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The myth of the downwardly mobile college graduate

The laptop class is moving left -- but not out of economic desperation.

The heyday of the “high-skill” worker is ending.

As corporations find new ways to replace labor with machines, more and more professionals are seeing their vaunted credentials lose their value. Many have been forced into menial jobs — while others cling to their prestigious positions only by accepting ever more exploitative terms of employment.

• Recent college graduates are less likely to be underemployed than they were in the 1990s.• College graduates have moved left due to demographic change, the culture war, and other factors.• Knowledge workers are doing fine today, though that could change in the future due to AI.

The class distinctions that once cleaved skilled workers from common laborers are therefore eroding. And as they do, the former are starting to embrace the politics of proletarians: identifying with the masses instead of management — and demanding structural change instead of milquetoast reforms. Today, “high-skill” workers’ declining fortunes are a problem for them; tomorrow, they will be one for the oligarchic elite.

Or so Karl Marx argued in 1848.

The ensuing 17 decades weren’t kind to Marx’s prophecies. Instead of melting every strata of worker into a uniform proletariat, capitalism generated myriad new gradations of skill, pay, and prestige. And rather than immiserating professionals and proles alike, market economies drastically raised living standards for workers in general, and the highly educated in particular (or at least, they did so once leavened with a spoonful of socialism).

Nonetheless, some now suspect that Marx’s predictions may have been less wrong than premature. The steam engine might not have devalued all skilled labor, but artificial intelligence sure seems like it might. What’s more, even before the past decade’s AI breakthroughs, many college graduates were already struggling to find white-collar work, growing disillusioned, and drifting left.

In a recent New York Times essay, the (very good) labor reporter Noam Scheiber argues that the past 15 years of economic change have taken a toll on young college graduates, bequeathing them “the bank accounts — and the politics — of the proletariat.”

In his telling, recent grads feel they were sold a bill of goods. Throughout their childhoods, every authority promised that they could attain a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle, so long as they secured a university diploma. But too many students took this offer. The economy started minting more knowledge workers than white-collar jobs, thereby consigning a historically large share of graduates to unemployment or low-wage service work.

As a result, in Scheiber’s telling, the politics of college graduates have been transformed. In the Reagan and Clinton eras, the highly educated tended to see themselves “as management-adjacent — ­as future executives and aspiring professionals being groomed for a life of affluence.” Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, university graduates voted to the right of working-class Americans, while holding more conservative views on economic policy.

Now, grads are more likely to identify with rank-and-file workers than their employers. In fact, overqualified baristas, discontented coders, and precariously-employed journalists have spearheaded a boom in labor organizing.

Meanwhile, college-educated voters have become slightly more economically left-wing — and much more Democratic — than those without degrees.

Scheiber acknowledges that these political shifts have multiple causes. But his account of college graduates’ realignment is still largely materialist: The demographic was increasingly “proletarianized” — which is to say, shunted into working-class jobs — and moved left as a consequence.

There’s much truth in Scheiber’s reporting. And in his new book, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, he offers keen insights into the radicalization of the overeducated and underemployed.

But his big-picture narrative about college grads’ shifting fortunes and politics is a bit misleading. A variety of forces have been pushing highly educated voters to the left. But a broad collapse in the economic position of the well-educated is not one of them.

The (college) kids are all right

Without question, the past two generations of college graduates have faced some unique economic challenges. The cost of a university education has risen sharply since the 1990s, forcing students to shoulder larger debts. And in the cities where white-collar jobs are concentrated, housing costs have soared.

Nevertheless, there is little........

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