Everything I Know about America I Learned at Community College

Chapter 2: Horatio Alger is Alive and Kicking

Popular nineteenth-century author Horatio Alger was the king of “rags to riches” novels. Primarily writing to boys about to enter adulthood, Alger took the common man and made him into a national success story. Historians have since derided Horatio Alger’s tales as abetting the American myth that bravery and hard work alone can change one’s fortunes. They argue that one’s life choices are preset by the economic class in which one is born and the institutional limitations of racism, sexism, and capitalism.

Needless to say, their less-than-positive outlook on American society does not play well at the community college.

In nearly twenty years of teaching, I have yet to have a classroom in which the majority of students do not aspire to achieve what they believe tangibly exists: the American dream. In fact, pursuing economic success is the only American value on which my students agree.

With politics, religion, and personal life experiences sharply cross-cutting classrooms, divergent views about America proliferate. Gone is the idea that college exists to introduce one to the fine arts of public life and communal humanity. In its place are institutional directives to train students to obtain well-paying jobs — in which they will most likely stay for the rest of their lives — and student expectations that paying tuition will guarantee the intended result: employment.

What holds this otherwise mundane enterprise together is the dream itself: the aspiration to make more money than one has previously possessed and to do so in as quick and efficient a manner as possible.

Nowhere is this more visible than in my immigrant student population. Not only do first and second generation immigrants (including refugees) work hard to master English, they do so while beginning their college degrees and gaining interim employment. They are a model of efficiency. They love the availability and affordability of community college education and do not understand why everyone in America is not partaking.

While other students may take more time in achieving their goals, they, too, share a similar outlook: a certificate or degree is the first hoop to making serious money in America.

National statistics affirm the optimism of my immigrant students. A startling 40.2% of U.S. Fortune 500 companies were founded by a first or second generation immigrant. As a group, the children of immigrants are financially more successful than their parents and obtain higher levels of education than the general American Public.[1]

For historians of the “Gilded Age,” the age in which Horatio Alger wrote and Mark Twain coined, the employment opportunities that my students seek are simply cogs in a giant wheel that serves to increase the fortunes of a few. The top layer of gold will remain out of touch to the tarnished underbelly of laborers working in the capitalist American system.

Perhaps there is more commonality between my students and the critics than would first appear.

What do my students hope to achieve by finishing school? How about a job that is not on the meatpacking floor on which their fathers and mothers currently labor? How about a job that provides healthcare or a pension? For some, the ability to obtain a loan to buy a new Kia is achieving more success than anyone else they have ever known.

Buying one’s first home, paying for daycare, finding a job with stable hours…all of these are student success stories, and it would be robbery to take that feeling of accomplishment away from them.

Andrew Carnegie wanted to go to school. After his father died, he needed to support his mother by working long hours on the railroad. We would not aspire to his early life today. When Carnegie ultimately saw opportunity in steel, encouraged investors to back him, and succeeded in building an empire, he did so as an immigrant who had experienced poverty.

My students today cringe at the workplace conditions of Carnegie’s factories, but they do not cringe at the thought of working in a factory. Many of them have family and friends who do. My students consider and debate the fact that Carnegie earned more in one hour than his employees earned in a year, yet they do not begrudge him an entrepreneur’s reward.

I wish Americans had more in common with each other than the pursuit of wealth — what Thomas Jefferson poetically called “the pursuit of happiness.” But, to pursue wealth, students also know, requires liberty. It requires equality under the law. It requires adherence to due process. These are solid cornerstones upon which to rest our nation’s new business enterprises whatever they may be.

For better or worse our American economy is a puzzle linked together from coast to coast and even abroad. We have the 19th century industrialists to thank for that. Industrialization continues to provide jobs and increasingly demands higher education which, in turn, raises the standard of living for more Americans.

Let’s praise those who succeed in obtaining jobs where demand remains unmet: dispatching and distribution, construction, communications and records, manufacturing and processing, mechanical and electrical specialties, transport operations, and sales. In the last national report on the future of America’s community colleges, available jobs in these career industries remained 81% unfilled.[2]

Cogs or opportunities? It depends on one’s point of view. Let’s let our fellow citizens decide for themselves the definition of success.

[1] Furnham, Adrian, “Why Immigrants Make Great Entrepreneurs: They’ve often overcome a lot of hardships. A business setback is nothing,” The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 26, 2017 (https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-immigrants-make-great-entrepreneurs-1511752261, Accessed June 3, 2018); Anna Sutherland, “Why Young Adults with Immigrant Parents are Doing So Well,” Institute for Family Studies, April 28, 2016 (https://ifstudies.org/blog/why-young-adults-with-immigrant-parents-are-doing-so-well, Accessed June 3, 2018).

[2] Reclaiming the American Dream: Community Colleges and the Nation’s Future, a Report From the 21st-Century Commission on the Future of Community Colleges (American Association of Community Colleges, 2012), 11.