New Republic - Starting in about 2005, something nearly unthinkable began to happen: The lifetime value of a college degree began to decline. Up until then, and really for quite a while afterward, a degree was considered a smart bet on a person’s future income and prospects. Possessing a college degree (any degree!) generally meant higher income. At the late date of 2013, Barack Obama called higher education an “economic imperative.”
Once upon a time, very few people got college degrees. About 6 percent of the population in 1950 had one (which itself, thanks to the GI Bill, was a remarkable high). College was, at some level, affordable, and by 2010 degree holders received a glorious 75 percent pay bump. And if you didn’t go to college, no sweat: Nondegree holders had plenty of options for work that paid OK, too—for instance, in skilled trades like electrical work or union jobs in hospitality.
Over the years, more and more people went to college, and today more than 50 percent of working-age adults have college degrees. Overall, they still make more money than people without college degrees. But after 2005, the ever-rising prospects for degree holders began to slouch. The job market for grads shrank, wages flatlined or backslid, and college got so expensive that the debt some people took on to get their degree almost permanently ate into their expected windfall. Degree holders had been promised the world, and a vaunted place in the professional or managerial class. Yet five years after graduation, only 55 percent of college graduates were employed in jobs that require a degree, according to a 2024 report. Many ended up working in the service industry. Caught in low-wage, often precarious jobs, some sought to form unions.
This is the basic story of decline told by Noam Scheiber in his new book, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class. The book expands on the early reporting Scheiber did on Starbucks Workers United at his day job as the workplace reporter at The New York Times. In Mutiny, Scheiber reports in depth on multiracial, cross-class organizing campaigns at Starbucks, Apple stores, video game design studios, and among screenwriters for television. These campaigns were not entirely composed of college-educated people, but many of their participants certainly fit the bill.
Degree holders had been promised the world, and a vaunted place in the professional or managerial class. Yet many were caught in low-wage, often precarious jobs.
The story of a highly educated yet disillusioned generation has been told repeatedly since roughly 2011, when Occupy Wall Street gave voice to the frustration of a struggling mass of college debtors, unemployed degree holders, and others. They have formed a vocal and enthusiastic base of support for left populists from Bernie Sanders to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and have pushed for relief from crushing student loan repayments, as chronicled in works such as Ryann Liebenthal’s Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis. The workplace-organizing campaigns that Scheiber traces are particularly notable because, for generations, college-educated Americans did not tend to throw in their lot with unions. These efforts and their successes, he suggests, not only illuminate the changing fortunes of the college-educated; they also might open a new front to the labor movement.
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