ESSAY
In this article, Jeffrey J. Williams argues that, contrary to college standing as an open
thoroughfare for Americans wanting to improve their lives, it has become a gated toll road
primarily available to those from middle-class and upper-class families. Williams is a
professor of English and of literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University. The
article was originally published in “Inside Higher Ed” in July of 2016.
College and the New Class Divide
by Jeffrey J. Williams
We usually think of college as providing a boost up the class ladder. That is what it did for a
generation or more of Americans, particularly from the 1950s through the 1970s. But since
around 1980, college has actually calcified class in America.
That’s one upshot of Tamara Draut’s new book, Sleeping Giant: How the New Working
Class Will Transform America (Doubleday, 2016). She explains how the central divide between
the working class and the middle class now is college. Not that things are entirely rosy for those
with bachelor’s degrees, but those without degrees have experienced a more severe pinch, with
proportionately shrinking wages, degraded conditions, few job protections and general
insecurity.
Moreover, contrary to college standing as an open thoroughfare for Americans wanting to
rise, it has become a gated toll road primarily available to those from middle-class and upper-
class families. Those who have gone to college beget those who go to college: if your parents
didn’t go to college, you are much more likely to work at or near minimum wage. Only about
9 percent of those from the lowest quartile of wealth complete college degrees, whereas about
three-quarters from the top quartile do.
A key impediment has been the exponential rise of tuition prices since the 1970s, at
several times the rate of inflation, correlated with the reduction of public support, which in turn
has brought the steep increase in student debt and student work hours.
This has produced what Draut called in an earlier essay “The Growing College Gap,” in
Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide in America and Its Poisonous Consequences.
We usually think that we have seen great progress if not solved the problem of racial inequality,
but the enrollment gap between white students and black students was about 5 percent in 1970,
whereas it had more than doubled, to 11 percent, in 2000. Similarly, Hispanic students have seen
the gap widen from 5 to 13 percent. Affirmative action gets headlines, but we have actually gone
backward in attaining racial equality in higher education.
One of Draut’s key insights is that the class divide is not just a matter of money but also
one of culture. As she remarks, “When once a steelworker and an accountant could live on the
same block, drive the same car, vacation at the same place and eat at the same restaurants, over
the course of the 1980s, 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s” those from higher classes have
little substantive contact with those from the working class except when they ring up their
groceries or take care of their elderly relatives.
That has precipitated a public and political blindness to the new working class, even
though it constitutes 60 percent of Americans. Rather than a silent majority, it is an invisible
majority.
The cultural divide has two daunting consequences. Because those who work in
journalism and other news media come from the upper, college-degreed cohort—as Draut
adduces, in 1971 only about half of journalists had B.A.s, whereas 92 percent do now—they
have little direct sense of the working class. Nor is there a strong interest to represent it in the
main news organs, like The New York Times or The Washington Post, whose audiences are
largely college educated.
In Draut’s analysis, after the 2008 crash, about half of the news focused on the banks, a
third on the federal response, a fifth on businesses and only a smattering on working-class people
who might have lost jobs or their houses. Rather, the Post ran a feature on a banker getting by on
a reduction of her salary—to $300,000 a year. Hard times indeed.
Similarly, those who work as congressional staffers come almost entirely from college
backgrounds. Of high-level staffers, about half “attended private colleges for their undergraduate
degree, including 10 percent who went to an Ivy League school.” They are typically the ones
who get the internships inside the D.C. beltway, as well as can afford to carry the expenses of
internships.
That has effectively shut the working class out of public representation or political power,
even though it constitutes a majority. For Draut, the key is to change the narrative, popping what
she calls the “class bubble.” One corrective is simply that we are not all middle class: most
Americans are working class.
In addition, Sleeping Giant shows that the present working class no longer fits the iconic
image of the construction worker in hard hat who had a union to speak for him. Instead, it is
largely female, about half Latino and African-American, usually nonunionized, and struggling to
make ends meet at or near minimum wage while laboring in home health care, fast food and
retail, which have gained the bulk of new jobs.
Since college is a key class marker, it’s easy to blame higher education itself as the
problem. But for Draut the problem lies in the policies that have drained equal opportunity from
it and segregated it, and in turn she advocates policies to enhance public higher education,
notably reducing tuition fees and eliminating student debt. [As Draut has said], “Debt-free
college is now a real idea and part of the political debate.” That’s one salutary reminder we can
take from Draut: it might be a long road, but good ideas that seem unrealistic at one moment can
win their day.
In academic scholarship, we typically focus on conceptual problems, commenting on one
and moving onto the next, and in fact we are continually looking for what’s new or next. But in
politics, change sometimes seems glacial, and one has to be dogged. It’s useful to keep in mind
that massive student debt is only a recent development, arising since the 1980s, and 10 years ago,
the idea of abolishing it or enacting free public higher education were considered pie-in-the-sky
proposals. But they’re on the agenda now, and we have to keep working to accrue the data, build
the narratives and devise policies that aim toward more equality.