American Dream: Opportunity, Crime & Material Pursuit

Achieving the American Dream has been the ultimate goal for individuals in America. Unfortunately, not everyone in society has equal opportunity to achieve this goal. According to Messner and Rosenfeld, the American Dream is “a commitment to the goal of material success, to be pursued by everyone in society under conditions of open, individual competition.” Even though, Messner and Rosenfeld agree with some of Merton’s paradigm about how individuals go about achieving society’s goals, they rejected his explanation for the increase in crime rates in the United States. Merton believed the individuals who lack the opportunity to achieve monetary gain turned to illegitimate means, often leading them to get involved in criminal behavior to get to their desired goal.

Messner and Rosenfeld developed their own theory to explain the increase in crime rates and stated the reason to be the dominance of the economy over other social institutions (Lilly, Cullen, and Ball 2015).

One opportunity that is promoted as a path to the American Dream is education. This opportunity has more of an impact on low-income, minorities and when money is the issue, it makes it more difficult for them to achieve monetary success legitimately. The economy has a heavy influence over this social institution and the lack to achieve the American Dream efficiently through education will result in deviance or criminal behavior. Issues within the educational systems, such as affordability and funding, are contributing factors in limiting an individual from achieving the American Dream. These issues were found in both public K-12 institutions and higher

education.
The economy biggest influence on primary education is in the area of funding. K-12 schools are funded with state and federal monies. When funding is limited it has an effect on the education system. These schools are expected to provide high-quality education despite having limited funds. This has become even more problematic as the cost of education has risen. From the time that an individual enters school, their growth, education wise, is expanded upon. Students are taught to be well rounded by learning various subjects in school from math to music. Unfortunately, due to the declining economy, public schools k-12 are receiving reduced funding to continue programs within the school such as music (Major 2013).
Another way funding is reduced within the school system is by reducing or eliminating student transportation. An example of this was done by Boyland and Bourke (2012) in Indianapolis, Indiana, where altering school transportation policies is done as a cost-saving measure for the benefit of property taxpayers in the state. Policy makers were looking to make funding across state equal for everyone’s taxes, but this ultimately lead to the reduction in the school districts revenue causing transportation for students to be eliminated. Overall, the reduction in funding K-12 schools for purposes of increasing revenue for the state by eliminating necessary programs and transportation show that the economy has a direct influences on the changes in education.
In addition to how funding effects K-12 public institutions, funding for and the cost to attend higher education, such as college, has an impact on individual’s opportunity to become successful and achieve the American Dream. Before World War I, the cost to attend college was much lower than it is today. A century ago, attending the most prestigious schools were lower in cost and tuition changes were relatively low as well. Even though cost were low for the students it was not enough to help the school sustain the cost of educational programs because charging student lower rates resulted in low tuition revenue for the school. In order for these colleges to provide more education benefits for the students they would have to raise the tuition rates but, that resulted in less students attending the school because there wasn’t enough financial aid available to cover the entire cost of attendance (Thelin 2015). Moreover, tuition also had to be increased due to the effects of the economy in today’s society.
One of the major issues with the rise in tuition rates today is that they are rising faster than inflation. Every year the cost of tuition goes up by a certain dollar amount and has a direct impact on student’s ability to afford to pursue their higher educational degree. The cost to attend college has gone up because of the economy for both “private” schools, which is privately funded, and “public” schools, which are funded by the state and federal government. To explain the continuous rising cost of higher education, the “Revenue Theory of Cost” by Howard Bowen was taken into consideration. This theory states that the “cost of operating college or university are set more largely by the amount of money institutions are able to raise” (Kimball 2014:888). In this case, if the revenue of the school needs to be increased, then the cost of tuition to students needs to be risen. When the cost of tuition goes up, students often look towards financial aid such as grants, scholarships and loans to pay to attend school.
Financial aid is heavily determined by the state government’s available funds to provide to the individual for a particular school. How much money a student receives is need-based for grants and scholarships, and most student who don’t meet the requirement for need-based aid have to turn to loans to pay for school. Today, it shows that the rise in cost of tuition is also due to the decrease in state funding. The changes that have occurred in the economy has had an impact on state’s budgets and that has a direct impact on funding public higher education. Most states are cutting higher education funding to increase their revenue as well as because states aren’t able to accommodate the universities needs to increase tuition for educational and expansion purposes (Doyle 2013). Regardless of the reasons for the decrease in state funding for higher education, tuition is rising and students, especially low-income, minorities, have to consider financial aid to continue their education.
One type of financial aid that is a major issue for students who graduate from college is student loans. A student loan is money that the government lends to individuals who are pursuing a college degree and are required to pay back at some point after graduating from college. Student loans are looked at as a down payment to the American Dream because after the degree is received, it provides access to employment opportunities. But, the social and economic benefits of a degree have to be taken into consideration when student loans are used. With the debts of loans as a burden on the student, they have an expectation of getting into a career where they can make enough money to pay off the debt and getting into debt was actually worth the reward at the end (Elliot 2014). In the end, the loans are the result of not being able to afford getting a higher education in the first place because of tuition cost.
As a consequence of the economic institution taking over a social institution such as education, the American Dream becomes harder to achieve in today’s society. With education, how the school is funded affects affordability. Then affordability becomes a major concern when in higher education which can lead students to turn to financial aid, such as student loans, to get to the ultimate goal of monetary gain. If the student is unable meet this goal the legitimate way and they have debts to pay back, the next most efficient way to make money is by breaking the law (Lilly et. al).
Overall, the education system has been dominated by the economy for centuries. Whether its schools eliminating programs or raising tuition because funding is become less available to the schools, the students are affected by the budget cuts. The economic dominance makes it more difficult to achieve the American Dream, which then leads individuals towards committing criminal acts because their opportunities are becoming limited. The idea of American Dream is to obtain monetary gain the best way possible, preferably legitimately, but when money is dominant over other social institutions this becomes almost impossible.