all, we will cease to be America. What makes our country special is that we donât just fight povertyâwe honor work. Work, and the sense of purpose and accomplishment that it brings, is essential to human happiness. Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute calls this âearned success.â That means achieving successâwhether you define that as making money, raising good kids or mentoring seventh gradersâon your own terms through your own hard work and merit. Brooks cites studies that show that people get less happiness from unearned thingsâeven good things like moneyâthan they do from things theyâve earned through work. For Christians, the centrality of work to human meaning and happiness comes from our being made in the image of God. Being made in His image means we have dignity, worth and creativity. Work is how we use these gifts to contribute to our fellow men and women and to honor His name.
Fifty years ago we set out on a big-government approach to fighting poverty and for fifty years weâve been doubling down on that approach, tinkering around the edges at best. It has failed and this failure not only morally implicates all of us, it goes to the heart of the health of the American Dream. Now is the time to try a new approach.
Chapter Four
Â
MAKING COLLEGE A GOOD INVESTMENT AGAIN
A s dreams go, Kristiâs isnât what youâd call outrageous. She wants a job and a life, in that order. But at age twenty-nine, Kristi has become cynical about the American Dream.
âYouâre told that life is supposed to be a certain way,â she says. âYou go to high school, then you go to college, then you graduate and get a job. Then you get a husband and a white picket fence and a dog and a cat and a son and a daughter and life is just grand.â
This isnât how life is working out for Kristi. She had the great misfortune of graduating in late 2006 from the University of Central Florida (UCF), at a time when the Florida economy was the leading indicator of the Great Recession to come. But long before the grass stopped being cut in the yards of foreclosed homes across Florida, the job market that Kristi would face when she graduated had begun to change. The industrial manufacturing economy that had created once great cities like Detroit and lifted millions into the great American middle class was long gone. What was left in its wake was a postindustrial economy in which jobs that could be outsourced to cheaper labor and less regulation overseas had been, and jobs that could be automated were rapidly being taken over by machines and technology. By the time Kristi took her last exam at UCF, it wasnât just that jobs were harder to find; it was that the jobs themselves had changed, and the higher education system she had just left hadnât kept up with the change.
Kristi grew up in Apopka, Florida, outside Orlando, where her parents own and operate a greenhouse construction company. She had a pretty comfortable middle-class life. That she would go to college was never really in questionâand for good reason. The value of a higher education has never been higher than it is for her and other members of the millennial generation, meaning those born after 1980. The unemployment rate for graduates with a bachelorâs degree or more in 2014 was 3.8 percent, compared with 12.2 percent for those with a high school degree. 1 Although itâs no guarantee you wonât get laid off, a college degree means having a better chance of keeping your job, even in todayâs economy. When the federal government tracked the high school class of 2004, it found that 40 percent of those with high school degrees and 45 percent of high school dropouts had lost a job within the past six years, compared with just 19 percent of those whoâd gotten their bachelorâs degree. 2 In addition, college graduates earn moreâan average of $17,500 more per
Fifty years ago we set out on a big-government approach to fighting poverty and for fifty years weâve been doubling down on that approach, tinkering around the edges at best. It has failed and this failure not only morally implicates all of us, it goes to the heart of the health of the American Dream. Now is the time to try a new approach.
Chapter Four
Â
MAKING COLLEGE A GOOD INVESTMENT AGAIN
A s dreams go, Kristiâs isnât what youâd call outrageous. She wants a job and a life, in that order. But at age twenty-nine, Kristi has become cynical about the American Dream.
âYouâre told that life is supposed to be a certain way,â she says. âYou go to high school, then you go to college, then you graduate and get a job. Then you get a husband and a white picket fence and a dog and a cat and a son and a daughter and life is just grand.â
This isnât how life is working out for Kristi. She had the great misfortune of graduating in late 2006 from the University of Central Florida (UCF), at a time when the Florida economy was the leading indicator of the Great Recession to come. But long before the grass stopped being cut in the yards of foreclosed homes across Florida, the job market that Kristi would face when she graduated had begun to change. The industrial manufacturing economy that had created once great cities like Detroit and lifted millions into the great American middle class was long gone. What was left in its wake was a postindustrial economy in which jobs that could be outsourced to cheaper labor and less regulation overseas had been, and jobs that could be automated were rapidly being taken over by machines and technology. By the time Kristi took her last exam at UCF, it wasnât just that jobs were harder to find; it was that the jobs themselves had changed, and the higher education system she had just left hadnât kept up with the change.
Kristi grew up in Apopka, Florida, outside Orlando, where her parents own and operate a greenhouse construction company. She had a pretty comfortable middle-class life. That she would go to college was never really in questionâand for good reason. The value of a higher education has never been higher than it is for her and other members of the millennial generation, meaning those born after 1980. The unemployment rate for graduates with a bachelorâs degree or more in 2014 was 3.8 percent, compared with 12.2 percent for those with a high school degree. 1 Although itâs no guarantee you wonât get laid off, a college degree means having a better chance of keeping your job, even in todayâs economy. When the federal government tracked the high school class of 2004, it found that 40 percent of those with high school degrees and 45 percent of high school dropouts had lost a job within the past six years, compared with just 19 percent of those whoâd gotten their bachelorâs degree. 2 In addition, college graduates earn moreâan average of $17,500 more per
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