The Revolt of the College Grads

Summary

Podcast Summary: Offline with Jon Favreau — "The Revolt of the College Grads"

Episode date: April 18, 2026
Guest: Noam Scheiber (author, journalist, New York Times)
Main theme: The economic and political transformation of the college-educated working class amid stagnant wages, student debt, and the rise of AI.

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the thesis of Noam Scheiber’s new book, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College Educated Working Class. Jon Favreau and Scheiber explore how the economic promise once associated with a college degree has eroded due to stagnant wages, ballooning debt, and AI-driven job disruption. They discuss how this has radicalized young, educated workers, leading to political and workplace organizing with far-reaching consequences for American politics and class dynamics.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The College Grads’ Economic Setback

Timestamps: 02:07–07:55

• Scheiber tracks the now-familiar trajectory of college grads finding themselves in jobs for which they are overqualified (think: “barista with a BA”).
• Wages for college grads have stagnated or even decreased (once adjusted for debt) over the last 20 years.
• The “safety valve” of decent-paying, non-degree “fallback jobs” (e.g., insurance agents) is disappearing, adding to frustration.

“If your fallback job was an insurance agent and it became, you know, barista...that can be a pretty frustrating thing.”
— Noam Scheiber (02:07)

2. Political Ramifications: Proletarianization of the Educated

Timestamps: 07:55–14:46

• Millennials and Gen Z experienced formative disillusionment: institutional mistrust born from events like Iraq, Afghanistan, and the 2008 crisis.
• The "diploma divide" frames politics—college vs. non-college voters—yet on economic issues, these groups are converging towards leftward, populist views.
• Doctors are now “clock punchers like everyone else”—the rise of a broader worker consciousness among professionals.
• Potential for a new working-class coalition exists, seen in election patterns (e.g., overwhelming support for democratic socialist Zoram Mamdani among young college grads).

“These two groups are actually getting closer over time on economic issues... By 2020, [college grads are] actually slightly to the left, as a group, of people without degrees.”
— Noam Scheiber (10:28)

3. Parsing the Data: Wages, Underemployment, and Diversity of Outcomes

Timestamps: 17:37–22:41

• Macro data shows overall wage stagnation, but significant divergence by major and institution.
• Disagreement among pundits (Eric Levitz, Roy Teixeira) is less about direction (stagnation) and more about scale and impact.
• Underemployment—college grads in jobs that don’t require a degree—may be modestly lower than 30 years ago, but “good” non-degree jobs have sharply declined, replaced by lower-paying service roles.
• For-profits and non-competitive public colleges are enrolling vast numbers with little economic payoff.

“We’ve had millions and millions of people getting these degrees of pretty dubious value. And we’ve just seen this huge kind of divergence in outcomes for people who go to college.”
— Noam Scheiber (25:13)

4. AI as an Accelerant and the Future of White-Collar Work

Timestamps: 27:31–34:05

• The threat of automation and AI is poised to dramatically worsen underemployment and wage problems for the educated.
• Entry-level white-collar work is especially vulnerable to automation; the traditional “career ladder” is breaking as grunt work (formerly a training ground) is automated.
• AI’s early effects seen already in fields like fashion buying—machines outperform high-status human forecasters.
• The displacement is just beginning; AI’s impact will likely be catalytic, not just incremental.

“Now that AI is doing that grunt work, it’s not clear why we need young people to hire them at all, but it’s also not clear how we’re going to train them or pay for the training. So this is like a multidimensional problem that no one really has their head around.”
— Noam Scheiber (33:34)

5. Class, Culture, and the Elusive Political Coalition

Timestamps: 36:29–42:07

• Even with economic woes creating a common cause, cultural divides—stoked by the media and social networks—can prevent a unified class-based movement.
• Culture war issues often dominate the political discourse, distracting from bread-and-butter economic concerns.
• On some flashpoints (e.g., Gaza), young college and non-college Americans are surprisingly aligned, suggesting culture war fractures aren’t insurmountable.
• Concrete, specific policy platforms (“fast free buses, publicly owned supermarkets”) and having a clear foil can overcome some division and cynicism.

“I think the lesson...is like, people, when they’re really mad, they do kind of want someone to blame. And if you don’t tell them who to blame, they may blame someone else.”
— Noam Scheiber (43:00)

6. The Media Environment’s Role

Timestamps: 45:50–48:04

• Social and traditional media reward outrage and focus on cultural flashpoints, making economic issues less “sticky” in public debate.
• Even politicians committed to economic populism (e.g., Sherrod Brown) find the gravitational pull of culture war issues nearly irresistible.

“...the media landscape has evolved...largely from social media...every outlet...gets data about what’s popular...By and large...people love to get worked up about cultural issues...”
— Noam Scheiber (45:50)

7. Historical Precedents and the Potential for Instability

Timestamps: 50:10–53:30

• Scheiber references Peter Turchin’s “elite overproduction” thesis: when highly educated people lack commensurate jobs, political instability follows (e.g., France, Russia, modern China).
• He sees major resistance and disruptive potential, but not necessarily “Bolshevik-style” revolution in the U.S.—more likely, increasing polarizations and shocks at the ballot box.

“...in this country, you know, we’re not looking at a revolution, but I think, you know, a Mamdani-type election again...that tells you...there’s intensity around this issue.”
— Noam Scheiber (53:30)

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Notable Quotes

• On Decline of Economic Promise:
  “They did more to prepare than anyone. More of them went to college than anyone in history. And yet when they get out, they find that their degrees aren’t as valuable as they thought.”
  — Noam Scheiber (08:54)

• On Professional Demotion:
  “Doctors have undergone this transformation...they’re now kind of clock punchers like everybody else. You know, they work for these huge medical systems...”
  — Noam Scheiber (12:39)

• On AI and Entry-Level Jobs:
  “The AI is doing that grunt work. It’s not clear why we need the young people to hire them at all, but it’s also not clear how we’re going to train them...”
  — Noam Scheiber (33:34)

• On Media & Political Discourse:
  “...when there’s a good meaty story about...trans rights or immigration, they’re gonna read that story, share it...So I think there is this kind of structural factor that just exerts this kind of gravitational pull on the entire discourse.”
  — Noam Scheiber (45:50)

• On Cynicism and the Political Challenge:
  “There is this sense among people who end up skewing right over this issue that...the government hasn’t really succeeded at speaking to my needs in any way except in some limited moment.”
  — Noam Scheiber (42:07)

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Timeline of Key Segments

• 02:07–07:55 — Scheiber details the emergence of college-educated underemployment through the Starbucks labor movement.
• 07:55–14:46 — Discussion of the economic leftward shift of college grads and the potential for new political coalitions.
• 17:37–22:41 — Parsing data on wage stagnation, debt, and divergences among majors/institutions.
• 27:31–34:05 — Exploration of AI’s effect on white-collar career pathways and entry-level jobs.
• 36:29–44:19 — Debate over class versus cultural drivers in politics, with focus on generational shifts and policy messaging.
• 45:50–48:04 — Examination of how the media ecosystem intensifies culture wars, crowding out economic debates.
• 50:10–53:30 — Comparison to historical periods of “elite overproduction” and reflection on the likely instability ahead.

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Conclusion

This conversation provides a sweeping analysis of how the economic fate of America’s college-educated working class—long presumed to be upwardly mobile—has grown precarious, and how their disappointment is becoming a force in organizing, political realignment, and potentially, broader societal shocks. Scheiber and Favreau offer a nuanced view, highlighting both the potential for new coalitions and the formidable obstacles posed by cultural divides and an algorithm-driven media landscape. The episode underscores that with the advent of AI-driven automation, the “revolt” of college grads may only be in its early stages.

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Transcript

[Jon Favreau]

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[Noam Scheiber]

You had these kind of good non college jobs that used to function as the safety valve that you know, kind of limited the frustration of people who didn't get the job that they that they hoped they would get. Suddenly that safety valve is really diminishing. And you can see where, you know, if your fallback job was an insurance agent and it became, you know, barista or it became, you know, retail, you know, assistant manager or sales clerk, that can be a pretty frustrating thing.

[Jon Favreau]

I'm Jon Favreau and you just heard

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

from today's guest, author and journalist, Noam Scheiber.

[Jon Favreau]

Noam writes about workers for the New York Times. He's covered union organizing efforts at Starbucks,

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Amazon and major tech companies.

[Jon Favreau]

He's written about AI's impact on white

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

collar workers, the rise of remote work after Covid, and the Trump administration's attacks

[Jon Favreau]

on the federal workforce. But today I invited Noem on to

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

talk about his new book, the Rise and Revolt of the College Educated Working

[Jon Favreau]

Class, where he argues that stagnant wages, rising student debt and the threat of

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

artificial intelligence has changed the economic promise once offered by a college degree.

[Jon Favreau]

He follows how college educated workers are

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

responding to this new reality by taking

[Jon Favreau]

jobs they're overqualified for or by organizing their workplaces and how their response is reshaping our political system and has the potential to break it.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

We had a fascinating conversation about the book. I challenged him on a couple of points. If these changes are dependent on the

[Jon Favreau]

type of degrees people are pursuing or

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

or dependent on where they go to college.

[Jon Favreau]

And I talk to him about the

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

ways that culture and class intersect and sometimes don't intersect when it comes to politics.

[Jon Favreau]

I also talk to him about the

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

ways AI may supercharge the problems these graduates face as more white collar jobs disappear. We'll get into it all in a

[Jon Favreau]

moment, but before we do, please consider becoming a crooked media subscriber if you haven't already, so that you don't miss out on any of the great content we're putting out for our friends at the pod. Subscribers get our new extra episode of POD Save America called Pod Save America. Only friends, other subscriber only shows like Polar Coaster with Dan Pfeiffer, access to all of our excellent substack newsletters like Pod Save America. Open tabs ad free episodes of all your favorite crooked pods and you get to feel good about supporting one of the few independent, proudly pro democracy media

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[Jon Favreau]

Let's get into it. Here's Gnome Shiber. Noam. Welcome to Offline.

[Noam Scheiber]

Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Of course, you've written this, this wonderful book, the Rise and Revolts of the College Educated Working Class. The book's called Mutiny Fascinating thesis. It opens on a Starbucks picket line in Chicago with a man named Teddy Hoffman. He's Grinnell grad, Watson fellow, and then has basically been pulling espresso shots for like seven years at Starbucks. When did you first realize that Teddy wasn't an anomaly, but the leading edge of something bigger, A bigger trend in employment?

[Noam Scheiber]

Yeah, so I actually, I'll back up a little. Before I met Teddy, I started covering the organizing campaign at Starbucks. In the late summer of 21, I got an email from an organizer who I'd worked with, you know, as a. Had been a source in the past. And he said, we've got a great team, team of folks here at the Starbucks in Buffalo, and we're about to file a petition to have a union election. Are you interested in talking to them? And I said, sure, yeah, of course. And so I wrote a piece, announce, you know, making, reporting the news that they were filing these petitions for a union election. They initially tried to do six stores. NLRB rejected three of the petitions. So they had elections at three stores. They won at two of the three. That was like in the late fall of 21. And then these folks who were doing the initial organizing in Buffalo had thought of it as a kind of Buffalo specific campaign, but it rapidly spread across the country. So by January, there were maybe half a dozen to a dozen stores in cities like Boston, Phoenix, Jacksonville, Florida, By February, there were dozens. And then by the late spring, there were hundreds of stores filing for union elections. And every time, at least for as long as I could keep up, every time a new store filed a petition for an election, I tried to get on the phone or jump on a zoom with a few of the people who were involved. And, you know, not to a person, but a large majority of the people turned out to be college educated. They were often, you know, had a pretty sizable amount of student debt. They were definitely not doing the job that they thought that they would be doing when they entered college and even when they graduated from college. And yet somehow they had found themselves at Starbucks. And so I realized, okay, something's up here, something's going on. I think I did an initial story in like January of 22 saying, hey, you know, there's a lot of college educated people involved in this stuff. And then this kind of continued to spread. We saw organizing campaigns at Apple, at rei, at Trader Joe's, at Amazon. And more often than not, it was college educated people leading those campaigns. And so, yeah, at that point I'm thinking, okay, there's something really going on. Here I started looking at economic data, economic research, and it starts to kind of line up. It looks like this is not some kind of fluke anomaly. Actually, the job market for recent college grads has really softened. And it's something that, know, as I looked at the research, had gone back all the way, even a few years before the Great Recession even, but then gets much worse during the recession, and it just never really recovers. I think that was the thing. So people who were just entering the job market in 20, 18, 19, 20, were still dealing with this kind of sluggish, stagnant job market for recent college grads. So it, you know, it kind of went in phases, but I'd say sort of from the late summer of 21 into the spring of 22, you know, it slowly started to dawn on me that there was something bigger going on here.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

That's like the economic background. You write that this generation of college graduates has been given, quote, the bank accounts and the politics of the proletariat. What does that mean, look like in practice? Like, walk us through what's different about this working class compared to working classes we've had before with regard to their politics?

[Noam Scheiber]

Yeah, so I think, you know, this is. A lot of these folks were born kind of in the early to mid-90s. They're in, you know, in junior high school, high school in the kind of early to mid 2000s. So this is Iraq, Afghanistan, and then the financial crisis, which you obviously remember this period very well. These folks were. I'd say there was just a kind of general loss of faith in institutions, a loss of faith in authority, a sense that the people who were supposed to be in charge really didn't know what they were doing. I mean, these were these kind of formative moments for people in this generation.

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And.

[Noam Scheiber]

And so I think that had a real effect on how they looked at the people who were supposed to be in charge. And I think from middle school, from high school, there was a sense that the people who were supposed to be in charge really didn't have a clue about what was going on. And so that was the kind of radicalizing thing, I think. And then you overlaid their personal experience with getting a degree and finding it difficult to navigate the job market after getting a degree. And then an additional layer, which is, as I write in the book, this was the generation that was probably given the hardest sell about going to college of any generation in history. They did more homework. Their school days were longer between the early 80s and the early 2010s, about 10 times more people took AP classes over that 30 year period. This was a generation that got a hard sell. They did more to prepare than anyone. More of them went to college than anyone in history. And yet when they get out, they find that their degrees aren't as valuable as they thought. And meanwhile, the world seems to be kind of falling apart around them. And I think both of those things had a kind of radicalizing effect on, you know, on their kind of political worldview broadly and their sense of the way that the system may or may not be working for them.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Why do you think the college educated working class matters? Not just as a sort of sociological, economic curiosity, but as a political force. Like what, what, what kind of political implications do you see having sort of studied this cohort?

[Noam Scheiber]

Yeah. So I think, you know, anyone who followed the discourse around the 2016 campaign and the 2020 campaign and then the 24 campaign has heard the term diploma divide in their lives. And this idea that, you know, college grads and people without degrees, they, they never voted exactly the same, but they really start diverging in how they vote during the first Trump election. And then by 24, there's just this chasm. Right. I think people with degrees favored Kamala Harris by about 15 points and people without degrees favored Trump by about 13, 14 points. So just a huge gap in how college grads are voting relative to those without degrees. And I think the story that's kind of spun out of that is these groups are as far apart culturally, politically, socially as you can imagine. Right. It's almost like two different epistemological universes that they're living in. You know, college grads read newspapers and, you know, listen to mainstream news, and people without degrees just get their information from TikTok and Facebook. And I guess what I found as I reported this out is while all of that is kind of true, these two groups are actually getting closer over time on economic issues. So in the 80s and 90s, college grads were typically well to the right of people without degrees on economic questions, on taxes, regulation, the role of government in the economy, redistribution. The college grads were pretty moderate to conservative on these questions, and people without degrees were pretty left, populist. Beginning in about 2004, the college grads, right around this time that we're talking about Iraq and the housing bubble, the college grads start drifting left on economics, and by 2020, they're actually slightly to the left, is a group of people without degrees, though, pretty close. So basically what you see is even as we've had this big divergence on cultural questions, on social issues, on maybe immigration, on core economic questions. These two groups have actually become much more similar than different over time. And so I do think that there is actually this kind of potential super majority of working class folks out there. You know, this is something that people like Bernie Sanders have talked about in the past. You know, it's really, you know, 99% of people are actually workers, you know, and there's just kind of a 1% group of capitalists and billionaires. And I think that the data actually bears that out. And I think we've seen that over the past two decades that this group has become much more left on economics and really developed more of a kind of worker consciousness. You know, in my book, I allude to conversations that I've had with doctors, even, you know, highly trained, highly paid. But doctors have undergone this transformation over the past 20 years where their industry has become much more consolidated. So these folks who used to own their own practices, they used to be the boss, they're now kind of clock punchers like everybody else. You know, they work for these huge medical systems. Typically they have all these like, metrics that they've got to follow. You know, you can only spend 10 minutes with a patient and you've got to discharge them after 48 hours. And there's a series of questions you have to ask them. And these doctors are now thinking like, wow, I just feel like a factory worker, you know. So I think this, the kind of rise of this worker consciousness is something that's, that's relatively new. And again, it kind of makes them a lot more similar, at least on economic questions than different from the traditional working class. So I do think that there is this kind of space for a coalition like we haven't really seen, you know, in a long time. And you know, we can talk specifics. But someone like Zoram Hamdani in New York, I think really did tap into this. He was very much a self described democratic socialist. He ran on fast free buses and publicly owned supermarkets. And yet college grads voted for him overwhelmingly, which would have been unheard of in the 80s or 90s, in fact, among college grads under 30. So young college grads, they supported Mamdani by 84, 15, basically, so, so overwhelming majority of college of young college grads from Aamdani. So yeah, I do think there's this divide that we've heard about. It exists, but it doesn't exist across all issues. And some very important issues. College grads are actually pretty close to people without degrees.

[Jon Favreau]

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[Noam Scheiber]

Love therapy.

[Jon Favreau]

My therapist always starts every session and she says, how are you feeling? And I said, well, this morning I woke up and the president threatened to exterminate a civilization, so I'm not feeling good. And then the conversation went on from there.

[Noam Scheiber]

And what was her technique for at the end of the hour?

[Jon Favreau]

Were you less worried about that?

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

No, no.

[Jon Favreau]

But that felt better about me. Right. And that felt better about me and looks.

[Noam Scheiber]

And if you're gonna be incinerated, that's a great headspace to be in, I think.

[Jon Favreau]

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[Noam Scheiber]

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[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

I want to come back to the sort of political cultural implications, but first I just want to dig in on some of the data.

[Noam Scheiber]

Yeah.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Since there's been some disagreement on this point, APLU and Public Policy Institute of California still shows bachelor's degree holders earning roughly 75 to 86% more over a lifetime than high school grads. That gap has widened slightly since 2003. Eric Levitz at Vox, I know you guys have gone back and forth on this as well. He argued that the share of college grads who are underemployed has actually declined over time. So recent college grads were less likely to hold a low wage job in 2023 than they had been three decades earlier. How do you square some of the macro data with the data that you've seen and some of the on the ground storytelling that you've done in this book?

[Noam Scheiber]

Yeah. So, you know, I think there's actually a pretty wide overlap between the story that I tell and the story that Eric tells. So I think we both agree that median wages or average wages, whichever you choose, they're somewhere between flat and declining over the past 25, 30 years. So Eric would say, you know, if you look at median wages for recent college grads between 1990 and today, they're like slightly up, but very slightly over this 35 year period. And I would say, well, if you look at this period that I'm talking about, you know, the kind of early 2000s to the late 2010. So that kind of, you know, 15, 20 year period where these people are getting radicalized. Median wages are actually going down for recent college grads. So they kind of max out around 2000, 2001, and by 2017, 18, they're still 5, 10% below where they were in 2000, 2001. And you know, Eric, Eric agreed. We don't dispute that. We both kind of looked at the same data from the New York Fed. The other thing is that's just your, your, your wage, that's your kind of your gross income. If you then add debt, right, student debt, which just explodes between the mid-90s and 2015, then suddenly you're taking another big chunk out of this wage that either hasn't grown or has declined. And so there's no question that the kind of actual disposable income of this group of folks has declined once you take out debt. You know, I think Eric's argument, which I, you know, I think is, is true is you haven't seen like a complete collapse in income. You haven't seen people who were, you know, the median going from 50,000 to 25,000 or something. But I think we both agree that there is like an ideological element in addition to an economic element. He would argue that ideology plays a much bigger role. I think, you know, ideology plays an important role, but economics is playing a key role too. The one other thing that I think is important in this data, it all comes from the Federal Reserve bank of New York. Well, he and I kind of picked over it. The data point that you cite, college grads in jobs that don't require a degree, he's right, that, that actually, you know, it kind of hovers between like, you know, 40 and 50% over time. So it, you know, recently it's lower than it was in the 90s, but in this period that we're talking about, it kind of bumps up and down. So yes, it's slightly lower now than it was 20, 30 years ago, but not substantially. But there's another data point in that same data set that they include that I think is very telling and Eric includes it in his article, but didn't draw a ton of attention to it. And that is the percent of college grads in jobs that don't require a degree. Right. So you're working a job that you're overqualified for. That's a good paying job. Right. So, you know, the Fed defines it as like insurance agents or HR administrators or, you know, office managers, people in jobs that college grads often do, but they don't require a degree. Kind of functioned at like a safety valve, you know, so you graduate from college, you know, maybe you train to be, you know, you're hoping to be a journalist or you're hoping to be, you know, a political consultant. You didn't end up in that job, you ended up as an insurance agent. It's not your dream job, but it pays you pretty well and you do okay. The percentage of college, of underemployed college guys in those good paying jobs, it really drops beginning in 2003. It then drops again during the recession in 2008, 9. And it just never recovers. And if you pull up Eric's data, he shows this group of people going from about 21% of college grads in 1990 or maybe the late 90s to like 14% today. So that group actually really drops by a lot. And I actually think that is a pretty radicalizing thing. You know, like you had these, these kind of good non college jobs that used to function as the safety valve that, you know, kind of limited the frustration of people who didn't get the job that they, that they hoped they would get. Suddenly that safety valve is really diminishing. And you can see where, you know, if your fallback job was an insurance agent and it became, you know, barista or it became, you know, retail, you know, assistant manager or sales clerk, that can be a pretty frustrating thing.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Do you think those jobs were, have disappeared? Do you think that they, those jobs just pay less than they used to?

[Noam Scheiber]

Is it both? Great point. Yeah, some disappear, some pay less. So you're right, it's a great question. So if you actually look at insurance agent, which is one of these kind of canonical or was one of these kind of canonical, good non college jobs, we have more insurance agents today, but they make a lot less. Like in real terms, their wages have dropped substantially from the late 90s, early 2000s. And that's because it used to be this kind of, you know, relationship business. You know, you met the customer face to face and now a lot of insurance, as anyone who's like bought homeowners or auto insurance can probably attest. So it happens online, right? So you mostly go to some website, Travelers or Geico. You enter your information, they give you a few quotes. If you run into an issue, you call someone in customer support. So we have more of those people. But, but the kind of, you know, old school person in an office who comes and glad hands you and you know, lays out your options for you, that job doesn't really exist anymore. So we've really sort of degraded and commoditized that job. And so, yeah, the people make substantially less in that field, even though there are many more of those jobs available. So that's one piece. There's another piece where we actually just have fewer people. And an example of that is like a tax preparer. You know, prior to the late 90s, you had college grads. You know, you work at H and R Block or something, you know, you're pulling your taxes together in the spring, you go see someone, they help walk you through your different options. Well, now again, all that happens online. If you want to go to HR Block, they're just going to send you their website. You enter all your information again, maybe if you, you run into trouble, you, you call someone, we have completely like cannibalized that job, you know, so we have about the same number of tax preparers today that we did 25 years ago, even though we have millions and millions and millions of more people. So as a share of the economy, way fewer people who work as tax preparation in tax preparation than did, you know, 25, 30 years years ago.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

So Roy Teixeira made a related point in his Wall Street Journal review of your book, which is that STEM and business majors still have a roughly 90% chance of getting a well paying job, versus about 50% for arts and humanities majors. So is the story you're telling about all college graduates or is it, does it index, is it an over index on like humanities grads in expensive blue city metros?

[Noam Scheiber]

I'd say somewhere between the two. So he's absolutely right. There's a chapter in my book where I talk about one of the big developments among college grads over the past 30 years is in the 80s and 90s, college grads more or less moved in lockstep. You know, obviously if you went to Harvard and you majored in finance or whatever, you're probably going to do slightly better than someone who went to the University of Florida and majored in art history. But it really was a rising tide. College grads, you know, kind of collectively moved Forward in the 80s and 90s and into the early 2000s. The story since 2000 has been a lot of diversity in the experience of college grad. So if you go to Harvard and you major in finance, you tend to do, you still do incredibly well. Yeah, but the person who goes to the state school and majors in the humanities does not do that well. And in fact, we then have a few additional wrinkles that have complicated the story. One is the fastest or you know, by volume. So the largest group compared with 25 years ago is people who go to non competitive public schools. So not the University of Florida or not even the University of South Florida, but like the University of Fort Pierce or something. Right. And these are essentially, some of them are open admission, some, you know, accept 80 to 90% of the students who apply. But we've seen that the return on that degree is just not that great. But we've seen the largest growth in enrollment there and then the other, the sort of fastest growing. So percentage wise, the largest, not in absolute terms, is for profit universities. And again, the return there has been pretty low and in some cases, in many cases negative. So when you add the growth of these non competitive public schools and people in for profit colleges, we've had millions and millions of people getting these degrees of pretty dubious value. And we've just seen this huge kind of divergence in outcomes for people to go to college. So I think that's absolutely right. If you go to a really good school and you get a STEM degree, though computer science, maybe not anymore, but if you get a degree in electrical engineering, you're probably going to do great. If you go to the University of Fort Pierce and you major in English, it's probably going to be a little dicey for you.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Well, your comment about computer science maybe not anymore sort of brings me to my, my main reaction, not just reading your book, but also reading like, you know, some of the reviews from Eric Levitz or Roy Teixeira, like sort of pushing back on some of the data because it's interesting and I think they make some good points. And you, you clearly make some good points, you know, hitting back at that. But all of this seems beside the point because it feels like AI is going to make this problem, even if

[Jon Favreau]

it's a smaller problem than you suggest,

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

or it's going to make it exponentially worse no matter what. And you talk about, you follow someone who's a writer. The 2023 writers strike, that takes up a big chunk of your book. And that was fundamentally as much about AI as it was about residuals.

[Noam Scheiber]

Absolutely.

[Jon Favreau]

And then your book argues in general

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

that quote, too many people with expensive credentials chase too few jobs requiring those credentials. So then we have AI making this problem dramatically worse because entry level white collar work is, is exactly what the current models are best at automating those stats about STEM seem very prime to be.

[Noam Scheiber]

Those jobs seem very backward looking indicator.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

So how do you think about like

[Jon Favreau]

how much worse this problem is going to get?

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Like is this just is what you wrote about? Is it the snapshot of a transitional moment or is it the beginning of something much, much larger?

[Noam Scheiber]

Yeah, so I do think of this as kind of a dress rehearsal for what's to come. And you know, I think we see the initial kind of rupture beginning in like 2003. 4 if, you know, depending on which data set you look at. One is that dataset I mentioned, the kind of good non college jobs starting to disappear. Another is employment rates for recent college grads. There's a really good paper by an economist at Berkeley called Jesse Rothstein. He's actually chief economist at the labor in Obama's first term, he wrote this great paper about employment rates for young college grads relative to older grads. Those two things used to move kind of in lockstep. The younger grads and the older grads used to have roughly the same employment rates. And around 2004, 5, they start to diverge. They diverge again during the recession and then again they never reconvere. So we kind of see this thing get going in the early to mid 2000s. The recession makes it worse. I think a lot of people thought that like, okay, once we get far enough out from the recession, maybe this was just a really bad, deep recession, the labor market heals. It's just taking longer for the younger folks. But in fact, post pandemic, you know, we had this year, you know, six months to a year long period during the great resignation and quiet quitting when it looked like younger folks were actually getting a little more leverage. That disappeared very quickly. And since 21 or so 22, the picture has gotten worse and worse. So there's another data point, the unemployment rate for recent college grads. If you look from like 1990 to 2018, it's almost never higher than the overall unemployment rate facing everybody. Right. So beginning in 2018, the unemployment rate for recent college grads just kind of pokes up above the overall unemployment rate. Looks just kind of like noise or a blip. But then beginning again in 21 and through the present, the unemployment rate for recent college grads just shoots past the overall rate and it just stays there. In fact, the gap gets bigger and bigger. So the last few years, if anything, have gotten worse. Only a little bit of that can be explained by AI. I mean, I think we're just starting to see the bite in the last year or two for people in certain careers, you know, software developers certainly. But yeah, I mean, I think we've had what's essentially A kind of a slow, a slow burn at this and I think is going to be this massive accelerant. And you know, the other wrinkle I think that's interesting is the way that this played out over the past 20 years. It actually was a kind of earlier version of automation in some respects. I mean I mentioned kind of tax preparation and insurance. But beginning about 10 years ago, we start to see AI. You know, what we recognize as AI start to chip away at white collar employment too. Not gen AI, not chatgpt, but early forms of machine learning. And the example I like to point to is fashion buyers. These are the people who work for retail outlets like Bloomingdale's or Nordstrom. And, and their job is to predict like what kind of shirt or shoes or jacket you're going to want like a year in advance. So they go to fashion shows, they talk to designers, they talk to wholesalers, they look at historical data and some of it is just they go with their gut. You know, it's a bit of an art and a bit of a science. This was like a pretty high status, high paying jobs. You know, people who've been doing it for a few years tend to make $100,000, $150,000, $200,000. Beginning around like 2017, 18, retailers start to realize that machines are really good at this job. You know, they can kind of look at 30, 40, 50 years of data. They can find all kinds of patterns that the human eye can't identify. And they actually do better at humans than trying to anticipate what the public is going to want to buy a year out. And so, you know, the big companies like Bloomingdale's or Nordstrom, they still have a lot of human buyers. But you see whenever there's a kind of new startup, a fashion startup, we had all these fashion in a box where they send you a couple of outfits to try on every month and rent the Runway. And all these kind of tech enabled fashion outlets. They were increasingly using AI to do what humans had done, which something had been a very high status and high paying job. So we already see AI bite at a kind of low level in the last part of the previous decade into the, the beginning of this one. But as you say, I mean there are just now whole categories of entry level jobs that the AI can do. And I think the real trick is, you know, we used to basically subsidize the training of entry level people with grunt work, you know, so like if you were a young consultant, management consultant right out of school, you spent a year or two just making like PowerPoint presentations and preparing slide decks and, you know, messing around with Excel and all that sort of grunt work subsidized the training. You know, you did all that stuff, it was tedious, but you hung around other more experienced consultants. You got to sit in on presentations and meetings and calls, and you learn how to do the job. Now the AI is doing that grunt work. It's not clear both. It's not clear why we need the young people to hire them at all, but it's also not clear how we're going to train them or pay for the training. So this is like a multidimensional problem that no one really has their head around. So far, I think.

[Jon Favreau]

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[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Well, I do want to go back to the politics of it all because the unemployment rate goes up and remains elevated for recent college grads. You have stagnant wages, they're in debt because they went to college with the promise that the college degree would lead to a well paying job. Housing is very expensive. We haven't even talked about sort of the affordability crisis that piles on top of this.

[Jon Favreau]

And as you said then there is

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

thus this potential for an even larger working class political coalition that doesn't just include non college educated folks, but college educated folks as well. So then George Packer in his review in the Atlantic sort of raises a different issue, which is about whether class or culture is sort of more politically salient for the college educated working class. And he wrote, quote, there are important

[Jon Favreau]

cultural differences between an internist struggling to

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

treat patients in a private equity conglomerate you mentioned and a John Deere machinist on strike because of layoffs that both belong to a union. Might matter less than that.

[Jon Favreau]

One voted for Harris, the other voted

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

for Trump, and each has some reason to fear and loathe the other. The culture war is burning too hot for a class war to snuff it out anytime soon.

[Jon Favreau]

What's your response to that?

[Noam Scheiber]

Yeah, so I mean, look, I don't want to, I don't want to be naive about the potential for a coalition here. George is like 100, right? Obviously our elections at least, you know, since 2016. I mean, I think you could argue and you, I'm sure you remember it well that 2012 was actually like an election fought on economics. You know, it was a pretty populist the last one the last one. So I think your boss was, was very skilled at, you know, sounding like pretty resonant populist economic themes. Obviously Mitt Romney was a good foil for that. We had a lot of help, the private equity guy. So I think that was a pretty good example of the power of that kind of message to unite people kind of up and down the income scale. But certainly since 2016, we've had elections that were fought on kind of cultural grounds and there were these obvious huge cleavages that the Democrats really struggled to bridge. So I don't want to be naive about it. I mean, the one thing, thing I will say, and I think both, both George and maybe Rui Teixeira in the Wall Street Journal review that you mentioned, I think they overstate the role, the divisions on cultural issues. So one example that Rui cited was Gaza. And it's absolutely the case that this has been a real cause among young college grads. I write about it in my book. This became. It just intersected with the Starbucks organizing campaign and it kind of blew up in all kinds of unpredictable ways. But it turns out if you look at polling on Gaza, young people, you know, people under 35 without the college degrees and people under 35 with degrees, they're both like roughly as skeptical of Israel and both roughly as sympathetic to the Palestinians as one another. So there's like really no discernible gap on Gaza between the college grads and the non grads. You know, maybe the college grads use more kind of radical rhetoric, but it's not like if you're, you know, trying to appeal, trying to, you know, build a coalition of people under 35 that you're going to alienate the non grads. If you take the position on Israel and Gaza of the grads, they basically feel the same way. So I think we can overstate the potential cleavages. The other thing is, look, I think there is something to be said just for the skill of the politician. I mean, Barack Obama was an incredibly skilled politician. He was very good at tilting the landscape to issues that he wanted to run on. I think Azoraani was very skilled at that too. Fast free buses and public owned grocery stores and rent control. I mean, these are like fundamentally economic issues, but they really broke through in an otherwise like really like culturally toxic and polarized political environment. So, you know, I think it can be done. But as I said, I don't want to be naive. I think George is clearly like putting his finger on something that is not going to be like trivial to solve

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

it's interesting to me that Gaza came up because I actually think that that's an issue. I agree that that's probably an issue that doesn't divide, especially this generation, as much, regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum at this point. But I do think, and you know, and George points out this too, which is, you know, 46% of white college educated men under 45 voted for Trump in 2024. There is this shift, especially with young men, you know, and if, look, if you look at polls now, they are, they have soured on Trump for sure. It doesn't mean that they've come back to the Democratic Party. But I've, you know, I've sat in these focus groups. I've watched some of these focus groups where young people, no matter what everyone thinks they care about, you know, which is like, oh, they all care about Gaza and climate change. And it's true that they do care about that. But when you ask them what's the most important issue on your mind, affordability is like, by far number one. And when you talk to a lot of young people who voted for Trump, they will still tell, especially people who hadn't voted for Republican before and have just sort of were sort of in the middle and go back and forth between parties or back and forth between voting, they will say, oh, well, I did. I voted for Trump because.

[Jon Favreau]

For economic reasons, because everything's so unaffordable.

[Noam Scheiber]

Economy was great.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

And so I do wonder if, like, how you think about sort of creating that, that coalition that is tied together by economic interests, when sometimes, like political views, even with around economics, they're divided not necessarily by just like, the role of government in general, but like, how much they trust government to actually deliver on what politicians actually promise.

[Noam Scheiber]

Yeah, I think you make a great point. I mean, going back to the earlier part of our conversation about a sort of loss of faith in institutions. There is this sense among people who end up skewing right over this issue that, like, okay, fine, you, Kamala Harris, are gonna tell me you're gonna build 3 million new units of housing and we're gonna subsidize demand. And I don't believe any of it because I've been paying attention for the past 20 years, and the government hasn't really succeeded at speaking to my needs in any way except in some limited moment. So I do think that you have to be very conscious as you try to articulate this message about that loss of trust, that loss of faith in institutions. I mean, I think I'd say there are two lessons, and you're far more of a student of the politics of this than I am. But as I kind of watch what's worked over the past few decades, the two lessons I take away are one, concreteness and specificity. I mean, I think Mamdani got a lot of traction over just like, super concrete issue, you know, rent control, fast free buses, publicly owned supermarkets, just stuff that you could, you could touch, you know, And I think it actually gave him some momentum heading into his mayoralty because, you know, maybe you're not going to succeed at, you know, bringing up, you know, millions of these, these disaffected folks, but you can certainly build, like one publicly owned supermarket, right? You can certainly kind of build some momentum, just like a basic proof of concept. So I think the, the specificity and the concreteness very much played to his strength. And then, you know, the other thing, just to go back to the 2012 campaign that we were talking about, I'm someone, I guess, who believes you kind of need a foil, you know, and, and sort of just, you know, speaking in abstractions and not sort of naming names. I don't think that's worked, you know, And I think the lesson of, you know, everything, you know, from Obama to Trump to Biden to Mamdani is like, people, when they're really mad, they do kind of want someone to blame. And if you don't tell them who to blame, though, they may blame someone else, and you may not want them to blame that someone else, you know, so in the vacuum that you leave by not naming names, you risk having that anger turn in other places that are maybe less constructive.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Personally, I would love nothing more than for Democratic politicians to be, like, completely focused on economic populism. And that's the central message. And if you do that enough and you don't get caught up in culture wars and you just focus on that and you have a real populist agenda, then you can sort of overcome other culturally more conservative attitudes, especially in redder parts of the country. The candidate I always think about, who I've known a long time and love, is Sherrod Brown, especially in 2024.

[Jon Favreau]

And I remember Sherry telling stories years

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

ago, talking about how he won Ohio even when it went red, about, you

[Jon Favreau]

know, doing town halls in these small towns and people saying, I do not

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

agree with you at all on gun control or abortion.

[Jon Favreau]

And I know you have all these

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

progressive stances, but, you know, I like that you care about unions and you care about workers. And so I'm all in. And watching him, you know, and hopefully he'll.

[Jon Favreau]

He'll win this time, get back in the Senate.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

But, like, watching him lose or just watching sort of Ohio drift away, it did make me wonder about what was, A, what's going on there, and B, sort of the ability of even the most economically populist candidates to sort of overcome something that is, maybe it's cultural, maybe it's economic, maybe it's just mistrust, or maybe it's just distrust and cynicism about politics and government in general.

[Jon Favreau]

Maybe it's also younger people.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

This generation you're talking about moving away from some of these states, but I don't know if you have sort of thoughts on that.

[Noam Scheiber]

Yeah, I mean, one thing we've sort of, you know, we've kind of touched on implicitly, that may just be worth, you know, getting out there explicitly, which I think was a real challenge for someone like Sherrod Brown and other sort of moderate Democrats who lost, you know, in some of these Trump waves is just the sort of structural effect of the media on the discourse. And, you know, so, you know, everything from social media rewarding engagements and sort of anger and kind of fulmination. I mean, I think the way that the media landscape has evolved over the past two decades, largely from social media, but not entirely. Obviously, every outlet in the country, including my own, gets data about what's popular and what people are most excited about reading. And by and large, that data has told them that people love to get, you know, worked up about cultural issues, you know, whether it's trans stuff or immigrants or, you know, a whole variety of issues that have democracy. Exactly. And so I think, like, we know when we poll that, as you say, you do these focus groups, people really care about affordability. They really feel the pinch of inflation and stagnant wages, but they kind of vote with their feet or at least with their eyeballs. And, you know, we know that, like, when there's a good meaty story about, you know, trans rights or immigration, that they're going to read that story, they're going to talk to their friends about that story, they're going to share it on social media. And so I think there is this kind of structural factor that just exerts this kind of gravitational pull on the entire discourse. And my guess is that if you talk to Sherrod Brown, he would tell you some version of, yeah, my whole political career has been premised on this idea that if I can just talk to people about the things that are most important to them standard of living, whether they can afford an education for their kids and a decent house and a vacation. That's what they care about. But also, when I go to some town hall, the number of questions I get about this viral thing that was trending on Facebook or TikTok is probably off the charts. And so, yeah, you just can't be naive about the way that the media has evolved over the past few decades and the way that shapes our discourse around these elections.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Yeah. If I do have some hope that this time around, Trump and what. How he's governed in the second term sort of exists as more of that Romney, like, foil that we had in 2012 than he ever has before, partly just because of the sheer scale of the corruption and the fact that he just doesn't seem to care about hiding it at all, whether it's the ballroom or the crypto stuff or whatever else he's done. Like, I do think that the. The angst over affordability, high costs, paired with how he and the Republican Party have just sort of gone, you know, whole hog on the corruption without seemingly caring at all how people react to it does make me think that you could go back to that sort of fighting an election on those traditional sort of populist grounds and actually have it be content that people care about. Right. So that it's the stuff that's shared more than just, you know, your typical economic platform, information and content that doesn't get shared as much.

[Noam Scheiber]

Yeah. You know, and I think, you know, people have made this point many times, but I think Trump is. Is very skilled at tilting the landscape to his advantage. But it's usually when he himself is running, you know, when he's on the ticket, you know, he just exerts such a gravitational pull on the discourse, you know, in good ways and in bad. And I do think that once, even when he's still president but not actually on, you know, on the ballot himself, we saw this in 2018. I think, you know, we're likely to see it in these midterms. Like, he. When he's not personally on the ballot, he tends to exert, like, a little less control over the discourse. And I think that maybe does create a little more space for, you know, for some of these, you know, these efforts to reframe the conversation in the way that we've described. I think, you know, if, regardless of how you feel about Trump, he has been incredibly deft at, like, sort of writing and, you know, and taking advantage of these kind of structural changes in the media landscape. And so, you know, as long as he's in the picture, I'm, you know, I'm sort of pessimistic about the ability to be able to change the subject. You know, many people have tried and failed to do that, but, but I do think like when he's not actually the one on the ballot, there tends to be a little more space for these conversations.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Peter Turchin's elite overproduction framework shows up both in George Packer's review and sort of hovers over your book. Yes, Turchin's historical examples, pre revolutionary France, Russia, Iran, obviously don't end well. You end the book comparing this moment to some of those moments. How dark is your actual read on where this is heading?

[Noam Scheiber]

Yeah, so I don't think we're looking at like the Bolshevik Revolution. You know, Turchin does paint like a really grim but compelling picture. You know, talks about how in late 19th century Russia you had all these children of elites and noble men. In Russia, they were highly educated. Traditionally, the safety valve for those folks had been jobs in the kind of upper ranks of the bureaucracy. But there just weren't enough of those jobs to absorb all those people. They were downwardly mobile. They became radicalized, they became the vanguard of the Bolshevik revolution. So I don't think we're looking at something like that. But the point that he makes, I think historically is accurate. Just when you look at kind of politically destabilizing moments, you know, and I think we saw that after the financial crisis in other countries. You know, certainly in Spain there was huge, you know, kind of young college grad unemployment in Spain, people were having to live with their parents until they were, you know, into their late 30s, early 40s. We saw it in Greece. There was actually like a real explosion in the UK that I think was not well appreciated in the US but you know, higher ed had traditionally been free in the uk. Tony Blair introduced like a small fee. I think it was like £1,000 in the late 90s. And then David Cameron raised it to like 3 the limit to like £3,000 around 2010 11. This created this huge backlash. I mean, there was like very high unemployment among college grads. This was right after the Great Recession. Huge political problem. There was like organizing in like dozens and dozens of cities around the country. There was this massive like 100,000 plus person march on London. They like ransacked the Tory headquarters. It was just, I mean, and this was all just a response to this, you know, raising which you know, still kept tuition like Absurdly low by US standards. But raising, raising the, you know, the fee from £1,000 to £3,000 a year just, you know, exploded politically. So I do think we've seen historically that this is an incredibly volatile issue. You know, and then the one other place that I think you see this playing out and, you know, we don't have a ton of great reporting just because the political system is kind of opaque. But China is dealing with an enormous problem in youth, young graduate employment. Their historical solution to this was economic growth in the kind of 6, 8, 10% range. And that's how they kind of kept all the balls in the air. But now that growth has slowed there in the aftermath of their real estate bubble, they have millions of college grads who just don't have jobs. So the part of what's kind of shaking that political system is the same problem. So I do think it's, I think it's serious. You know, my guess is in this country, you know, we're not looking at a revolution, but I think, you know, a Mamdani type election again, where you get 85% of people in their 20s with a college degree voting for the same person, that tells you it's like, you know, there's intensity around this issue. Yeah.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

And like we said, AI is just going to accelerate this trend and in such a major way that you could see some, I think, pretty unexpected political results as we head into the next decade. Noam Schreiber, thank you so much for joining Offline. The book is Mutiny the Rise and Revolt of the College Educated Working Class. Thanks again.

[Jon Favreau]

It's a great book, everyone. Check it out.

[Noam Scheiber]

Thanks for having me. It was great to chew this stuff over with you. I really appreciate it.

[Jon Favreau]

Offline is a crooked media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Emma Ilech Frank. Austin Fisher is our senior producer and Anisha Banerjee is our associate producer. Audio support from Charlotte Landis. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. Matt De Groat is our VP of production. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Delon Villanueva, Eric Schutt and our digital team who film and share our episodes as videos every week. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. I sold my car in Carvana last night.

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