The uniqueness of America is nowhere more apparent than in the fact that the college-educated group, which in most countries of the Western world is the elite, is here a mass. There were in this country, five years ago, four and a half million college graduates, a figure which has been increasing at the rate of about 400,000 a year. There were at that time, in addition, five and a half million who had had some college education.

It is not easy to grasp immediately the significance of these figures. For example, if we were to assume that college graduates, or at least a sizable proportion of them, have been furnished with some of the cultural interests and skills that institutions of higher learning have traditionally considered it their business to teach, then it should not be unreasonable to expect a serious magazine to reach a circulation of a half million, a serious book to sell 50,000 copies—these are indeed moderate estimates when we consider that the college teachers alone number 200,000. One might expect to see, considering this mass audience of more than ten million persons who have taken at least a few college courses, a chain of radio and television stations rivaling the BBC’s Third Program—and one might expect to see it pay for itself. (The estimated audience of the Third Program in England is about equal to the number of its university graduates—both figures are probably around 300,000.)

But clearly, whatever it is that some sixteen years of expensive education have done for millions of college graduates, its effect has not been to produce such a cultural scene in America. Indeed, when we look over the most extensive study yet made of the American college-graduate¹ we are not surprised—at any rate, too surprised—to find that the whole vast range of questions dealing with culture and education (in its dictionary sense) has been ignored. What does the college graduate read? What books does he buy, what magazines does he subscribe to, what does he think of the state of American culture, how does he compare, in interests or intelligence, with other Americans? Admittedly some of these questions are not easy to handle with the standard instruments of social study, but even the easy ones (for example, how many read Time) are ignored in this re-port, even if they were asked in the original questionnaire.

What is not ignored are three things—money, marriage, and political opinions—and of these it is the first that is the chief and overwhelming concern of this book. How much does the college graduate make? In what industries and occupations does he make most? What in his background determines how successful he is to be?

That such a question can be the main concern of this book is indeed a tribute to the democratization of higher education in America, and presumably of the access to higher vocations to which this education opens the door. In England, where it is taken for granted that the university student is either a member of a class which will fill the best positions of society, or a selected member of a lower class who is being assimilated to the ruling elite, it is probably inconceivable that such a question could be taken as the main focus of interest—the answer would be obvious. But in a country where it is possible for not much less than 20 per cent of the children of workers and farmers to attend college, as one study shows, it has become a matter of some interest just what the “cash value” of a college education is.

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In any case, the question is now answered. The median income of men with a college degree at the time of this study (1947) was $4,689; that for all employed men was $2200. While 13 per cent of all U.S. non-college graduates were proprietors, executives, and managers, some 34 per cent of the college graduates held those positions. And while 3 per cent of non-graduates were professionals of all types, a full 50 per cent of college men were professionals. Only 5 per cent of the college men were manual workers, against 58 per cent of the non-college population, and, even as workers, college men did much better than the average—their median income was still $4200 a year. The women graduates, of course, make much less—but they too are overwhelmingly professionals and managers and executives, and those of them who are housewives are married to men who make at least as much as the average college graduate. In addition, while the income of all U.S. males reaches a peak during the ages from thirty-five to forty-four, the college man can expect to keep on increasing his income as he gets older—since it depends on intellectual skill or managerial position, rather than physical skill or strength.

Some interesting problems emerge when we examine the question of income in more detail. The most prosperous of the college graduates are the doctors, lawyers, and dentists. Of the doctors, 57 per cent had incomes of more than $7500 a year. Of all those working in business, on the other hand, only 25 per cent made more than $7500. This preeminence in earning power of professionals over businessmen is a little surprising; but of course the people in business include clerks, salesmen, and workers, as well as owners and managers. If we take only business proprietors and executives, and limit ourselves to those over forty, at which point presumably such anomalies as the boss’s son who is learning the business at $30 a week are eliminated, we find that the businessman does just about as well as the professional. This is still somewhat unconvincing—but we must realize that the business executives so defined still include a most heterogeneous group, not broken down further. The graduate of Podunk State Teachers who is a small-town storeowner is still recorded as a business proprietor. In a study of the Harvard class of 1926 (The Life and Opinions of a College Class, by Cornelius Dubois and Charles J. V. Murphy, Harvard University Press, 1951), the occupational figures are broken down more finely: and there we discover, more satisfactorily, that manufacturing proprietors rank first, advertising agency executives second, manufacturing executives third, owners of banking and financial institutions fourth, and doctors and business lawyers fifth and sixth.

The contrast between the Harvard graduates of 1926 and the figures of They Went to College suggest to us that the over-all prosperity of the mass of college graduates demands a finer analysis—and indeed this study indicates quite clearly that there are two very distinct kinds of college graduates in terms of success, even though it is not easy to say where one type stops and the other begins. The college man who went to a well-known college and was supported by his parents is very different from the man who went to an unknown school and worked his way through it. The graduates of the big three (Harvard, Yale, and Princeton) had a median income of $7,365. At the other end of the scale, if we leave out the graduates of Ivy League schools, leading Eastern colleges, leading technical colleges, and the Big Ten, the median drops some $3,000. Almost half of the Harvard class of 1926 did not work at all while going through college—nationally, only 17 per cent were this fortunate. The authors of They Went to College carefully follow the careers of those who worked while in college and those who did not, and discover those who worked are less often in the favored occupations, and they make less money regardless of the occupations they are in. Class distinctions are more difficult to locate in America, but here too, the complex of the right family² and right school makes itself felt in later life.³

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Even more sobering is the clear indication in these studies that the college man is not likely to be as favored in the future as he was in the past. For example, with the ballooning of college enrollment, we find that an ever smaller proportion of graduates end up as well-paid professionals. The long-range trend is presented most sharply in an earlier Time study of college graduates (F. Lawrence Babcock, The U.S. College Graduate, Macmillan, 1941), which showed that while 20.5 per cent of graduates over forty were in medicine or dentistry, this proportion had dropped to 7 per cent for those under thirty. One quarter of the graduates in this earlier study were found to be doctors, dentists, or lawyers; seven years later, only 16 per cent of the graduates were in these professions.

And this decline, They Went to College demonstrates, has hit the student who has worked his way through college, the student from the poorer family, rather than all students alike. If we consider the history of working students alone, we find that 27 per cent of those over fifty are in the three leading professions; while only 13 per cent of those under thirty have entered them. There has been no similar decline for those students who were family-supported.

These figures suggest, if only obliquely, what has happened to the meaning of a college education in this country. In 1900 we had half the population we have today, and one-tenth the number of college students. The college student was a much rarer person, and, in retrospect, it appears that society could afford to do much more for him, even if he was poorer, and even if he belonged to the less favored newcomers. David Riesman, writing in this magazine last December, pointed out that be-fore the First World War such students, just because there were fewer of them (and, we might add, for this reason alone they must have been more gifted), and because, too, the occupation of college teacher was less one of a number of promising fields proposed by a vocational counsellor and more an occupation selected out of love of teaching and learning—these poorer students could hope in college to gain the friendship and interest of truly distinguished men. One thinks of how immigrants like Bernard Berenson, Felix Frankfurter, and Selig Perlman were received at a time when the colleges were in much greater measure reserved for the rich, and there were few scholarships or fellowships to tempt the impoverished. Yet those favored few who, under these circumstances, were admitted within the pale, received the same opportunities as those who belonged there by birth. Their later life showed they had no less success than other students. Paradoxically, as their numbers have risen, as they have found more and more in the way of institutional help, they have become more sharply distinguished from those students who come from more prosperous and established families. Such, at any rate, is one way in which the figures we have cited may be read.

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It is not surprising that this large body of relatively prosperous men who are college graduates should hold conservative views. We find that a full 72 per cent believe that “democracy depends fundamentally on the existence of free enterprise.” On the other hand, it is an en-lightened conservatism. There is considerable support of international cooperation: 78 per cent believe that “the UN should have the right to make conclusions which would bind members to a given course of action.” They are tolerant conservatives: 86 per cent disagree with the statement “children of minority groups or other races should play among themselves,” and 80 per cent agree “all Americans—Negroes, Jews, the foreign-born, and others—should have equal opportunity in social, economic, and political affairs.” In America, all our studies show, the educated and the wealthy (the latter to a somewhat lesser degree) are enlightened on matters of race and religion, and on international questions, while conservative in domestic politics. This is something that those of us who were raised on the history of the Dreyfus affair and German anti-Semitism find it hard to become accustomed to. We expect the wealthy to be anti-Semitic, for example, while all our evidence shows that it is the lower classes, who were the political supporters of the Jews in France and Germany, who in America hold (or at least express) the strongest anti-Semitic feelings.

The quality of the conservatism of the educated in this country is a subtle matter, and perhaps most modulated in the highest social strata. It is revealing to see in the Harvard class of 1926 that Whittaker Chambers is disliked a bit more than Senator Joseph McCarthy (the order of the most disliked men: John L. Lewis, Henry Wallace, Chambers, and Mc-Carthy; the men liked most, in order: General Marshall, President Conant, the late Senator Vandenberg, Herbert Hoover, Alfred Einstein). These are men who, in their undergraduate days and after, looked on Russia and socialism with some favor, and their turn against both would seem to have in it more the enlightenment that comes with facts and experience than the hardening of opinions that comes with age and financial success. Indeed, a good number of these men still find it possible to identify with Alger Hiss, who went through Harvard Law School about the time many of those who answered this questionnaire did: 15 per cent are still in doubt as to his guilt, and 11 per cent say flatly they do not think he is guilty.

In general, however, it is not easy to get a coherent political and social outlook from the questions asked in these studies. The most obvious questions are the easiest to ask (the Harvard study shows considerably more ingenuity in its questions than They Went to College): when it becomes a matter of going beyond the cliche that has been presented for comment, of trying to understand the meaning of acceptance or rejection of the cliche, the simple statistics do not help us very much. At that point, it has become typical for contemporary social research, leaning on the questionnaire, to reprint the comments written in the spaces provided, with little or no effort to structure them or grasp their meaning. The questionnaire is inevitably deficient in supplying meaning: this we must supply as best we can from our own, unquantified, experience.

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This is most notably the case when we come to the interesting differences that distinguish the Jewish college graduates from the non-Jewish. Why, for example, do we find that only 23 per cent of the Jewish college women are unmarried, as against 31 per cent for the Protestant, and 48 per cent for the Catholic? Here even experience fails this writer—I can think of no explanation, unless that it may be a statistical illusion created by the fact that there are fewer Jews among the older college women, who as a body come from a generation in which, as the study shows, a very large proportion of them did not marry at all.

Other facts about the Jewish students are easier to understand but still present mysteries. We read that only 12 per cent of the Jewish graduates attend religious services regularly as against four times that many Protestants and seven times that many Catholics. These figures are no surprise to informed observers. But how are we to understand them? Consider the apparently contradictory evidence of the Harvard study. The Harvard questionnaire asks the ’26 men in what religion they were brought up, and what they now consider themselves. And paradoxically enough, the Jews show the strongest attachment to the parental religion, 81 per cent of them still considering themselves Jews, while every other religion shows a smaller proportion. Of course what we have here is the confusion of the modern world in dealing with the term “Jew.” The Harvard study asked in terms of religion, and the Harvard Jewish men answered in terms of a vague ethnic identification. A religion which is a set of views can be shed easily, but one which is the expression of a national—or rather tribal—ethos remains persistently attached even when its carriers do nothing to indicate their attachment. One may perhaps interpret the phenomenally low figure of Jewish religious observance this way: the Jewish religion, with its emphasis on ritual laws, was peculiarly unadapted to the contemporary world, and the first and second generation fell away from its observance. But if this is so, this study may have hit Judaism when it was in a trough between the orthodox religion largely abandoned, and the modified religion that is beginning to emerge. Today Judaism shows strong signs of a power of acculturation which, while it may fail to overcome theological and spiritual difficulties, succeeds in creating congregations parallel to those of other American religions. Ten years from now, I would guess, the figure of Jewish observance will be much higher, and Judaism may yet acquire the same respectable pallor that characterizes the older Protestant denominations. The vigor of American Catholicism seems quite beyond Judaism and Protestantism.

The most interesting item of information about the Jewish college graduates comes—again—in the sphere of money. The Jews are more prosperous than the Protestants, and far more prosperous than the Catholics. For one thing, they are concentrated in the better-paying professions and in the positions of proprietor, man-ager, and executive—in comparison with the non-Jews, only few of them are teachers, white-collar workers, and manual workers. This alone would be enough to raise the income of the average Jewish college graduate. But even within the ranks of the professionals and proprietors, managers, and executives, they have a higher income. The authors of They Went to College suspected that this might be an effect of the fact that the Jews are concentrated in the large cities, where average income is greater. But testing this suspicion they discovered that big-city Jewish graduates made more than big-city Protestant and Catholic graduates—and so did small-town Jewish graduates.

The remarkable prosperity of the Jews in America is a fact that cannot be disputed (see, for additional evidence, my article “What Sociology Knows About American Jews,” in this department, March 1950). What are its causes, and what it means—there we are helpless. In part, it is an effect of Jewish urban concentration; in part, of Jewish occupational concentration. But all this supplies an only in-complete explanation, as we have just seen. Beyond these statistical explanations there is some psychological or social factor; many may be proposed, none as yet seems adequate to the fact.

Finally, the Jews diverge from the other college graduates in their political opinions. Re-publicans are rarer among the Jews than among Southern college graduates—6 per cent of the former, as against 9 per cent of the latter, label themselves Republicans. Two-thirds of the Jewish graduates are classified by the researchers as New Dealers, on the basis of a number of questions, against about one-third of the Protestants and Catholics. Three-quarters are classified as tolerant, as against two-fifths of the Catholics and one-third of the Protestants. Two-thirds are classified as “internationalist” as against less than two-fifths of the non-Jews.

Thus, even though they have abandoned their ancient law, the Jews remain in America, at least in one respect, a peculiar people, breaking the sociological generalization that decrees that, the more prosperous, the more conservative. Again, various theories spring to mind: perhaps their prosperity is too recent to affect the attitudes appropriate to poverty; perhaps their prosperity comes from trades and pursuits which gain from liberal policies—Marxists once made great use of this point to explain why not all businessmen were supporters of “fascism”; perhaps their liberalism is a guilty atonement for their unaccustomed wealth. At the present stage of our knowledge, the brute fact is more interesting than any conceivable theory.

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We have reviewed only some of the material in They Went to College and The Life and Opinions of a College Class. There is more that is entertaining or interesting or both. What emerges from these books, however, is unfortunately only a very external portrait. The Harvard study tries harder, and goes deeper. Perhaps it gets closest to the type of man the American college at its best will help make when it asks: What do you consider to be the most annoying thing in your everyday life? Sure enough, “finances and bills” head the list, but high up, too, we find “traffic, crowds, noise,” “commuting,” “not enough time,” “telephone,” “subways.” Even with their median of $12,000 a year, these men, it seems, would like more time to consider themselves, rather than only their incomes and prospects. Perhaps the next time Time sends out a 13-page questionnaire it should give them greater opportunity to do so.

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¹ They Went to College: The College Graduate in America Today, by Ernest Havemann and Patricia Salter West, “based on a survey of U.S. college graduates made by Time Magazine and analyzed by the Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research” (Harcourt, Brace, 277 pp., $4.00).

² Twenty-one per cent of the Harvard class of ’26 had fathers who had themselves gone to Harvard; 54 per cent had fathers who had graduated from college, as against 26 per cent in the national sample.

³ It is perhaps characteristic that the discussion of income in They Went to College completely ignores the question of father’s income and occupation, and the problem of the role of inherited wealth in determining future wealth and occupation. We in America like to believe that inherited property can play only a small part in affecting one’s prosperity, and in consequence little has been done to study it. The Harvard study does have interesting material on unearned income—which of course need not be from inherited property since these men are now in their late forties and have had a chance to turn earned income into income-earning investments. The figures show that 45 per cent of the class have no unearned income; for 22 per cent, unearned income makes up at least 15 per cent of total income; and for 4 per cent, it makes up at least 75 per cent of total income.