← The Realignment
The Realignment
601 | Noam Scheiber: How the Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class Could Reshape America
00:56:22
Noam Scheiber, New York Times reporter and author of Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, joins The Realignment. Marshall and Noam discuss how the rise and fall of the "college-for-all" economic model has left a generation of graduates (and non-graduates) feeling betrayed by the system, how downwardly-mobile college graduates are swinging to the economic left, which universities and government policies are responsible for the student debt crisis, and why the Biden administration's debt forgiveness program wasn't a political winner.
Loading summary
Transcript30 lines
- [00:00]
A
Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment. My guest today is the New York Times labor reporter Noam Scheiber. He has a new book out today, Mutiny the Rise and Revolt of the College Educated Working Class. This episode we explore one of the defining questions of the 2000s. What happens when the system you were told to trust stops delivery? The topic is the collapse of the college for all economic model and the consequences now rippling through American society. We dive into why downwardly mobile college graduates are becoming a powerful political force. The authenticity gap between what students were promised and what they got. How universities, especially mid tier and for profit institutions, created a debt fueled mismatch between decrease in jobs, the rise of left wing populism among educated young workers, and why student debt relief failed politically and what a better approach might look like. This conversation is a window into one of the most important and underappreciated shifts in American life. The growing disillusionment of the very people who were supposed to win in the modern economy and why their frustration may define the politics of 2028 and beyond. I hope you all enjoy the conversation. Noam Scheiber, welcome to the Realignment.
- [01:18]
B
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
- [01:20]
A
So I'm going to start with a very insensitive question. If I were to come up with a list of categories of person in this country who in the sort of post2016 narrative sense probably get the least amount of sympathy, I would put college graduates whose expectations are not meeting what they actually came into the system with as towards the top of the. This is not compelling. By contrast, think of the Rust belt worker who was betrayed by globalization. So why beyond just human empathy, should this be a problem that people are concerned about?
- [02:00]
B
Yeah, fair question. I mean, I think even if you don't particularly care about college educated folks who, as you say, went into college and assumed a bunch of debt with one set of expectations and one image of their, in their mind of what the world would look like on the other side. I think that it has pretty large political implications. And I think the way I would shorthand that is when blue collar workers have their expectations disappointed, the backlash tends to go to a kind of right coded or right wing populism. And when white collar folks have their expectations dashed, it tends to manifest as a kind of left wing populism. And I think we're, we're living in that increasingly left wing populist world. And you know, we saw the early tremors around this with Occupy Wall street and then with the Bernie Sanders campaign. In 16 and 20 and then AOC and then of course, Zoran Mandani in New York City. I don't think people quite appreciate how much sort of downwardly mobile college grad energy there was behind Zoran Mamdani's campaign in New York City. I mean, everyone broadly gets that a lot of college educated folks who were down on their luck economically voted for Mamdani. But if you look at say, college grads under 30, 84% of those people voted for Zoran Mandani. I mean, that is just like, you know, dictator like numbers. And so, yeah, I mean, I think this just has real reverberations for our political system. I think that story probably wasn't told well enough when Biden tried to do the debt relief for college grads, which, you know, became a political controversy unto itself and which elicited, elicited some of the reaction that you're, that you're sort of distilling here. But yeah, I think there are huge political consequences. I think first we're seeing it kind of on city level. Cities like New York, Seattle just elected a pretty left wing populist mayor. But I think we'll really see it play out in the 2028 campaign in the primaries, the presidential primaries. And then, you know, I just think we're going to see this play out also in a variety of ways across the workplace, across the economy. You know, I think you can look at the rate of unionization in the country and say, well, it's only 10%. So I mean, even if we had this massive increase in union membership, you know, maybe we get to 12% or 15% would be a kind of outside expectation. But I think you're just seeing just generally like a lot of, a lot of friction, a lot of, you know, a lot of jostling in the kind of white collar workplace. You see people on the right like a Marc Andreessen or even an Elon Musk complaining that their workers used to be sort of docile and, and kind of just focused on the, the substance of the job. But now there's just a series of, of protests and walkouts and petitions. And I, so I think it's just generally gumming up the works in the economy in addition to shifting our politics in this sort of left wing populist direction.
- [05:09]
A
So speaking of your statement that the messaging during the Biden era wasn't quite what it needed to be, I'd love to hear your sort of reporters take on what the messaging was. But before that, I would actually argue the problem wasn't just in messaging. It was conception politically of how you address the problem, which is that I think treating student debt relief as a single issue is, is basically, given the political dynamics of the country right now, a unfixable messaging problem. I think you have to really sort of put on your 19th century Victorian conservative hat and say, okay, we need to think of this as like a cross class settlement of, okay, so we're giving this thing to the downwardly mobile college grads, we're giving this thing to the middle class, we're giving this thing to the people who are in the micro dirty jobs thing. So what I would have liked to have seen was say to yourself, okay, this issue matters because our entire post 1990s governing economic strategy was basically promising the idea we'd send people to college. And when you combine that with technology and the promise of the Internet, all the sort of cliches you and I both know from our work, that would lead to a better economic outcome on the level of sending people to high school during like the turn of the 20th century. That gamble on a couple of different levels didn't play out. It didn't upskill the workers. It led to the statistics that you cite in your writing that we'll bring up later, but that, that didn't work. So we as a society need to create a variety of policies to address how that failed. We are going to do some Dem coded dirty job stuff. We are going to like do aggressive spending on apprenticeship programs. We are going to say to universities who didn't deliver the outcomes they promised, some punishment, carrots and sticks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we also are going to compensate people who through no fault of their own, were misled by the system. I think what I'm talking about politically is just so much easier to articulate and just make sense to people than just this idea of college educated people in their 20s and 30s are a constituency of the Democratic Party and we're going to give something to them. So I'd love to hear your broad thoughts on that.
- [07:19]
B
Yeah, I think that's basically true. I think the way, both in the kind of conceit of the program and in the messaging around it, a lot of the focus was the college grads themselves, the debt, the downward mobility. And I do think that was a mistake because as you say, in the eyes of a lot of people who didn't go to college, they're just not a very sympathetic constituency. So I do think that was flawed. I think the way I would have done it was a bit in the vein of what you say, which was I would have sort of focused on the system and the flaws in the system. I would have probably identified certain bad guys like universities. You know, one of the themes of my book is a kind of marketing bait and switch that universities have increasingly done over the past 15, 20, 25 years, which is, you know, they have, it's almost like they have these R and D departments coming up with new majors that can be sold to kind of unsuspecting college students. And then you, you know, you get them in the door, you sell them on this story about if you get this particular degree, then your job prospects will be rosy and unlimited. You saddle them up with debt and then on the other side of it, you know, they're debt ridden and can't find jobs. And you know, the example I use in my book, which I think is, you know, it's, it's, it's colorful and compelling, but it's representative of this shift in higher ed over the past generation or so is programs in video game design. We've had just this huge proliferation in video game design programs over the past 20 years or so, 25 years. We now graduate tens of thousands of people with degrees in video game design. The way that the universities sell these degrees is like, this is almost like a vocational degree. It's almost like a stem adjacent degree. It's basically like you're getting a computer science type degree and you can, you know, we have this vast demand for video games and so we have all these people that we need to hire to make them. In the same way that we have this vast demand for software, we need all these software developers. But in fact it turns out that designing video games is more like becoming a short story writer or a Hollywood actor. Millions of people want to do it. The number of people who can actually support themselves doing it is a tiny fraction of that number. And when you get a degree in it, it's not like a technical vocational degree. It's kind of like a Bachelor of Fine arts type degree or an acting degree. And so when people go into it with one set of expectations, and if you look as I did, if you look on the websites of these universities or look through the marketing material, there's a lot of very bullish descriptions of our graduates typically work for these AAA studios and typically is doing just a lot of work in the descriptions of the program. And yet people basically just can't find jobs when they come out of these programs. And Obviously, they're way down in a ton of debt. And I think that's just kind of emblematic of the role that the universities have played over the past 20 years. And so I think, you know, if I were the Biden folks, you know, and I'm not, you know, a political pundit, but I think that the focus on the way the system had been set up to be, you know, predatory in a way. I mean, there's. There are very few limits on the amount of debt that. That people can run up, and there's not, you know, there's no regulator that scrutinizes the marketing claims that universities make on their websites. Right. So in another context, in a, you know, say in a, you know, stock purchase or, you know, some other kind of, we have regulations, we'd have limits, things like that. We'd have, you know, sort of established ways of. Of making yourself whole after the fact, but we don't really have any of that in the higher ed context. And so if I were the Biden folks, I would have focused on the way that the system has been set up, the way it has not been very well regulated, the way the claims have not been very well scrutinized. And then I think critically, I would have lumped together the people who, you know, I would not distinguish between rhetorically at least, between sort of graduates and people who go for a couple of years and don't graduate, who are like, in the worst of all possible worlds. Right. I think the narrative kind of got into this space of like, oh, these are people who, you know, got their degrees and maybe then they even went on to law school or med school or whatever, and, you know, they're doing pretty well. But you have this spectrum of people, actually, right? From people who went for a semester or two and have debt that's completely useless all the way up through people who went for four years or maybe even got a. A graduate degree and are still, you know, struggling under the weight of that debt and are not super employable. So, yeah, I think the emphasis on the actual students was probably misplaced. I would have really placed the emphasis on this system that's kind of set up to. To exploit people. And I think both rhetorically, that would have given them a lot more purchase. And I think actually, substantively, that's kind of where the focus needs to be. So I might have even folded in, you know, regulation on. On marketing claims, things like that. That would have really kind of shined a light on the way that the system has evolved over the past generation
- [12:24]
A
or so to overcomplicate the issue from a political comms perspective. I'm realizing though, as you articulate that part of the reason why there was so much emphasis on the students was this is also a political strategy as well too. So telling the story of the underemployed college grad who's been at Starbucks for seven years is also trying to get that person to mobilize for you. Right? So like you're really trying to. This is just like the perfect issue for understanding the tensions between just sort of policy outcomes and actual political strategies. The political strategy not working and then also the policy strategy I think, not working as well. You're in a difficult place here. I'm really interested in your use of the word universities because, you know, I'm more center coded and my left friends from sort of D.C. ward are always trying to push me to like name enemies more. So I'm like really more open to naming enemies than I used to be. But in this topic, especially the video games example, that's where my sort of like fainting couch comes out, where it's like, well, I don't know, we gotta be fair about this. So for example, you talked about video game degree programs. Like I was like really into video games back during the 2000s. So I used to subscribe to GamePro and in every issue of Game Pro there'd be like a advertisement for one of these like video game design programs. I remember it would be like full sale and, and being in fifth grade I thought that sounded super sick. I did not know as I quickly would learn once I became a middle schooler and beyond that actually that program is like basically a scam. It's like a private for profit college system. If you wanted to actually be like a top plate like computer scientist or designer, you would like just try to go to Stanford and like do that thing. Aim at Stanford, don't 5th grade, aim yourself at Full Sail. But the point there being Stanford was not selling people on video game programs. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, we're not designing these video game programs or those are those like for profit industry driven things. So if we look at one of the solutions that comes from the naming enemies perspective, one of the popular ones that's bought bipartisan purchase across the aisle. So like Josh Hawley and J.D. vance are particularly into this one is like taxing the endowments of these universities who like did this thing. But what really. And once again I'm separating the politics from like the policy here. What really like frustrates Me is like, yeah, actually the universities with the biggest endowments basically are not the problem. If you can go to Harvard, you really need to go to Harvard. And if anything they've done really great at making it so that if you like are making less than $80,000 a year, I think they've even lowered like they've even raised to a hundred thousand. You basically go for really super great subsidy. So they're not the problem. It's really this weird like middle tier that is more responsible. But they also don't have the endowments. So like taxing them wouldn't really help anything. So how do you think of this dilemma? Because like by just saying the universities we're really missing the actual sources of responsibility and the models that like actually broke their promise. Because Harvard has a lot of problems. What I do not think Harvard has the problem of, of not fulfilling its promise that if you like scrounge your way in here, you're going to have a pretty successful life.
- [15:24]
B
Yeah, no, absolutely the case. I think it's 100% clear that the Harvard's and Stanford's and Yales of the world are not, not the problem. You know, that said, that really is a tiny fraction of the millions of people who go to college. Yeah. So, you know, and so I think you're right. I mean we want to be careful.
- [15:42]
A
But it's a huge, but the key thing is, but it's a huge fraction of the, of the endowment percentage. That's, that's why I would differentiate it
- [15:48]
B
and in the political conversation. Right. I mean they're fat targets. Just to, you know, maybe to elaborate on who is the problem. Over the past 20, 25 years we've seen an explosion of students entering not super competitive or completely non competitive public universities. That's like the biggest explosion in the higher ed population. You know, so not the University of Texas, not even the University of Texas at Dallas or the University of Texas at Arlington, but like the University of Texas at Brownsville or Corpus Christi or something. So like the third or fourth or fifth tier public institution in a big state. You look at admissions for those universities, typically you'll see 80, 90% people admitted. Those degrees just don't have a ton of value on the labor market. And yet, you know, there's basically because of the, you know, the federal student loan programs, there's very, you know, there's almost effectively no limit to the amount of debt that you can, that you can layer on to get a degree from those universities. So. And then of course you have for profit universities that I think the labor market value of those degrees maybe even less. I think percentage wise you've seen a bigger growth in for profit universities, but in terms of raw volume, larger growth in those kind of non competitive public universities. In any case, I think the way that I think as a, as a policy proposition you want to go at this is really scrutinize the claims, you know, like require them to, to publish on their website, you know, what kind of returns people can expect by major. And actually the Department of Education actually has this data. It's out there, we know it. The Department of Education publishes data by major, by school, 10 years after enrollment. And so it's out there. But I would require these universities to actually have that like embedded in their marketing material to make sure to require them to show that to students before they sign up for the debt that they're taking on. I think, you know, in the same way that we require tobacco makers to, you know, to include warnings from the surgeon General on cigarette packages, I really think it's, it's that serious. And to, and to hide that information or at least to not, you know, elevate that information is just a huge disservice to these students. So I think transparency and kind of requirements, transparency requirements would be a huge improvement. The other thing, you know, that's come
- [18:12]
A
up is quick follow up on that. Before you make this point just to bracket putting on a conservative hat for a second. Why not, why should we not just even skip over the labeling and just not have the federal government and Department of Ed subsidize that in the first place? Because this has become controversial because like West Virginia for example, at their university system they eliminated like a whole swath of degrees. It just feels a little sort of centrist, moderate middle to offer a warning on the print versus just sort of, hey, we think this thing is so not valuable that if you need to go, you need to pull, you need to either pay full freight or university needs to subsidize it. So why don't we just like skip over the labeling and just not do it?
- [18:53]
B
Yeah, no, I think that's right. I mean, I think there's certainly an argument that you don't want to subsidize. You know, you don't want taxpayers subsidizing these loans that are essentially, you know, that create a huge moral hazard problem, basically. I think that's fair. I mean, I think if, you know, I think a more sort of interventionalist, left of center model would be just to use the leverage of the federal government to, to kind of change the economics of some of these degrees. So the argument would be like, okay, yeah, I mean, we're going to subsidize these things, but the cost has to be in line with the benefit. So we're going to make, we're going to try to like equalize return across degrees. Right? So like, you can't charge someone the same, you know, $40,000 in tuition for the theater degree as you charge them for the engineering degree. You know, we're going to cap the amount of debt that we allow students to take on for certain humanities, you know, social science degrees. And it's actually not that hard to sort of fine tune that tool because again, we know, we know what the return on these degrees is and we know how they vary across school and across majors. So, you know, it's not hard. You know, you don't want to be too micromanagey about it, but you can, you can basically say that the return on this degree or the sort of implicit return based on what you charge for tuition, you know, has to be like relatively constant across majors, whether it's like a highly lucrative major like software engineering or a not very lucrative major like art history. And so you could just basically cap the debt in order to rein in tuition across these different majors. You know, again, that's like a much more interventionist, you know, kind of big government solution. But, you know, I don't think a particularly complicated one because, you know, we have the data, we already have, you know, sort of loan application procedures that, you know, require a certain amount of documentation as sort of government interventions go. I don't think this is a particularly complicated one.
- [20:46]
A
Well, what's funny is I actually think it's more interventionist for the government to dictate literally which. And obviously like we're talking about state systems. So I'm not saying this is like with outside the bounds of the rights of West Virginia, but like, I think it's more interventionist to have a bunch of bureaucrats and politicians say this major works, this major works this major. So if anything, I actually think I'm offering with a moderate interventionist, like model there. And I want to just sort of backtrack real quick before you make the point you were trying to make. Before I sidetracked us for a second, I was sort of offering Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford an escape hatch. But there are plenty of Ivy actors who are quite guilty of this practice, specifically Columbia University at the graduate degree level. Wall Street Journal's done some really great reporting on this. So I'm just like not just trying to be an Ivy show here. I need to sort of establish the credentials. The what? And I'd love you to talk about this example like what Columbia has done with their creative arts and MFA and like film studies graduate programs. So not the bachelor's, but just sort of like turning these grad programs into multi hundred thousand dollar, just like cash cows where the outcomes are just like disastrous. Because even if, even if you get a theater major like BA at the end of the day it's still like a BA And I think a lot of people don't even put like their major on their resumes, if they're even sending resumes. Then there are other things you could do, you take other classes, but like if you go to a graduate program in that thing for two years, you're paying cost of living. It's crazy expensive. These have been really, I think weaponized in an ineffective way. So there's within the Ivy League different degrees of this like really bad dynamic.
- [22:23]
B
Yes, so I agree with both points. I mean, I do think on some level if you get a broad liberal arts education from a decent school, you still have options. You know, I mean you may not be getting a job developing software at Amazon or Facebook, but you know, you have ways of getting in the door into, you know, reasonably compensated jobs. You can, you know, from there you can go to get a professional degree that will be, you know, highly lucrative. So you know, yeah, I agree. I think the graduate level does get dodgier, as you say. Columbia is sort of famous for innovation in this space and I think this has been, not to impute motives that are overly crass, but I do think as funding, as public funding has declined over the past generation or so, universities have just had to get more creative about their revenue model and grad students in certain disciplines pay full freight. And that's just been a really lucrative source of revenue. And I, I think the additional innovation that we've seen over the past 10 years or so is really leaning heavily into foreign grad students. There's been an explosion of programs kind of in, you see them a lot in business, kind of data analytics, business analytics, different MBAs with little interesting innovations. Now like the MBA with a concentration in AI in the last few years has been a real, and, and what you see is these programs, you know, if you, if you look at the, the, the, the enrollment in these programs, often they're like 80, 90% foreign, you know, a ton of Indian students, a ton of Chinese students. And those students pay, you know, 50, 60, $70,000 a year. They typically pay full freights. You know, they come out and there is often an implicit and sometimes explicit promise or suggestion that, that if you get this, then you can get what's known as a STEM opt visa extension. So that allows you to stay in the country on a kind of, you know, expanded student visa for up to three years after graduation, where you can basically stay here, look for a job, and then once you get that job, you get down the H1B pipeline, you know, so you're. You're qualified for. For. But kind of. I mean, the term is debated, but a skilled worker visa and then, you know, down the path to a green card. So there's a whole infrastructure that's been set up by. By universities to really bring in foreign students under the promise of getting you on this H1B path. And that is incredibly attractive to a lot of students around the world. Often, you know, you hear stories in India where, you know, the entire extended family will contribute to the funding for the, you know, the child to go get this. This STEM opt. Certified graduate degree because they know it'll get them down this H1B path. You hear stories of families selling land or livestock to fund this. And so it really is. I think of it as a. Is a pretty extractive model. And I think all of that has been motivated by the kind of funding squeeze in higher ed over the past 30 years or so. And so, yeah, I do think, you know, as egregious as some of this stuff looks on the undergraduate level, there's still this sense that, like, you know, the sticker price isn't the price you actually pay. And certainly at very prestigious Ivy League schools, as you say, we're increasingly moving to this world where people whose families make under 100,000, under 150,000, or even under 200,000 will get, you know, a full ride that does not exist on the graduate level. That is the absolute mirror image of the graduate level. So I think you're right to call that out.
- [26:02]
A
You know, I. Something that gets me really excited is when different people start converging on, like, similar narratives. So a colleague of mine, Dr. Daniel Lee Thompson, we do a lot of work together on this podcast, and she. She talks about this concept called the authenticity gap. Basically, you know, the. As the. As there starts to be, like, a gap between your experience and what you expected, like, you kind of like, go crazy and like, you add, like, your own, like, articulation of this phrasing in the New York Times. Write up about your book where you say a gap has opened up between the life that many graduates believe they've been promised and their actual prospects and their seething about it. I 100 agree with that. And like, this just sort of like authenticity gap theory explains a lot of sort of my political pivots and sort of understandings of the world. But I think where this gets so complicated and why the way you wrote the book is so helpful is it brings up difficult questions around, like, a social contract. So in your time space, specifically, like, you bring up two students, so Shia Barrett and Teddy Hoffman. And this is also relevant for me because I'm, you know, class of 2014, so these are like, now like my age too, so I can very much think through that frame.
- [27:11]
B
It's.
- [27:11]
A
That's the one good thing about being in your 30s. There's a bunch of good things, but it's just like now you're profilable from. You could think about this. Yes. And you know, Teddy, really smart, really smart guy. Half a dozen AP classes. Grinnell's a great college. He gets a Watson Fellowship, which is sort of at that prestige tier, and now he' at Starbucks for his career. He did not get a job, I think. And once again, I'm really just trying to be like, frank here and not be insensitive. He spent his Watson fellowship traveling across Asia studying different forms of dance and performance. And I think where the working class skeptical portion comes in and where this is not the thing you're really pitching here is, wait a second, you studied that and you're shocked that, like, you're working at Starbucks versus I think Shia is a more interest. Not. Once again, these are both interesting, but I think Shia is really where this gets, like, really interesting for me, where it's like, studied comms, went through all the no Child Left behind era, like, prep, prep, prep, prep, prep, and just can't get a comms job. And has been at Apple, like, ever since she graduated. Right. So, like, she did all of the things that logically should have ended up in, like, a job, but it just, like, wasn't there. And I would not recommend someone do a comms major, but, like, from a 2000 and twenties perspective, she's graduating in 2018. So can you talk about all these dynamics around the social contract thing? Because, like, I don't. I think we violated the social contract of Chaya. I don't think we actually violated Teddy's social contract from an authenticity gap perspective.
- [28:42]
B
Yeah, really fair. Let me just fill in the story a little more. But I think that, you know, that's an intuitive reading. I think there was, you know, so I some. I graduated from college in 1998. I sometimes joke that that may have been the best year in the history of the world to graduate from college. You know, you had this really tight labor market, this booming stock market, this exploding tech industry. You know, people who majored in humanities or social sciences were walking out the door and into a startup where they give you like a ridiculous amount of equity. You know, that if you cashed it out within two years, you probably did pretty well. If you wrote it into the tech bus, not so well. But in any case, it was an incredibly favorable time to graduate from College. But within five, 10 years, it was obviously not the case. I say that because I think that when I graduated, if you graduated in the late 90s, you could kind of take the Teddy Hoffman path, right? You could major in theater, and he double majored in theater and English. You could do your Watson Fellowship where you really explore things that are compelling to you, that you have a real intellectual passion for. But, you know, it's not clear like what the monetization of that, that experience is going to look like on the other side. But you could do that. You could even, you could come back, you could work for Starbucks for a few years and then, you know, and then maybe go to law school, then you get a graduate degree. And, you know, Teddy had come from a family that had sent people to elite liberal arts colleges for a few generations. And, you know, a number of them had kind of basically done that. They'd gone to a liberal arts college, they got a kind of well rounded liberal arts degree. They work for a few years, they go to law school, grad school, and then they get on with their lives. So I think Teddy, you know, that, that arc, that path was kind of like sort of seared into him. And, you know, it was just kind of understood that that's, that's like a pretty reasonable way to, you know, to advance through life. And, you know, so I think Teddy was, was sort of on that path. But two things intervened. One is, as I write in the book, that just the labor market for recent college grads was just softening. I cite research by an economist at Berkeley named Jesse Rothstein, who had been the chief economist of the Department of Labor under Obama. And Jesse has this really fascinating paper about how the market for recent college grads actually starts to soften around 2005 relative to older college Grads, you just see this kind of downshifting and then the gap really opens up in 2008, 9, as you would expect during the Great Recession. But then the employment rates of recent grads and older grads just never reconverge. So 10 years after the Great Recession, you still have this big gap in employment rates between recent college grads and older college grads. And he has this really evocative line, evocative for an economics paper, about how the people coming out, you know, graduated from college in 2019, were still, still dealing with stuff that was kind of happening in the world when they were in middle school, you know. And so I think Teddy encountered some of that, which is, you know, this, this arc where you go to a liberal arts college, you kind of, you know, take a few years to figure out what's going on, get your footing, figure out, you know, the kind of long term plan, and then you sort of re enter, either get a graduate degree or, or look in earnest for your, your sort of ultimate path that had really, in a way that people didn't realize, that had really kind of retreated as an option by the late 2010s. And then, you know, I think the far more legible development is just the pandemic, you know, so Teddy actually in late 2019, is thinking like, okay, I've been at Starbucks for a few years. It's really time to get on with it. You know, he starts reaching out to friends who have had other jobs. You know, he ends up doing these like informational interviews with potential employers. He starts to get into like drama education. So he reaches out to different youth theater groups. None of these are like super high, high paying, but they kind of get you on this path. And he, there's. There are a lot of interest in Teddy, you know, you know, he's, he's got this, this pretty prestigious undergraduate degree. He's got this fellowship. He's an accomplished actor. And so he, he does get, you know, a fair amount of interest. And then the pandemic hits, you know, and basically one potential employer after another says, you know, sorry, we've frozen hiring at this time. You know, he gets like a series of form letters. And so he's just at Starbucks for another year or so and kind of feels, he sort of ultimately feels sort of maroon there. I think you're right. Teddy is someone. You'd look at his arc and you wouldn't, you know, particularly if you're someone who didn't go to college and are wondering what all the fuss is. About wouldn't necessarily immediately be sympathetic, but I think he does represent these two big forces. One is this sort of longer term softening of the market for recent college grads. And then just the, like the meteor that was the pandemic. Kaya. She actually, she pronounced it Kaya. I think you're right. Kaya is a little more immediately recognizable as someone who, for whom the system just didn't work. You know, she goes to Towson University, which is, it's not the University of Maryland, but it's like a pretty solid state university in Maryland. Buckles down, gets a degree, takes out a lot of debt. I think she left Towson with about $50,000 in debt. She works.
- [33:54]
A
But that's also not an insane amount. That's not like what were you thinking? That's a, that's a reasonable. This system works. Amount of debt.
- [34:01]
B
Exactly. Assuming that you're going to go then get a job, you know, like the kind of job that college grads have typically gotten. So she's, she's at Apple. She works at Apple during college and you know, is really thinking like, okay, I really like this company, but this is my college job, you know, and really wants to get into either communications or she was actually interested in kind of adjacent professions like instructional design or professional training. So the hope was to work for, you know, maybe even work for Apple. But Apple corporate doing training of, of helping to design the curriculum that trains marketing folks, things like that. And yeah, just nothing materializes for her. She's very scrupulous and sort of focused. Applied for dozens and dozens of jobs, got no takers, and at a certain point was just like, well, you know, I guess, I guess it's going to be my, my college job is going to become my profession. And again, I think you'd like to think that you do that for a few years and then you move on to, you know, you move on to the next phase of your life. Kai actually did enter a master's degree program, but I think again, the pandemic really torpedoes a lot of things. It just kind of freezes everybody in place for a year or two. You know, I think we had what everyone, you know, that we had this moment where the labor market tightened. We call it the Great Recession or, you know, sorry, the Great Resignation. The phenomenon of quiet quitting emerges and I think a lot of people got the impression that the labor market had become really favorable for folks during this time. It's actually not. The picture's a little more complicated than that. I think the labor Market really tightened for people at the bottom, kind of the bottom half of the income distribution. But for people in the middle, the middle and upper middle, we didn't quite see that the tightening of the labor market and the increase in wages the way we did for people toward the bottom. So I think on balance, the pandemic and then the post pandemic years just kind of continued this trend that we had seen, you know, from really 2005 through 2019. You know, there was a. It was this kind of moment where the market tightened a bit, but. But on balance, it didn't last very long for people who got college degrees. And I'd say since 22, it's really just been even grimmer than it was before the pandemic.
- [36:14]
A
Yeah. And I just want to say, and this is where this gets politically heterodox for me. I don't want to make it sound like I was just sort of like, dunking on Teddy because I actually don't want to live in a country that wouldn't let people do what Teddy did. Right. So, like, I grew up with German exchange students in my house, so I'm like, very aware of what it looks like to live in a system where at 14, you transition from, are you going to college? Are you going to an apprenticeship program? I don't want to live in a system. Like, I have a. I have a useless political science degree from the University of Oregon. I was not academically inclined. I didn't do very well. But I like to read books. And my parents. I'm upper middle class. My parents paid in state tuition. And I then got to like sneak into think tank World and like this sort of space because it turned out during that zoom transition, during early Covid, I can just like hop on with people like you, like five times a day. And it's just like, easy. I like, I'm like activated energetically by that. So I would have been a disaster if you'd said, marshall, your option for college is go into the stem mines. Or the even worse option is, well, Marshall, you could get a bullshit. You're getting a bunch of B's and C's, Poli sci degree because your family has resources. But for the lower middle class kid, you have to take a practical thing. And Marshall gets a gentleman C education. Like, that's like. That is literally the society that we'd be building. And I think that sucks. And I think people may think in their head via, like, class resentment and like hyper politics. People think they want to live in that, but Like, I don't. I think the German model is fundamentally and aesthetically incompatible with what it means to be American and second chances and third chances and who cares if they weren't great at math when they were 14? You get to start again, you move to Texas and do your own thing. So I love to hear what you think about that.
- [37:54]
B
Yeah, I think it's a great point. I think you're, you're absolutely right that we have set up this system that is much less forgiving for people who are first generation college students because the system kind of implicitly runs on like a subsidy from your parents or a certain amount of family wealth or assets. And I think you see that not just in college and your options in, you know, which college to go to and your options immediately outside of college, but it can, it can persist for, you know, years after graduating from college. So one, one example that I write about in the book is, is Kaya's time at Apple. She, for a variety of personal reasons ran into some financial difficulties in 2023, I want to say. So her sister was very ill and needed to be in the hospital for several months. Her sister had a daughter. Kaya took a leave of absence to help look after her sister's daughter while her sister got the procedure that she needed and recovered. But the way that the Apple leave is set up, it can often take a few pay cycles before you start getting your pay while you're on leave. It's a pretty generous leave program, but there can be a delay of a month, a month and a half, two months before your, your pay during the leave kicks in. And I think for, for a typical, typical middle class or upper, upper middle class person who had some family resources to dry on, draw on, this would just not have been a problem at all. Right? Like your parents could have, you know, maybe cut you a check for $5,000 or something. And you know, then when you got your pay from your job, you just repay them and you go on about your business. But for Kaya, this was like a cascading. It just set off like a cascade of financial disasters. You know, so she had this gap in her income. She got behind on her energy bill, she got behind on her car payments, she got behind on her student loans. And eventually, you know, her, her electricity is turned off, her car is repossessed. I mean, just like one disaster after another. And I think it just underscores how narrow the margin for error is among someone who's a first generation college grad. So you really do see how this stuff can kind of trail you not just through your late teens and early twenties, but for a decade or two after the fact. I think if you're someone who has family resources, you have this, as you say, not a crazy amount of debt. $50,000. It's large, but it's not by the standards, by contemporary standards, you know, there are people who come out with a 100, $200,000 in debt. But for someone who is a first generation college, actually Kai's, her parents went to college but didn't graduate from college.
- [40:41]
A
So which the stats tell you is actually the worst case scenario, the cost about the benefits.
- [40:46]
B
But I think someone in that situation is thinking like, you know, someone with, with more assets, with more family wealth might say, you know what, I'm going to give myself two, three years after college. I'm going to just kind of look around. Maybe I'll work part time at my college job, but I'm going to really try to give myself some time to break into the field that I want to break into. Maybe it's I want to do an internship or some other kind of human capital accumulation in the immediate post college years. But I think for someone who's a first generation college grad with $50,000 in debt, you're thinking I got to service this debt, you know, I got to get a full time job, I got to start making money. And so I think both kind of in economic terms but that you know, maybe even more broadly that the psychology of it is just very different if you're, if you're first generation. I think our system is, is much less forgiving, you know, depending on your background.
- [41:35]
A
I just want to highlight what I think is so interesting and this is why my politics just always are going to circle back to like center left FDR like universalism as like an approach which is the way you told the story of the 2000s and the 2010s and 2020s.so.com bubble 91120050809 long running high unemployment coming out of that Covid like all these different things. Like there are just so many issues that would pop up across both the college and on a college educated situation in that story. And I just think it's important to tell something I would do some writing on is how a fundamental problem for with central life is they don't have a story to tell about the country which then would guide the way you like move on these things. So I think this college for all being out of fashion thing really matters because in the 90s, that was the story. Like our theory of how things would work post 1992 was basically premised on college for all working. Right. The college for all is the equivalent of high school for all. And now that we don't have that, and now there isn't just like this core economic theory that could guide how people think about things. There's just so much missing there. So I just think it's like helpful to say, like, okay, so if the 90s fell. But what's also not helpful is the, like, it's been 10 years of the Trump era. I think there's been enough sort of like self flagellation over. Like, we were promised this and we promised that. Okay, now we need to move into something. But just starting with what you said. So, like, here are these like five specific things that, like a millennial experiencing the authenticity gap went through. What are ways that we could address that across categories beyond just for example, student loan forgiveness is really important. So I want to highlight that towards the end of this episode. I do want to just sort of ask about the elephant in the room, which some people think is an elephant. Some people think it's sort of like corporate bullshit. AI because like, this book, as has been written, could have been published without this AI discourse. Where does AI come into the story for you?
- [43:33]
B
Yeah, so AI figures into the story, as you say, kind of at the margins. I write about Hollywood writers and, you know, there's. Because of the. Partly because of the streaming revolution Hollywood, a lot of Hollywood writers became increasingly precarious over the sort of 2012 to, you know, to the present period, go into the economics of the Hollywood labor market a bit for people who are interested in the book. But as AI began to loom, the Writers Guild of America, which represents a lot of Hollywood writers, began to make this a kind of front and center issue in their contract negotiation in 2023. They thought it would be a sort of cut and dried issue. They would ask for some protections, the studios would give it to them and they'd move on. In fact, the studios said, no, we basically want to preserve our options here. And that really freaked out the writers and the negotiating team for the writers. So it ended up being a major component in the strike and one of the last things to get resolved during the strike in 2023. So it figures into my narrative a bit. But even for the writers, as you say, it was mostly kind of prospective. It wasn't something that they were encountering in their day to day. It was just this Idea that at some point, probably in the near future, showrunner will be able to do without a writer's room and maybe hire one or two writers and then just rely on AI maybe to maybe have AI sort of outline the season and do first drafts and then you have one or two writers just punching them up and stuff. So there's real anxiety. But it was mostly in the future. And I think that's like a useful metaphor for the moment that I was writing about because AI was kind of broadly looming across the economy, but not yet visible for most people. To me, I think it's just that I sometimes think of the book as like a sort of case study or dress rehearsal for the AI near future. I think it's pretty clear that AI is going to displace white collar workers. I actually think the speed will be a little slower than the kind of worst case scenarios that are being banded about. You hear tech people like Dario Amade of Anthropic say this could affect 50% of people of entry level people within a few years. I think that's unlikely to be the case. I mean, I just think there's just a lot of inertia in the corporate world. Adoption is just going to happen at a relatively slow pace. You're going to see the most rapid adoption in startups that can kind of, you know, start from scratch. You know, if you were building a company and you, you know, you needed people to produce a lot of PowerPoint presentations. Well, if you're starting from scratch, you probably wouldn't hire many young people to produce PowerPoint presentations. But if you're, you know, McKinsey or Boston Consulting Group and you already have like hundreds of them lying around, you're probably going to like, figure out a way to use those people rather than like, you know, engage in mass layoffs. So I do think adoption is going to be more gradual. I think we have more time to figure out how to reallocate labor and to figure out how to train entry level folks. If a lot of the grunt work that they used to do, which kind of subsidized their training, is now being done by a machine. That said, the direction seems obvious to me. It's not going to increase demand for white collar work, it's clearly going to decrease it. And given that it'd be one thing if we were already starting from a really tight labor market for college grads and recent college grads, but given that we've had this 15 year softening of the labor market for recent college grads, I Can only imagine that it's going to further soften the labor market. So I do think of the last, you know, the last decade or two as a dress rehearsal for the AI future. And, you know, I think from the perspective of employers, I alluded to this earlier, but you get we've had a lot of tech employers or investors like Marc Andreessen bemoan the fact that the employees at big tech companies have gotten way more unruly and belligerent and confrontational. Well, I think you haven't seen anything yet. You know, I really would think of this as a kind of dress rehearsal. And I do think, you know, there's been a lot of effort and a lot of money spent by large corporations to stop union campaigns. You know, it's very common when a group of employees file for a union election or they start engaging in some kind of collective action, you bring in a law firm or a consulting firm that helps you, you know, put down the rebellion. Given how radicalizing these forces are and given the likelihood that AI is going to increase the radicalization among white collar workers, I think employers would probably be well served to think about how they can sort of engage with workers rather than trying to sort of just crush attempts at collective action. Because I just don't think this is going away. Whether it's formal unionization or informal strikes and walkouts and petitions or just like people collectively aggressively hectoring the CEO when they hold their quarterly town hall meeting. I mean, we've seen it, we've seen this kind of activism increase pretty steadily over the past decade. And I would imagine that AI is going to accelerate it. And so I think, you know, on some level the ball is in the court of managers and company executives kind of figure out some accommodation, you know, some, you know, whether it's an institution like a union or some kind of like management labor council, some way to engage. Because I think just trying to suppress it is going to lead to a bigger explosion down the road.
- [49:09]
A
One and quick comment, and then final question. The comment is, and I think that's what's new here, and drives like the, the revolt, the mutiny part of this, which is, think of the way I told you, my sort of reader's version of the Teddy story versus your more complicated one. He made some sacrifices at a career level by going to do art and doing like the type of travel study he did. Therefore, the issue is not that, like, oh no, like I'm 26 and I'm working at Starbucks. I think within that frame for like before COVID like that still makes a lot of sense. Like he's not going to revolt over that outcome. I think what's new and this is what's new in terms of our post globalization like blue collar job displacement and then white collar job displacement is this is the 33 year old McKinsey consultant who went to a good school, did the two years entry level, did the two year MBA, has like the mortgage and upper middle class community, got married, did all of the like played and follow the rules. This is always like a big thing. Conservative spaces in 2010s like the success sequence of like if you get married, if you get a job like you're gonna, it's gonna really work for you. If we, if we run into a situation where it's not the people who like lost or missed opportunities or were underserved who are getting screwed, but it's actually people who took the opportunities and had privilege and like whatever that is actually just like very, very brand new. So people should be aware of that. For this the final quick closing question and you note this in like the book and in the piece the way we're seeing this mutiny already is white collar and this was the Zoran race. People are moving to the left on economics where they are outpacing non college educated people. That's the to speak of the theme of this show that is like the realignment theme. So just close on the implications and why this is a new part of this post 2016 story that people should pay attention to and read more about in your book.
- [51:05]
B
Yeah, so just one, one thing in response to your comment initially which I think is exactly right, which is, you know, if you can write a sort of mathematical equation, you know, the gap between expectations and reality, the larger the gap between expectations and reality, the more intense the radicalization. Well, the people who went to an Ivy League school and then got the prestigious job at McKinsey or you know, the prestigious job at Goldman Sachs and suddenly are unemployable. Like that gap is going to just be way larger than the gap of the people who you know, got the liberal arts degree from a state university university and found themselves disappointed. So I completely co sign your intuition there. Yeah. When it comes to the politics, I really do think that this kind of radicalization just can be highly destabilizing politically. And I'm sure you've talked before about the sort of overproduction of elite's thesis. This is Peter Turchin a book called it's, you know, it's been in the Discourse. It's a. It's a quirky but very interesting book. And, you know, he looks historically at when you have, you know, sort of downwardly mobile, educated folks, how that, you know, tends to be like a pretty reliable recipe for revolution. He has this metaphor of the game of musical chairs. You know, you educate a certain number of people, the number of elite jobs available to them is disappearing. And so it ends up being this, like, really intense competition for a shrinking number of spots within the elite. And again, historically, we've seen how radicalizing and how destabilizing that can be. He sort of attributes the Bolshevik revolution to this phenomenon. You know, I'm not saying that we're on the verge of, you know, of a communist revolution, but I do think you see these, you know, this sort of. Of periodic bubbling up and the outbursts are getting larger. And so I think it's very difficult to kind of track, if you sort of connect the dots from Occupy Wall street in 2011 to Bernie's campaign in 2016 to 2020 to AOC to Zoran Mamdani. It's not like 100% clean linear progression, but generally up and to the right. Or depending, you know, the. The right may not be the right political metaphor, but, you know, you're seeing it get more energy, more disruptive. And yeah, I just think that anyone within the Democratic Party or even the Republican Party who thinks that you're just going to kind of rally around the sort of mainstream establishment candidate who's blessed by the powers that be, it just seems to me that that is emphatically not how it's going to work going forward. And, you know, one subplot that we didn't talk about, but where I think you really see this, maybe even more than the economic stuff that we've been talking about, is Gaza. A lot of these folks, young, college educated folks, after October 7th, became extremely dissatisfied with the mainstream approach in the Democratic Party. And it was then the Biden administration, when the Biden administration's approach to managing our relationship with Israel during that conflict, and you just saw it be hugely disruptive to Biden when he was still in the race, and then to Kamala Harris. You had these, you know, these people voting in Democratic primaries in early 2024, where you would just vote uncommitted. And those numbers got, like, pretty high for an incumbent president. So I think all of that is to say, you know, we've kind of seen increasingly disruptive outbursts. We've seen sort of dress rehearsals. But. But it seems to me that the intensity of the radicalization is increasing. And yeah, I would really stay tuned for 2028 and beyond when it comes to the stuff.
- [54:52]
A
Yeah, a quick closing story that comes to mind when we're talking about this context. So I was talking to a friend last night and a very like left leaning, sort of millennial Brooklyn stereotype couple friends of theirs, they've been very left like up until basically the, you know, 2025 mayoral race, period. And they ended up swinging hard against Zoron and voting for Cuomo because of the gifted and talented program, which if you were to understand the theory of the case for sort of like the Cuomo parts of the Democratic Party, they would just think like, at the end of the day, like, that base is always going to be on our side against the radicals. And them making that swing over gifted and talented is based on them buying into this system. Right of there's this system where if we get our kid into the gifted and talented program, they're getting both this, this couple's Ivy League. They're, this is a very University of Pennsylvania story, but they're a Penn couple. So like they're going to get into the G and T program and then they're going to be in the Ivy themselves and body BA. But if that couple does not see the gifted and touted program status quo system is leading their kid to that outcome, they are with Zoron and that was where they originally were. So I think that's just like the example of a case study of how destabilizing this is going to be for a certain theory on the center left for how like the professional managerial class operates in their system. And I think reading this type of work and this type of conversation is like a great orienting piece for that. So Nam, this has been really great. Thank you for joining me on the realignment.
- [56:17]
B
Yeah, really enjoyed it. Thanks for taking so much time and care with the subject matter. I really appreciate it.