We’ve long known that Seattle, where we have lived since 1990, is a blue bubble politically. Something like only 12% of the vote in Seattle went for Trump this November.
But lately I have become aware of what is arguably the much more important bubble in which I dwell, managing to do so with little awareness of it. Like the proverbial fish who doesn’t notice water. (Older fish swims by two younger ones and asks, “How’s the water?” The two younger ones look at each other and say, “What’s ‘water’?”)
I occupy the bubble of the college-educated. That bubble, Patrick Ruffini argues in his 2023 book, Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, is the most important political and cultural divide in America today. Note the publication date, 2023, i.e. prior to the most recent election, an election which appears to have confirmed Ruffini’s analysis.
“A college diploma,” writes Ruffini, “has replaced income as the new marker of social class and key dividing line in our elections. And the relationship between this new conception of class and partisanship now runs in the opposite direction [to what it has historically]: the more highly you rank, the more Democratic you vote.”
He continues, “If politics now feels less like a contest of competing policy ideas, and more like an existential cultural struggle, educational polarization is why . . . At the end of World War II, only a tiny fraction of young people went to college. Those who did were a narrow elite, and those who didn’t were the country’s mainstream. Today, college graduates represent a much larger elite, and those who don’t are defined, socially and politically, as the working class.”
That said, today’s “working class,” as Ruffini goes on to make clear, is a more complex category than the traditional picture of it as those who work in factories and on assembly lines.
But here’s the number that really got my attention. The percent of the population today who are college graduates is 33%, which means that 67% — the large majority — are not.
Then I thought about those I know and those in our social circle. Virtually all are college graduates. Moreover, without much thinking about it, I have assumed that the percentages were roughly the inverse of what they actually are, and that a large majority of Americans are, like me, college graduates. Such an assumption is way out of touch with reality. It owes to the fact that these are the people I know, talk with, work with, and with whom I exchange ideas.
While I know people dubbed “working class” I can think of only several, at most, I count (or count me) as friends. Others are people who service my car, remodel a bathroom, or with whom I chat at the hardware in Joseph, Oregon in Wallowa County, Oregon, where we spend four to five months of the year. There the large majority are “working class,” and proud of it.
I had extrapolated from my highly educated bubble all sorts of conclusions, not least that “most everyone goes to college, don’t they?” This, I thought, was “normal.” But I was wrong. Moreover, my casual assumption effectively rendered two-thirds of my fellow Americans “not normal,” and kind of invisible. Not only are the non-college-educated the large majority in America, but in the last 40 years, quality of life indicators for this majority have taken a huge nosedive.
David Brooks noted this in his first post-2024 election column, which deserves reading or re-reading, even now. In “Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?” Brooks lists a string of alarming social indicators for the non-college educated:
” [T]he diploma divide became the most important chasm in American life. High school graduates die nine years sooner than college-educated people. They die of opioid overdoses at six times the rate. They marry less and divorce more and are more likely to have a child out of wedlock. They are more likely to be obese. A recent American Enterprise Institute study found that 24 percent of people who graduated from high school at most have no close friends. They are less likely than college grads to visit public spaces or join community groups and sports leagues.”
These indicators of social decline are not simply the result of less formal education. They are the result of social and economic shifts that have left many working class people, and the places where they live, out of the prosperity experienced by the more educated and degreed in a high-tech, knowledge-based economy. This, Ruffini notes, was only amplified by the COVID pandemic.
“Stark differences by job sector translated to differences by worker education levels. From May 2020 to April 2021, the average rate of teleworking . . . was 24 percent. Rates were vastly different based on education: an average of 52% of those with graduate degrees working from home, as did 38% of those with a bachelor’s degree. The rate for high school graduates: 8%.” Turned out the working class were the “essential workers.”
Columnist Peggy Noonan observed that our society now divides between the “protected” and “the unprotected” classes. While educated liberals talk a lot about the “marginal” and “disadvantaged,” we missed the largest group to whom such terms actually apply. Not only was that majority of the population overlooked, they were often labeled as “racist” or “sexist” or “authoritarian.”
Brooks wrote, “That great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect. People who climbed the academic ladder were feted with accolades, while those who didn’t were rendered invisible.” While the Democrats were busy devising ways to forgive “student loans,” vocational training programs were being eliminated.
As I have noted in recent blogs my post-election focus has been on better understanding the people who have returned Trump to the White House and what motivated them to do so. Ruffini’s book has been an eye-opener for me. It also goes a long ways in explaining why Trump has gained support among Hispanics and African-Americans.
Two things now seem urgent. First, a better and more empathetic understanding of those on the other side of the college diploma divide. And, second, greater self-awareness and humility on the part of those of us on this side.
If consumed without handfuls of salt, that David Brooks stuff will rot your brain.
You’re right when you observe that “These indicators of social decline are not simply the result of less formal education.” They aren’t really at all the result of less formal education. You could have college for everyone, and if that’s all that changed, no difference.
The problem you’re looking at, is that our nation’s economy has practically no valuable use for a large percentage of the population. The value of people who went to college is dropping along with the rest, as computers become more capable of replacing them, but the big numbers are among people whose value never dropped, because it was always minimal, as was their parents’. Therein lies an essential component of racism, along with the inconvenience of the population’s poor mental and physical health.
The no-college example I know who comes to mind, is a guy who’s as liberal or more in his views than the college educated he comes into contact with. But he’s a skilled tradesman I guess would be correct, he has a nice home in north Seattle, etc., and he’s also quite smart. A 4 year degree wouldn’t have made any political difference (or might have screwed him up – it seems to me colleges are the stronghold of the Libertarians.)
Another tradesman did (I think) go for the degree, and he thought it helped him at a sort of social level, to have that experience of hanging out with the kind of person who goes to college – like his clients. I suspect it wasn’t really necessary for him, but there’s sure a reality there for a whole lot of Americans. Economic value isn’t all about your ability to master technologies, you have to be a comfortable fit with the people you will work with, and it could mean you don’t get good jobs, whether they nominally require any academic skills or not.
Income inequality isn’t a simple problem, but letting a little of the air out of it would do a lot more good than all the humility and understanding anyone can summon up.
The high tech thing, specifically, might be kind of a blip in the long term. Someone who was there in the day was telling me last night, it wasn’t really a thing until one day the news went around the office that everyone at Netscape was suddenly a millionaire, like even the person who answered the phone. From that day on, no one worked a high tech job for more than a few years any more, where before that it used to be an ordinary job with kind of ordinary pay where you might work decades and eventually retire. Well, it has been changing as we go along, but given the complexity of the subject it might be hard to see the big picture from here. It seems to me like it kind of has to run dry in some ways eventually, and computer nerds will go back to being people who do it because can’t really do much else. Even if all of us were suited to it, it’s never going to employ a majority of US workers.
Excuse me for talking about the value of a person as a sort of measurement, but it’s a reality at some economic level, and it’s at the root of this problem. More precisely, the value of your time and effort, recognized by tangible rewards for it. I find the objectionably neoliberal types frame this in terms of “productivity”, and propose that people are paid poorly because their work isn’t “productive.” Either that’s correct and we need to change it, or it’s false and we need to boot it to the curb. We can’t have necessary work that’s poorly paid, and we need enough necessary work for all who will take it. That’s going to be a bridge too far for David Brooks, and that’s why people like that are not going to get us anywhere.
One solution to the great divide is to fund an intermediate level of colleges, like those state universities in California, that are less expensive and more oriented toward the job market. Washington has instead pumped money into community colleges and research universities, skipping the mid-level places like Davis in California, with an emphasis on the wine industry. This arrangement stems from a great bargain engineered by UW president Charles Odegaard that steered money and generated a peace treaty. One solution is to take some community colleges and graduate them upward to state universities, as with Bellevue College. This also helps to spread the higher-education wealth beyond Seattle and Pullman.
College – UW for example – is dramatically more expensive than it was 50 years ago, am I right? Any ideas why? Of course this is relative to what someone going to school could make on the side, in the summer etc. People in ordinary walks of life used to pay for school without loans, do I remember this right?
The other slice that elected Trump – wealthy republicans- the owners of commercial property, businesses large and small – insurance agents- real estate brokers- bankers, finance, corporate managers – tech bros- some have degrees some don’t- money is the driver, not education- on the other hand, many college grads working in their community government , schools and health care clinics live paycheck to paycheck – many of the people I know – they are the college educated working class – most didn’t vote Trump but it certainly doesn’t make them “elite” – the people at the bottom truly suffering in this capitalist system don’t vote
Suggestions based on the presence or absence of a college degree are mechanical and simplistic. We may be comfortable thinking that better educated citizens are more likely to understand broader values than self interest and immediate gratification, more likely to understand the importance of discipline and hard work, more likely to be sensitive to the needs of others. It is also possible that such understandings will affect political preferences. But a college degree is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for such insights. As a life-long college educator, I can assure you that the heavy lifting which helps produce such insights is the work of parents, friends, teachers at all levels, counselors, advisors and other experiential sources of wisdom. We should be careful of sharply defined categories and labels when engaged in general analysis.
William Andersen
All:
Respectfully, I offer that previous examination of education level has little import, as 2 + 2 is no longer 4, especially via Fox News.
>30,000 prevarications in the previous term didn’t matter and apparently didn’t happen. (Ranging from “intent to deceive” to “pants on fire”.)
About 44% of one party’s voters thought Biden stole his election.
And somehow, some version of majority of voters for one candidate thought their candidate was the actual Christian.
I am not supposed to judge someone else’s beliefs, but 2+ 2 = 4?; not optional.
Seattle Times just put up a stats article showing where “educated people” live in Seattle. In a few areas – either very nice, or reasonably nice and close to South Lake Union – the percentage over 25 college grads is in the mid 90s. Various chronically angry right wing-y commenters assert that a college degree doesn’t make you educated. Whatever, I think that’s pretty much the common definition of education (so maybe only the uneducated would say that.)
Meanwhile, out in the sticks … Medill Journalism School’s State of Local News project made the news by reporting that Trump’s election margin was 54% — the margin, not the total! — in the 91% of “news desert” counties he won. People who can’t read a newspaper because their community doesn’t have it, are an important, possibly dominant constituency.
What is “educated” about, really? I think literacy in the US, albeit not ideal, is adequate for people who are motivated to learn, even in the most forgotten backwater. A few will pick up a newspaper and get some ideas about what’s going on in their towns, their counties, and the world, of a kind that don’t come from social media feeds. But if there’s no news source like that … suppose you had a college degree, would it make a difference? What I’m thinking here is that education, as we commonly define it, is a part of a more general information competence, and it isn’t the part that’s in really disastrous condition today. Information competence is effectively zero where there’s no reliable information.