It’s Been a Bad Couple of Years for American Confidence in Higher Ed. Here’s How Democrats Should Respond.

Nearly a third of young people, according to polling done last year, now say that getting a college education is less important than it was 20 years ago. Higher education enrollments, declining for nearly a decade, are dropping at an “alarming” rate. And though going to college is still the default plan for many, views are changing.

Why are kids cooling on college? The disruption of the pandemic was certainly a factor. So is price: As the cost of higher education soars, growing numbers of young people are questioning the value of a degree. And for conservative families, the drumbeat of negative headlines—painting campuses as “woke” indoctrination camps—hasn’t helped.

Among political observers, Americans’ sinking belief in college is being interpreted as yet another threat to the Democrats’ already unwieldy coalition, one in which college-educated voters now make up the majority. As voters turn away from college, goes the refrain, they’ll inevitably turn away from the Democratic Party.

But there’s a bigger shift occurring, one that points to a way forward for Democrats.

Consider another swing in public opinion: perceptions of labor unions. According to Gallup, 77 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 presently approve of unions—the highest figure in more than two decades. And that pro-union sentiment crosses traditional dividing lines. Across race, class, and political party, this generation is remarkably united in believing that unions mean a better future.

Together, the declining confidence in higher education and rising support for organized labor point to a significant change in the way that young people view their economic futures.

For decades now, it has been an article of faith that human capital investments—education, in other words—are the foundation of labor market success. As Bill Clinton famously put it, “What you earn depends on what you learn.” But after confronting a recession, a pandemic, and spiking inequality, young Americans are decidedly less sold on that vision of economic prosperity. Moreover, recent victories by organized workers have offered a vivid reminder of what’s been missing from the human capital equation: collective power.

Notably, Joe Biden seemed to speak to precisely this realignment in his State of the Union address last week, largely bypassing the sort of education-as-economic-advancement rhetoric of his predecessors. Instead, he boasted of having created tens of thousands of good-paying jobs that don’t require college degrees, and proclaimed that “unions built the middle class.” It’s a decidedly old message, but one that may hold new appeal for young voters.

Half a century ago, an emergent breed of “new” Democrat sought to shrug off the New Deal economic agenda, which was rooted in big government and organized labor. For upstarts like Bill Clinton and his future running mate Al Gore, economic rewards in the 21^st century would be the result of knowledge and skills, requiring investments in training and retraining. When New Democrats assessed the party’s traditional union allies, they saw what economists refer to as “deadweight losses”—inefficiencies that were keeping the price of labor artificially high and rendering domestic industries unable to compete in an era of globalization. It was another example, as they saw it, of the need for a Democratic Party that reined in the power of unions and embraced the free market.

The solutions of the ’30s won’t solve the problems of the ’80s. Such was the mantra of the Democrats’ self-described neoliberal faction. “The structure of the American union movement,” argued Randall Rothenberg in a 1984 paean to the new liberalism, “seems to be antithetical to the organization of postindustrial society.” To survive in a globalized economy, unions and their members needed to recognize that their moment had passed; they needed to embrace a future in which labor market outcomes would depend on smarts, not solidarity. Rothenberg summed up this dilemma bluntly: “If, as the neoliberals state, the future depends not on the technostructure but on the entrepreneur, it is difficult to see how organized labor, as it now exists, fits into their political economy.”

Such a perspective was vividly captured in the 1992 novel turned film Primary Colors—Joe Klein’s thinly disguised chronicle of Clinton’s first presidential campaign. Midway through the novel, the candidate, whose campaign is reeling, pays a visit to out-of-work shipyard workers in New Hampshire. Rather than coddling them, as party leaders of the past might have, the Clinton doppelgänger dishes out straight talk about the realities of the new knowledge economy. Neither their jobs nor their union was coming back, declared the candidate, “because we’re living in a new world now, a world without borders—economically, that is.”

The alternate vision proposed by the insurgent Democratic Leadership Council—a group that included Clinton and Gore, legislators like Dick Gephardt and Joe Lieberman, and power brokers like Charles Peters, founder of the influential Washington Monthly—swapped out solidarity for individual training and skills acquisition. To participate in the knowledge economy, workers who had long relied on unions to protect salaries and benefits needed to acquire more human capital through education and training. “The only way middle-class people can keep good jobs with growing incomes,” proclaimed Clinton in a 1992 speech, “is to be Iifetime learners and innovators.”

The bipartisan embrace of training vouchers that workers could use to pay for “upskilling” exemplified this way of thinking. The 1990s concept of the Individual Training Account originated with the conservative Business Roundtable. But the New Democrats thrilled to the idea of a fund, paid for by equal contributions from employer and employee, that could be used by displaced workers to acquire new skills.

Individual Training Accounts never took off, but the vision of each American endlessly acquiring new skills to meet the demands of a global knowledge economy became Democratic Party orthodoxy. When Barack Obama convened a summit of union leaders at the White House in 2015, he couldn’t resist encouraging members of the working class to head back to school, even as he sought to win their support. Among the “commonsense principles” offered by Obama that afternoon: “If you work hard in America, you should have a pathway to the education and training you need to grow your skills and earn raises and promotions and the chance to get ahead.”

The populist backlash seeded in part by Democratic rhetoric that seemed to blame economic “losers” for their own misfortune has been well chronicled. But less understood is the generational resistance to what scholar Jon Shelton calls “the education myth”—the uniquely American belief that the answer to every economic woe is more education. For young workers who graduated into the Great Recession, or who joined the workforce just as COVID was shuttering the economy, or who are now staring down a future in which A.I. could destabilize entire industries, the idea that an additional investment in their human capital will protect them from layoffs or ever-concentrating corporate power sounds like a joke.

In short, many younger Americans no longer subscribe to the Clintonian idea that “Education is economic development.” And this change has begun to reveal itself, not just in diminishing faith in the importance of higher education, but also in a generational shift regarding the role that government should play in confronting structural problems. Compared to a decade ago, young people today are far more likely to believe that the government should do more to reduce poverty and curb climate change, as well as to provide food, shelter, and health insurance to Americans who can’t afford them. More than a generation ago, Democrats made the case that big government and big unions were the enemy, and sought to shift the onus of economic responsibility onto individuals. Having seen the results play out, young people are increasingly interested in turning back the clock.

The recent wave of high-profile strikes and workplace actions will likely cement this shift. Autoworkers joining forces across three different plants in the fall of 2023, for instance, had overwhelming public support. In part, that’s because standing up to billionaires is an increasingly popular undertaking in an economy that often feels like it’s designed to cleave the country in two. But the United Auto Workers’ successful strike wasn’t just a symbolic victory. The wage hikes they won were also a rebuke to the notion that better pay can only come as a result of human capital investment. Assembly line workers who started the strike making $20 an hour will see their pay double by the end of the contract—not because they retrained, reskilled, or reeducated, but because their union carried out one of the most effective labor actions in recent memory.

Indeed, the recent surge in workplace activism, fueled in part by a tight labor market, now extends to workers who are among the most educated, including pharmacists, teachers, nurses, and screenwriters. Last year, nearly 50,000 unionized graduate students throughout the University of California system participated in the single largest higher education strike in history. And graduate students have been forming unions at a record clip, winning elections, often by wide margins. Last year alone, graduate students unionized at Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Northeastern, NYU, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Yale. While labor union membership numbers remain mired at depths last seen in the 1920s, whatever resurgence is underway is being driven largely by young people.

For most of the past half century, the Democratic Party has loudly proclaimed the injustice of economic inequality. And the policy solution they offered achieved exactly what leaders like Bill Clinton had hoped. Staking out the political center, New Democrats ate into a voting bloc assembled by Ronald Reagan. Their positions on work, wages, and welfare, particularly, were brashly bland—designed to win the middle.

The only problem was that those policies didn’t work. It may be more popular to suggest that the “haves” needn’t be threatened by policies designed to aid the “have nots.” One consequence of class conflict, after all, is that there are opposing sides—both of whom have the ability to vote. But it’s wishful thinking to suggest, as the Democrats did for so long, that a rising tide will lift all boats.

Why did the Democratic Party break with unions and begin shilling “college for all” as its economic mantra? Because an emphasis on human capital development promised winners without losers. Unions, of course, do the opposite: They proudly extract concessions for their members at the bargaining table. New Democrats like Clinton, and party leaders who followed—neoliberals like Barack Obama, who didn’t outwardly identify as such, but whose policies indicated otherwise—wanted to frame economic development as a win-win. Go to college and get a good job, they repeatedly said. Then you don’t have to join a union. The last part was never uttered, but it was implicit.

Nearly 50 years later, the evidence is in. Human capital is a better sales pitch than it is an economic policy. And in this new Gilded Age, it seems almost comical to worry about a win-win. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are planning to colonize outer space. Meanwhile, nearly 40 million Americans live in poverty.

This is good for unions. They’re back in vogue. But what does this mean for higher education?

As long as going to college was framed as the key to economic mobility, enrollments boomed. Now, it seems, those days are over. Yet this needn’t be a bust for the nation’s colleges and universities. After all, the vast majority of them, at least those not operating on a for-profit basis, do add real value. Moreover, if freed from the shackling dogma that their core function is job training, they might do an even better job at what they actually do—namely, producing and embodying a reservoir of social, cultural, and technical capacities that enrich community life at every scale. Still, there will be some time in the wilderness, as colleges and universities reckon with the reality that price tags can’t escalate forever on the promise that degrees “pay for themselves.” And, in light of recent controversies, leaders will have to reassure the public that higher education really is the marketplace of ideas that it has long claimed to be.

Meanwhile, young people will be making a new future—one that looks surprisingly like the past. Rejecting the idea that they are solely responsible for their economic futures, a new generation is increasingly attracted to the concepts of collective interests and organized labor. They might even embrace another old notion: learning for learning’s sake.