Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden speaks after touring International Union of Operating Engineers Local 66, September 30, 2020, in New Alexandria, Pennsylvania.
Even before the coronavirus arrived, colleges and universities were groaning under decades of public-funding cuts. Tuition totaled three-tenths of revenue for public colleges in 1992, but has risen to over half of that revenue today. To afford a higher education, Americans have turned to student loans—now an unsustainable collective burden of $1.6 trillion, suffocating the future prospects of millions. The pandemic has turned that pre-existing crisis into an existential threat to higher education’s raw financial survival, one that a Biden administration, should it come to power, will have to immediately manage. But this looming challenge hides a deeper, more unnerving reckoning.
While in the mid-century, Democrats could reliably depend on the votes of the working class, today the base for left-wing politics has shifted dramatically toward the well-educated. Trump’s arrival in particular widened the gap between college-educated and non-college whites. Indeed, possessing a college degree seems to have predicted 2016 outcomes better than any other single variable, including race or gender.
Meanwhile, college-educated workers are paid considerably more than non-college workers, and have been for decades. Roughly 80 percent of workers in the top fifth of incomes have a college degree, compared to less than 20 percent in the poorest fifth. America’s top earners and economic elites are overwhelmingly products of colleges and universities.
The left has historically been the home of the underdog—the minority, the marginalized, the poor and working classes—and the enemy of high society, with all its self-righteousness and draconian demands. But with higher education serving as a cultural base for left-wing politics and a gateway to elite status, large portions of the left are in danger of becoming high society. Which raises the question: Is higher education even something the left should want to save?
It’s hardly a shattering insight to note that being a social progressive in good standing these days requires fluency with a host of linguistic turns and abstract concepts that are largely conferred by a college education. Barbara Ehrenreich’s influential examination of the “professional-managerial class”—her term for the strata of college-educated workers stuck between the working classes and actual wealth-owning elites—was largely inspired by the cultural disgust she saw college-educated people direct at their non-college-educated peers within left-wing spaces.
Despite a stated respect for tolerance and inclusion among the left, this can create significant blind spots. Ask why certain portions of the country (largely white, rural, full of people without college degrees) are in economic free fall, while other areas (urban and liberal and well-educated) account for the vast majority of the country’s wealth production, and many progressives and Democrats will not blame capitalist exploitation or the concentration of corporate power creating regional inequality. They’ll blame a reactionary backwardness among the denizens of left-behind areas: anti-science religiosity, rigid adherence to tradition, white chauvinism, and anti-immigrant xenophobia.
Like conservatives before them, many progressives have grown to see economic success as the natural fruits of good moral hygiene. And while higher education can acculturate the upper class to social progressivism, it also often acculturates them to a kind of brain-dead “economism 101” in which markets are always efficient, an individual’s income is always the product of their marginal productivity, public investment is always bumbling and wasteful, and “freer” global trade is always good. It’s probably not a coincidence that the Reagan Revolution and the Democrats’ own turn toward neoliberalism both happened in tandem with the rise of the college-educated as a major U.S. demographic.
Meanwhile, conservatism is increasingly suspicious and hostile toward colleges and universities, if not outright eager for their extinction. Conservatives are of course delighted to suddenly find themselves with a card to play as the defenders of the (white, reactionary) working class. But you will search the new roster of post-Trump, “populist” Republicans in vain for any actual plan to return power to the working class. The story conservatives tell of how college degrees became a prerequisite for good, stable employment remains an entirely cultural one, making snobby educators and liberal bureaucrats the primary antagonists. Conservatives’ practical economic positions remain relentlessly pro-plutocracy, and the GOP remains a party stuck trying to launder those positions into a politics acceptable to a big enough portion of the working class to win national elections.
The right wing spent the last half-century actively destroying the institutions that gave working-class Americans political and economic clout. Austerity-obsessed fiscal policy, decimation of unionization, inflation-obsessed monetary policy, corporate-friendly regulatory policy, the encouragement of a bloated financial sector, the defanging of antitrust enforcement, and a fixation on global “free trade” all conspired to leave American workers fighting one another over a perpetually inadequate job supply, with what work remains often poor-quality and low-paying.
With higher education serving as a cultural base for left-wing politics and a gateway to elite status, large portions of the left are in danger of becoming high society.
Blessed with limitless leverage to set the terms of employment, American business owners became irrationally, capriciously, self-indulgently picky. This manifested itself in ceaseless demands for a college degree for every kind of employment. Every job requires some learning curve, and the demand for “skills” is really a sublimated fight over who will bear the costs, in time and money and convenience, of that learning period: the employer or the worker? The notion that higher education confers “skills” that employers require is a mirage produced by this dynamic.
That’s why, from 2000 to 2015, when the gap between wages for the college-educated and everyone else grew, it was because wages for those with a college education simply fell more slowly. It’s why inequality within education cohorts has increased much more dramatically than inequality between cohorts, and why half of all college-educated workers did not see their wages grow at all over the last 20 years. It’s why, when labor markets do tighten and employers find themselves hard-pressed to find cheap labor, demands for the “skills” that higher education supposedly confers fall as well. In fact, as the job market finally tightened a decade after the 2008 crisis, the speed of wage growth for people without a high school education briefly overtook wage growth for those with an undergraduate degree.
Inequality and mass plundering by the wealthy and elite have turned American society into an economic sinking ship. A college degree simply increases your chances of being herded to the raised end of the vessel. The “market” for workers with college degrees will never “clear,” because there is no amount of education the market actually “needs.” The point for any individual worker is simply to have more education than the other guy, and thus win the lottery for scarce good jobs. Hence our society’s one-size-fits-all quest to shove everyone down the college degree path, and the ever-growing crisis of college dropouts and growing student debt.
The ambitious factions of the Democratic Party would like to forgive most or all of that student debt, and make an undergraduate degree as free and universally available as a high school diploma. If higher education is a ceaseless arms race, we can at least repair the financial damage it’s already done, and make those credentials as easy and cheap to obtain as possible. But even in that instance, we will still have a grossly unequal society with far too few good jobs.
The left-wing case against college for all tends to paint it as a giveaway to the already well-off, but this proves too much: It’s an argument against any public goods of any sort. The actual problem is that college for all, at best, misses the point. At worst, it doubles down on broken upper-class logic for how to “fix” the lower class, tied up in bad arguments about skills gaps and the education panacea.
The actual solution to the arms race has nothing to do with education policy at all. It requires undoing the power and policy shifts of the last 40 years. That means rebuilding unions and the labor movement; refocusing fiscal and monetary policy on true full employment, rather than the accounting abstraction of “budget balancing”; raising wages on the low end and crushing inequality; and rebuilding pro-worker regulations, from the minimum wage to antitrust.
The current danger is that the cultural split created by the spread of higher education will render pan-worker solidarity all but impossible.
A Biden administration and Democratic Congress are not terribly likely to do all this. The recent Democratic primary was a decisive “sit down and shut up” order aimed at the radical portions of the party. Nonetheless, they are far more likely to do it than the Republicans. And they can be prodded into action by a movement demanding a rewrite of the rules governing our rigged and cutthroat system.
Now that student debt has morphed into a gigantic crisis, and more college graduates are forced into poorly paid work, more college-educated people have become economically radicalized, and thus more amenable to this kind of pro-worker reordering of American society. But to actually do it would require a mass bottom-up movement of the economically exploited, of all educational backgrounds. And the current danger is that the cultural split created by the spread of higher education will render such pan-worker solidarity all but impossible.
In a truly democratic and egalitarian America, higher education would be superfluous: Even if it were universally available, most people would simply have no need of it. Higher education would merely serve as a kind of professional trade school for a limited number of specific careers. That would force progressive-left politics to build a very different base of power. Such a change would be quite positive for the left, not to mention the prospects of broadly shared prosperity. But as is often the case in life, we do not necessarily want what is good for us. Thus the question of why higher education should be saved—or, perhaps to be more precise, for what purpose—remains unanswered.
