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were outsiders as undergraduates, and they remain outsiders as professors.
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    Vocational culture
    For [vocational students], there is simply not enough time or money to support the extensive play of the collegiate culture. To these students, many of them married, most of them working anywhere from twenty to forty hours a week, college is largely off-the-job training, an organization of courses and credits leading to a diploma and a better job than they could otherwise command … . But, like participants in the collegiate culture, these students are also resistant to intellectual demands on them beyond what is required to pass the courses. To many of these hard-driven students, ideas and scholarship are as much a luxury and distraction as are sports and fraternities.
    â€”Burton Clark and Martin Trow, sociologists

    Vocational students have long existed in American higher education (today, they constitute over half of all college students). Traditionally, vocationals were characterized as students “working their way through college,” and they neither participated in collegiate life nor, unlike academic students, attracted special attention from the faculty.
    The first wave of vocational students entered American higher education at the beginning of the twentieth century. Often the children of recent immigrants, they mainly attended urban colleges and universities, and usually lived at home, lacking the money or inclination to reside in a dormitory or a Greek house.
    Unlike collegians at residential schools, vocationals did not regard college as a “fun interval” between adolescence and adulthood; for vocationals, attending university was another job, similar to their part-time or full-time occupations. As a result, most vocational students lacked the time and energy to intellectually engage their schoolwork, and they considered their classes as obstacle courses with hurdles to be jumped as efficiently as possible.

    Vocationals were more conscientious students than the collegians—the casual “gentleman’s C” was alien to them—but they tended to do their homework quickly and often achieved what was called the “plebian C.” Most of all, they wanted their C’s to add up to a college degree. However, unlike the collegians, who viewed a sheepskin as an excellent trophy of the good times at Ol’ Siwash, or the academic students, who considered a diploma as proof of attaining a high level of knowledge and culture, the vocationals saw a degree as an entrance fee into the middle class.
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    After World War II, an enormous wave of vocational students permanently changed America’s colleges and universities. As a result of the legislation popularly known as the GI Bill, more than a million ex-service personnel entered higher education, many of whom were the first persons in their families to attend college. The vets regarded going to college as a job, and often took “extra loads” of courses to finish as quickly as possible.
    To accommodate these students, and to gain their government-paid tuition dollars, many private colleges, small and sleepy domains of class privilege before the war, transformed themselves into large, bustling, and democratic facilities; public universities grew exponentially, also expanding their clientele from the children of the middle class to multiclass and multiage students; and municipal schools benefited greatly, their long-standing vocational orientation fitting the vets well.
    In the post—WWII period, the undergraduate population on most campuses doubled or tripled from prewar levels, and the number of college graduates increased accordingly. In 1939-40, around two hundred thousand Americans received college degrees; ten years later, the first graduating class that included WWII vets pushed the degree total to close to five hundred thousand, and, in the 1950s, the total continued to grow as increasing numbers of