Political observers on the left and right had very different views on whether Zohran Mamdani would be a good mayor of New York City. But one thing they agreed on was why so many young college graduates supported the self-proclaimed democratic socialist.
As Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and Trump backer, put it in an interview with The Free Press after last fall’s election: Too many people graduate from college with useless degrees, sky-high debt and long odds of owning a home. The graduates saw Mamdani as a solution to these problems. “If you proletarianize the young people,” Mr. Thiel said, “you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist.”
He’s not wrong, at least about the economic challenges facing recent college graduates. Student debt has escalated over the past few decades, while housing is increasingly inaccessible for young Americans, especially in high-priced areas like New York and San Francisco.
Perhaps most alarmingly, recent college graduates are having a harder time finding work. Between 1990 and 2018, it was almost unheard-of for the unemployment rate of recent college graduates to exceed the country’s overall rate. But that has been the case for five straight years now.
It appears that the white-collar job market will continue to soften this year. And almost all of these problems precede the impact of artificial intelligence, which is still in the early stages of cannibalizing human labor.
As a result, poll after poll shows that college graduates are unusually dour. In surveys by the University of Michigan dating back to the 1960s, the college educated had never been more downbeat about economic conditions than over the past four years. Gallup recently found that the portion of college graduates who thought it was a good time to find a “quality job” was a mere 19 percent, down from over 70 percent in 2022.
Of course, the economic turmoil of the last decade or two has taken a toll on millions of Americans. Most of them lacked degrees, and many fared even worse financially than the college educated.
But for young college graduates, extended bouts of unemployment, or long periods stuck in a low-paying job that didn’t make use of their degrees, upended the entire picture of adulthood they had been taught to expect. In effect, a gap has opened up between the life that many graduates believed they had been promised and their actual prospects. And they’re seething about it.
The College Admissions Arms Race
For people in their 20s and early 30s, those expectations were forged as early as elementary school, when “college for all” became a national obsession — the way every American could achieve middle-class affluence.
One of the country’s largest charter school networks, KIPP, helped popularize the mantra “College starts in kindergarten” after it was founded in 1994, not long before this cohort was in fact entering kindergarten.
Presidents reminded families that “the return on a college investment” was nearly double that of the stock market (Bill Clinton) and that college was no longer a luxury but an “economic imperative” (Barack Obama).
With an eye toward future college enrollment, students slogged through longer school days and labored over more homework. One scholar found that the average amount of time that younger children in elementary school spent studying at home increased roughly threefold between 1981 and 2003.
In high school, when it was time for actual college prep, as opposed to just the preparation for the prep, they stuffed their résumés full of university-level classes. The number of students taking Advanced Placement courses grew tenfold from the 1980s to the early 2010s, as the author Malcolm Harris has noted. At Edina High School, in an upper-middle-class suburb of Minneapolis, the now-34-year-old Teddy Hoffman took more than half a dozen A.P. classes before being admitted to Grinnell College in Iowa. It was a fairly common course load for someone who aspired to attend a competitive college.
And it wasn’t just affluent white students who became foot soldiers in the college admissions arms race. At the Baltimore County high school that Chaya Barrett, now 32, attended, students were tracked into classes where they studied vocabulary words and took practice SATs so that no manner of test question would faze them.
“It was: ‘We want you to get to college,’” said Ms. Barrett, who later graduated from Towson University in Maryland. “‘We’re a mostly Black school. And we have high college acceptance rates, and we want to keep that up.’”
In this relentless race to the college quad, money was no object. Dylan Burton, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, already had a lot of college credit when they enrolled in the video game design program at the University of Texas at Dallas in 2017. It would still cost them nearly $70,000 over two and a half years to earn their bachelor’s degree, after room and board. But they had wanted to make video games since childhood, and the industry was exploding in popularity and revenue.
So millions of people like Mr. Hoffman and Ms. Barrett and Mx. Burton applied for scholarships and part-time jobs, and took out loans to cover the difference. Mx. Burton borrowed the full amount. For several years these students juggled finals and term papers and the night shift at the dining hall or the weekend shift at the mall.
And then, once they graduated, many found themselves with tens of thousands of dollars in loans, and no path to a job in line with their credentials.
The Baristas With Degrees
While this generation was focused on earning degrees, the job market was worsening — slowly at first, then all at once. According to a paper by the Berkeley economist Jesse Rothstein, recent graduates started doing significantly worse than older graduates around 2005, then fell much further behind during the Great Recession. The employment rate for recent graduates had yet to fully recover by the Covid-19 pandemic, which upended the job market all over again.
At the highest altitude, the problem was that the economy was producing more graduates but not as many of the jobs they traditionally held. Some economists argue that software had begun to eliminate jobs in fields like financial services and merchandise planning well before the rise of generative A.I.
On average, college graduates still earned a large premium over people with only a high school diploma. But the averages concealed the fact that some graduates were doing very well — like people who worked on Wall Street and in Big Tech — while many others were falling behind.
For decades, many young graduates had earned good money even if their jobs didn’t require a degree, according to researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. But many of those roles — like insurance agent and human resource worker — appeared to start paying less or disappearing in the 2000s and never recovered. A larger portion of these overqualified graduates ended up in jobs that didn’t pay well.
After earning his degree from Grinnell in 2014 and spending a year abroad on a prestigious Watson Fellowship, Mr. Hoffman became a barista at Starbucks. The idea was to buy time while he settled on a career path. (He had studied English and theater.) But seven years later, he was still at Starbucks — partly because the pandemic had delayed his professional plans. With a child on the way and money getting tight, he and his wife applied for temporary public assistance. The state rejected their application.
Mx. Burton, who in college had led a team that made a playable video game called KaiJr, struggled to find work as a designer after graduating in 2019. It turned out that designing video games, notwithstanding the university’s optimistic marketing material, was more akin to becoming a Hollywood actor than a computer programmer: The field could support only a small fraction of the millions of people eager to enter it. Mx. Burton eventually took a much more tedious job testing video games for glitches, for $15 an hour.
“My student loans were about to kick in, and I don’t have a job yet,” Mx. Burton said. “You have to not be picky anymore.”
As Ms. Barrett prepared to graduate with a degree in communications from Towson in 2018, she applied for dozens of jobs in fields like marketing and professional training at the likes of Accenture, Amazon and Stanley Black & Decker. After getting no bites, and with roughly $50,000 in debt, she went full time at the Apple Store where she had worked in college. The store often seduced college graduates with job titles like “Genius” and “Expert,” along with its generous benefits, but Ms. Barrett had still hoped for more.
Class Confidence
In his 2000 book, “Bobos in Paradise,” David Brooks identified a new upper class of bourgeois bohemians — a demographic of techies, financiers and tenured professors who had the earning power and ideology of the bourgeois but the tastes and habits of bohemians. They favored balanced budgets and free trade. They went on expensive ski vacations and kept second homes. But they decorated them with reclaimed-wood furniture and grew heirloom produce in the backyard.
By the early 2020s, young college-educated adults were in some sense the mirror image of Mr. Brooks’s Bobos. They were often bourgeois in their tastes. They cradled sleek smartphones and watched prestige TV on demand. But the previous decade and a half had bequeathed them the bank accounts — and the politics — of the proletariat.
Polling by the Pew Research Center showed that the portion of college graduates with positive views of socialism roughly doubled during the 2010s, to over 40 percent. The shift helped fuel the rise of politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — left-wing figures who built mass appeal.
The ideology of these disaffected college graduates didn’t end with economics. At the most fundamental level, their politics elevated the underdog. They were more likely than non-graduates to call out the harassers of women and gay and transgender people. They worried about racism and climate change, were growing skeptical of law enforcement and believed the Iraq war had been a mistake.
Perhaps the most visible expression of this ideology came at work, where many college graduates increasingly saw themselves as the underdog. They began to unionize at previously nonunion workplaces, like video game studios, architecture firms and banks. In 2023, hundreds of doctors in Minnesota and Wisconsin, fed up with mergers and acquisitions that had made them feel like cogs in the medical-industrial complex, formed what was the largest union of private-sector physicians in the country.
And it was the college graduates stuck in jobs that didn’t require a degree who seemed most determined to take on their employers. College had taught them to question. It had instilled in them what the sociologist Ruth Milkman called “class confidence” — a sense of agency that comes from knowing how to work the system, a broader perspective than the day-to-day grind.
But at the cash register, with the manager looking on, they had to smile and take whatever the customer gave them.
“I have been pretty hard on myself thinking the exhaustion was just me having an attitude problem,” Mr. Hoffman wrote to a friend during his second year at Starbucks. “But there are just too many human interactions in which you aren’t recognized as a human.” He was darkly amused by a customer who, referring to the name displayed on his apron, remarked: “I didn’t know you guys had names!”
Mr. Hoffman helped organize his store in Chicago, one of more than 600 that would unionize beginning in 2021, after years of perceived indignities.
“If you’re going to be disrespected like this,” he told me, “you have to have a bigger piece of the pie.”
The Vanishing Diploma Divide?
Since President Trump’s first term, and especially since his re-election, political analysts have pointed to the gap between college-educated voters and those without degrees as one of the most significant fissures in American politics.
In 2024, Mr. Trump won non-college voters by almost 15 points, while losing the college educated by a similar margin. By contrast, non-college voters had narrowly backed a Democrat, Mr. Obama, as recently as 2012.
To explain the growing divide, commentators typically emphasize how the college educated are more liberal on social and cultural issues than those without degrees, and how these issues have played a bigger role in deciding elections over the past generation.
But that analysis tells only half the story of how American politics has shifted. Critically, it misses how the views of college-educated voters on economic questions have come to resemble those of voters without degrees.
A 2023 paper by the political scientist William Marble found that college graduates were well to the right of voters without a degree on economic issues during the 1980s and 1990s. But they began drifting leftward around 2004, and by 2020 college graduates were somewhat to the left of non-graduates on these issues.
More strikingly, the entire outlook of college graduates appears to have changed. During the Reagan and Clinton eras, many college-educated workers saw themselves as management-adjacent — as future executives and aspiring professionals being groomed for a life of affluence. They did not believe they had much in common with the working class. In the late 1990s, only slightly more than half supported labor unions, according to Gallup.
But by this decade, college graduates often identified more with rank-and-file workers than with employers. According to Gallup, about three-quarters of college graduates supported autoworkers and Hollywood writers in standoffs with their employers in 2023, when both groups went on strike. That matches their support for labor unions overall.
Matt Hoffman, one of the doctors who recently unionized in Minnesota (and no relation to Teddy), told me that he took his children to a United Automobile Workers picket line in 2023. “In our society, the sides are workers versus management,” he said. “I wanted them to understand that.”
In a high-wattage presidential election, when the country was primarily focused on cultural issues, college graduates and those without a degree often appeared to have little in common. But when it came to how they felt about their bosses or their bank accounts, it was suddenly harder to tell them apart. They were no longer on opposite teams.
How this will all play out is still up in the air, but Mr. Hoffman’s store in Chicago may offer an early clue. The staff was a mix of college graduates, college students and employees who didn’t aspire to a four-year degree. One employee earned a welding certificate while at Starbucks and later became an apprentice pipe fitter. But regardless of their educational backgrounds, they almost all voted to unionize the store in 2022. The final tally was 20 to 3.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Noam Scheiber is a Times reporter covering white-collar workers, focusing on issues such as pay, artificial intelligence, downward mobility and discrimination. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
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