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.