Sustainable. Resilient. Free.. John Warner C.

       PREFACE: A NEW NARRATIVE

      For almost a century, the popular narrative about college in the United States has held that a college degree is the surest route to the good life. Get a college degree, and all the rest will follow. A good job, financial security, happiness, 2.2 kids, the dog, the white picket fence … you know the drill.

      When I was growing up in the northern suburbs of Chicago in the seventies and eighties, the white child of two college-educated parents, no one had to sit me down and tell me this story. I lived it every day. Almost all the kids who graduated from the excellent public school I attended went on to four-year colleges and earned degrees. Same for their kids. Rinse and repeat, generation after generation.

      I never had cause to question this narrative. For me, the story went exactly according to design. It all worked perfectly.

      So, after twenty years teaching college, why am I now questioning a narrative that seems to work so well?

      Well, for starters, this narrative is breaking down. Between 2013 and 2019, the percentage of American adults who agreed that college was “very important” declined from 70 percent to 51 percent. Among adults aged eighteen to twenty-nine, the population that has most recently made the choice to attend college, the decline was even sharper—from 74 percent to 41 percent.¹

      More importantly, though, for those people who aren’t part of the white middle or upper class, the narrative about higher education that worked so well for my classmates and me has never really been true in the first place. White high school graduates in America are wealthier than Black and Hispanic college graduates.² Black and Brown students arrive at colleges and universities and often experience a steady, low-grade resistance to their ambitions that sometimes flares into outright hostility. I recall a Black student from my first-year writing course a few years ago; she had been valedictorian of her midlands South Carolina high school and she wanted to be a doctor. But she struggled on her first biology exam, an entirely common occurrence for first-year college students who are adjusting to the demands of higher education. When she sought out extra help, however, the message she received was discouraging instead of empowering. Not everyone should major in science, she was told. What about social work?

      Teaching a diverse array of students over the last twenty-plus years has revealed to me how the narrative of higher education I once believed to be true—and the one I fulfilled for myself—came at the expense of people like that student.

      Our most popular narratives about college haven’t progressed much beyond 1978’s Animal House, a movie that was set in 1962. Neighbors,