College Grads Turning into Communists
College grads are turning into communists.
Angry communists.
The reason is simple: College grads are losing their elite status. And the more educated they are, the harder the fall.
College and the Elite
There was a time going to college was a guaranteed ticket to the middle-class.
Those days are gone thanks to a combination of too many people going to college — 38% of Americans now have a college degree, up from 21% in 1980.
Meanwhile, most choose majors of questionable utility — liberal arts, psychology, gender studies — that are now collapsing between cuts to government grants, Trump’s war on DEI, and the coming AI tsunami on cubicle jobs.
As a result, while the college wage premium nearly doubled between 1980 and 2000, since then it’s been crawling down to the point that almost a third of undergrad degrees -- and almost half of masters programs -- actually lose money.
As in you spent more on tuition and 4 years of lost wages than you got in pay.
These include liberal arts and English, fine arts, education, psychology, and even biology.
In fact, pretty much the only slam-dunk degrees are engineering, computers, medicine, and nursing. Which make up just 1 in 4 bachelor’s degrees.
To give a sense, plumbers and electricians make nearly double a liberal arts major who spent, on average, $150,000 on their degree all-in.
Universities’ Core Skill: Cherry-Picking
University ROI is actually even worse than it looks. Professor Bryan Caplan calculates that almost the entire college wage premium is actually colleges cherry-picking the best students who would’ve done just fine without the degree.
So Harvard takes the top tenth of a percent of SAT scorers, feeds them beer for four years while teaching them philosophy, then claims credit for the paychecks they — or their rich parents — hustled despite the education.
Fortunately, the kids -- and their parents -- are realizing this. College enrollment is down 2.5 million since Covid, the trades grew by a fifth, and almost half of parents say they don’t want their kids to go to college, instead learning a trade or starting a business.
But the problem is the suckers who already spent 150 grand and make less than blue-collars. They’re angry.
Communism: Opiate of the Low-Income Elite
And a fascinating 2019 study says they’re Communists ready to happen.
The study analyzed participants in the Finnish Civil War, which pitched Bolshevik Communists against conservative counter-revolutionaries.
In short, it found the communists were not the poor and downtrodden. Instead, they were overwhelmingly people who had grown up comfortable -- or even rich -- but failed in life. Like, say, Karl Marx. Or Zohran Mamdani, who turned a $68,000 prep school education into a failed career as a DJ before discovering Democratic Socialism.
Studies dating back to the 70’s have found high-education and low-income is the magic potion for communism. For wanting to burn it all down in hopes of joining the winners to rule over the ashes.
And it fits the now-familiar vignette of privileged kids with gender studies degrees throwing rocks because plumbers make twice their pay.
What’s Next
There’s actually a model for this: Peter Turchin’s Elite Overproduction Theory. And the punchline is when an elite is dispossessed they become dangerous. Historically, they do lead to civil wars.
So the violence and rhetoric we’re seeing from the left isn’t surprising.
And expect more as Trump continues boosting blue collar pay with deportations and reshoring manufacturing while draining the left’s government grants. All while AI decimates the low-skill white-collar jobs psych majors live off.
If they’re angry now, they really won’t like what’s coming next.
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Great perspective. I’ll add, if you don’t mind, many of the people attending college have been taught from a young age that “doing the hard work” is for another class of people. Yet, most of them can’t afford to pay people like me to do the hard work because their degree is useless and their mindset is us “workers” are subpar. I wish them good luck when the power is out or their grocery stores are closed. Maybe they can find an illegal Mexican to help… oh, a lot of them are in trades too.
Great article, as always Peter. Michael Green has published an article putting numbers on the middle class demise which ties in with this.