf of millions of people with whom they in fact have no authentic connection, and in whom they have no genuine interest beyond securing votes to support their own often very personal agendas.
