Noam Scheiber

Yeah.

So I think we sometimes forget that as recently as the 1980s and 1990s, college grads were actually pretty conservative politically.

In the 1980s, for example, they tended to vote Republican by double digit margins.

at least on the presidential level, they used to favor things like smaller government, lower taxes, fewer regulations.

And a lot of this, I think, was driven by the fact that college educated workers tended to see themselves as kind of management adjacent.

They tended to expect that their lives would become much more affluent in the future.

So this is very consistent with their worldview.

If you're an affluent person and you run a business or you're an executive, you tend to want the government to stay out of your way.

But if you fast forward a few decades, you really start to get a different picture of

And if you look at the most recent election, you see that college guys actually shift really far in the other direction.

They end up supporting Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by about a 15-point margin.

And on those specific economic issues like government and taxes and regulation, they've actually moved much further to the left, much closer to people without a degree than they were in the 1980s.

Well, there are a number of factors that people point to when trying to explain this.

But in my book, I focus first and foremost on economics.

A lot of people who went to college were really sold on this idea that it would be the key to an upper middle class adulthood.

And it turned out that the reality fell far, far short of that.

And instead, they were squeezed in a whole variety of ways.

In that field, a sense of grievance and frustration among a lot of college grads with the economic system that exists today.

So this starts several decades ago.

In 1970, only about 10% of Americans had four-year college degrees.