Why College Graduates Feel Betrayed
Their anger goes far beyond the recent rise of unemployment and the looming threat of A.I.
Perhaps most alarmingly, recent college graduates are having a harder time finding work. Between 1990 and 2018, it was almost unheard-of for the unemployment rate of recent college graduates to exceed the country’s overall rate. But that has been the case for five straight years now.
But for young college graduates, extended bouts of unemployment, or long periods stuck in a low-paying job that didn’t make use of their degrees, upended the entire picture of adulthood they had been taught to expect. In effect, a gap has opened up between the life that many graduates believed they had been promised and their actual prospects. And they’re seething about it.
For people in their 20s and early 30s, those expectations were forged as early as elementary school, when “college for all” became a national obsession — the way every American could achieve middle-class affluence.
And then, once they graduated, many found themselves with tens of thousands of dollars in loans, and no path to a job in line with their credentials.
In a high-wattage presidential election, when the country was primarily focused on cultural issues, college graduates and those without a degree often appeared to have little in common. But when it came to how they felt about their bosses or their bank accounts, it was suddenly harder to tell them apart. They were no longer on opposite teams.