Every age has its obsessions, its ziggurats and catacombs, celestial highways and roads to hell, its reliquaries and hula hoops.  While it’s always entertaining to cluck and chuckle as unassailable dogmas of the past are transmuted into picturesque superstitions, it’s also intriguing to speculate about which of our current cultural icons and fixations will seem like a hoot to our great-grandchildren.

Already, for example, the bright light of historical perspective has put the car culture of the 1950’s and its tail fin madness under our amused scrutiny.  This was the era of the extreme annual style change, when automobile dealers covered their showroom windows with paper until the day the new models were officially revealed to a curious and fawning public.  In those days, everything about the manufacture and marketing of new cars – their look, the status they conferred, even their smell – coalesced into a major organizing principle of American economic and social life, which now looks about as gaudy and tinny as the cars that rolled out of Detroit factories.

Although America has had a long and fabled love affair with the automobile, this passion hit new levels of intensity in the 1950s.  As the decade began, the automobile industry, long shackled by the Great Depression and then World War II, was at last free to give people what they wanted:  access to cars.  And these new cars would not be frugal, utilitarian machines like Henry Ford’s Model T.  These new beauties – stretched out, lowered-down, and powered by high-compression engines – not only would express a nation’s dreams, but also would tell the world that the man in the driver’s seat (and it was surely a man in those days) had earned a well-deserved place for himself on the main highway of American life.

People became the cars they drove, and to highlight this fusion General Motors composed an ascending hierarchy of models that went from Chevrolet to Pontiac to Oldsmobile to Buick, all the way to Cadillac.  Soon Chrysler, with their Plymouth-Dodge-Chrysler-Imperial slate, and Ford, with a Mercury-Lincoln-Continental line, followed suit with their own bevies of cars.  The corporate strategy would be to initially win the customer’s lifelong loyalty and then reward that loyalty with increasingly elaborate and expensive cars as his career progressed, as it surely would.  Complementing this dynamic hierarchy was the concept of annual style change, which guaranteed that when you drove a new car, people would be sure to notice its newness.

For the sake of argument, one can maintain that the current fascination middle-class American culture has with selective college admission is nearly as lavish as that of the ‘50s car culture.  In a generation or two, it will become clear how much we have invested in the madness surrounding selective admissions and how much we have lost.

In the world of selective college admissions, the analogy to the automotive status hierarchy is the rear-window college decal.  If the driver of a Buick in the ‘50s was instantly recognizable as a solid member of the postwar haute bourgeoisie – a banker perhaps – then the driver of a car with a Princeton decal on the back window in our own time is presumed to be high in the pecking order of contemporary national life; higher, certainly, than the driver of a car with a Lafayette sticker.

In my work as a college counselor, I have long been impressed with how carefully calibrated the public’s sense of college prestige has become – how rarely, for example, a senior in high school, with a group of acceptances in hand, fails to choose the most prestigious college to attend.  Once I asked Andrew, a student who was known for his impeccable sense of which college ranked where, how he had managed to internalize the pecking order of colleges with such precision.  He told me he had first become aware of college names on ski trips.  As his family drove from Boston to ski areas at Stowe or Killington, his parents often made note of college decals on the rear windows of passing cars.  For Andrew’s parents, the decals served as family report cards posted on car windows for the world to see and discuss.  When there was a group of stickers on a window, the animated discussion of nuances lasted for miles.  (Did that Dartmouth sticker among a group of “safety” schools represent a genetic anomaly or the presence of a hockey player in the family?)  This front-seat game kept the grown-ups busy for hours.

Like legends internalized by children around the cooking fires of traditional peoples, these words sank in deep.  As Andrew’s parents deconstructed fresh constellations of decals and computed their prestige quotient against the model of car they were affixed to, Andrew learned to imagine that the people riding in cars proclaiming Amherst or Duke looked like the right kind of family, while those with other college labels Andrew had trouble remembering from one trip to the next, didn’t.  From the time he was a little boy, before he knew algebra or could conjugate a single verb in a foreign language, Andrew was made aware of the potency of college names, spoken out in hushed liturgical tones, as the family swept along the snowy highways of his childhood.

Another similarity between 50’s cars and college admissions is the puzzling lack of concern on the part of consumers as to how they work, about what actually goes on under the hood, so to speak, of either cars or colleges.  No one bothered much with how cars performed, and as the decade progressed, models became increasingly less dependable (even as their fins got longer).  But it didn’t affect sales, because what mattered was how cars made their drivers feel.

A selective admissions system in which desirability is based on prestige is analogous to this.  If a college is prestigious enough, if its decal telegraphs enough power, then it is, ipso facto, the best college.  We needn’t inquire further into its actual performance, or even whether its primary mission is to educate undergraduates.  Everything will be taken care of by the magic elixir of prestige.  The self-esteem of any student lucky enough to be accepted will rocket ever upward, and the world, it is assumed by everyone involved, will forever want to befriend, hire, marry, and live happily ever after with what must be a surefire winner.

With both cars and colleges, there is a very American theology of winning and losing.  In each, the struggle to achieve either a fancy car or a fancy college becomes a map by which to navigate the ambiguities of contemporary life.  In the ‘50s, good people drove Buicks, and the best people drove Cadillacs.  In the struggle for places in top colleges, we believe that quality is rewarded and recognized just as clearly.

Looking back over the excesses of the 1950s, we now see the price of this theology.  For one thing, our lack of critical thinking about car quality led to the production of increasingly shoddy models, which ultimately opened the door to foreign competition.  The importation of the Volkswagen Beetle broke the ice.  That modern-day recapitulation of the Model T penetrated the U. S. market with so few amenities that the first models didn’t even have gas gauges.  But the Beetle was dependable and got good gas mileage, so it won a place in the American market.  After a half-hearted salvo of Pintos and Corvairs was fired into the small-car market, Detroit went back to the old formula, churning out “gas-guzzling behemoths,” confident that its market niche at the heart of American life was ever secure.  But when the Arab oil embargo put fuel consumption on the front burner, a flood of German, Japanese, and even Korean imports permanently altered our manufacturing hegemony in the world economy and our balance of trade. 

Although the American system of higher education is still correctly regarded as the world’s most potent, the fact that its consumers at the undergraduate level continue to gobble up its wares with such uncritical enthusiasm might give us pause.  We should look critically at the fact that our most desirable and prestigious universities often act as if their undergraduate colleges are merely picturesque sideshows, useful for fund-raising and football, while the real performance – research grants and contracts (the stuff the faculty cares about) – happens under the big tops of their graduate schools.

Reviewing Charles Clotfelter’s book Buying the Best in Harvard Magazine in 1996, David W. Brennan reports:  “For regular-rank faculty (those holding tenured or tenure-track appointments), teaching loads in the representative humanities departments at Duke fell from 5.6 courses in the 1976—1977 academic year to 4.2 in 1991-1992; from 4.3 courses to 3.6 in the social science departments…At Harvard, in the departments reviewed, the course load in the humanities remained stable at 2.8 per year, but declined in social sciences from 3.6 to 2.5, and in the natural sciences from 1.7 to 1.6.”  Brennan then points out an interesting comparison between research universities and colleges (in this case Carleton) that Clotfelter’s research reveals:  “By the 1991-1992 academic year, for example, the average class size in the social science department was 80 at Duke, 242 at Harvard, 38 at Chicago, and 24 at Carleton.  At Duke, 72 percent of the courses in that discipline were taught by regular-rank faculty, compared to only 48 percent at Harvard and 42 percent at Chicago; Carleton again stands alone, at 85 percent.”  In summing up, Brennan writes:  “Clotfelter’s data strongly suggest the presence of cross-subsidy from undergraduate to graduate education in part on the backs of undergraduates, who pay for it through large classes and limited access to senior faculty.”  And Brennan is no Ralph Nader; he is Dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education.

As Clotfelter and Brennan show us, we thrust the tender young talent of this nation and much of our money into a system that only tangentially regards the education of eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds as its primary goal.  But at what cost?  Are these universities providing our kids with a quality educational product, which will equip them for the twenty-first century, or are they just our era’s edition of the gas-guzzling behemoths of yesteryear?