Mediocre
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In looking at right-wing political rhetoric around higher education, we see a pattern of complaints. Some are based in real problems, others in bigotry and resentment:
• Colleges are turning your children into ungrateful liberals who hate America. A college campus, especially at a liberal-arts institution, is a place where many young people first discover the power of civic engagement. As students learn more about injustices in our systems and are empowered by new adulthood, they are perhaps more likely to voice their opinions and work for change. There are, of course, many different ideologies on any given campus, but college activism has been an easy target of conservatives since the 1960s.
• Obama went to college. It might sound like I’m making this up, but I’m not. As part of the anti-Obama backlash that white conservatives embraced after his election and reelection, his Ivy-league degree became one of the strongest symbols of his “out-of-touch elitism” (or, if you are listening closely, his “uppityness”). Obama’s elite-college experience became a stand-in for what an Obama presidency would force on Americans: a bloated, expensive system that turned your children into communists and threatened traditional American values on the taxpayer dime. Conservatives wanted a president who could relate to the everyday man, not a bourgeois Kenyan from Harvard.
• College has gotten far too expensive because colleges tried to maximize profits while your children got degrees in rhythmic screaming and cultural studies. The cost of a college education has indeed risen dramatically, especially in the last decade. In 2016, the average yearly cost of an education at a four-year public university was almost 52 percent of the median man’s yearly income and 81 percent of the median woman’s, versus 20 percent and 52 percent in 1980.32 But this rise is by Republican design. In response to growing discontent with higher education, Republican-controlled state governments across the country started reducing their spending on public colleges and universities. When the Great Recession hit, higher-education budgets were among the first items to be cut as state budgets plummeted; overall, states collectively reduced their annual education funding by $9 billion in the years 2008–2017. Colleges responded by passing a sizeable amount of their expense burden on to students. Even though the recession is years behind us, most states have not increased their education funding to even prerecession levels. Adjusting for inflation, states still paid on average 10 percent less on education per student in 2017 than they did in 2007.33
• Compared to possessing only a high school diploma, obtaining a four-year degree from any not-for-profit college or university is likely to financially benefit a student.34 This fact defies claims that students today get degrees in wildly impractical fields that are a waste of money. Bring on the rhythmic screaming.
In the midst of all this anger and discontentment, what is the reality of the value of a college education? Yes, higher education is too expensive; many state colleges and universities are far more focused on increasing revenues than they were a decade ago. But there is still no surer path to financial security in America than getting a college degree. Today’s college graduate can expect to make over $1 million more on average over their lifetime than someone with only a high school diploma. Even as the average student debt rises above $30,000 per student, college is still a pretty good deal in the long run.35
If there is one person in the post-Obama years who values an elite college education, it’s Donald Trump. He proudly attended the Ivy League’s Wharton School of Finance at University of Pennsylvania. Trump was pleased to send three of his children—Don Jr.,
Ivanka, and Tiffany—to Wharton as well. For all his attacks on higher education and the “elites” who go to fancy schools, Trump has managed to brag quite frequently about his own elite education and how intelligent it obviously means he is. He has mentioned it so often that it caught the attention of the Daily Pennsylvanian, who decided to count how many times he discussed his Ivy League education. The paper found that, from May 2015 through January 2018, Trump discussed his degree an impressive ninety-three separate times in interviews, speeches, tweets, and other public commentary. Trump flaunted his education with statements like: “So I went to the Wharton School of Finance, which is considered the best business school, okay? Gotta be very smart to get into that school, very smart. The Rubios of the world cannot get into that school, believe me,” and “Hey, look—I went to the hardest school to get in, the best school, the Wharton School—it’s like super-genius stuff.”36
If self-avowed “super-genius” Donald Trump values his college education so much that he would mention it publicly almost a hundred times in under three years, why is he working so hard to undermine higher education for the people he represents? The 2016 election numbers offer some strong clues. In 2016, 66 percent of white voters without a college degree voted for Trump. For white men without a college degree, the number jumps to 71 percent.37 On the flip side, Clinton took college-educated voters by nine percentage points, and she received a larger share of the votes from white college-educated voters than Romney did in 2012.38
In short: people with college degrees are far less likely to vote Republican.
A few people on the left like to extrapolate and say these numbers mean that people who vote Democratic are smarter than people who vote Republican. That is an unkind and untrue assumption. It also ignores many of the reasons why people do or do not go to college (or even have access to it) and erases the various ways in which we can define knowledge or talent outside of academia.
There are, I believe, a few reasons why white people with college degrees are more likely to vote Democratic than white people without a college degree:
• College puts you in closer contact with more marginalized people than life outside of college is likely to. White people, as part of the majority of this very racially divided country, rarely have to spend a lot of time with people who are not white. The ability to live in a racially and culturally homogenous society is not a luxury that minority populations have. This racial separation is by design. For generations, white communities have placed barriers to access before people of color in order to ensure that their neighborhoods, primary schools, and workplaces stay as white as possible. And it has worked. The average white person in America has less than one friend of color.39 Getting to know people of different backgrounds and identities is one of the best ways to build empathy and community with them. Issues impacting communities of color will not seem like your issues if you do not consider any people of color a part of your community. It is far easier to see the interests of marginalized communities as competing with yours instead of a part of yours. A white American perspective will seem to be the “normal” one, and everything else will be “other.” Accommodations will feel like sacrifices—or even worse, theft. When the majority of people from communities of color and LGBTQ+ communities vote Democratic because they believe it is the party that gives some concern to their needs, the Democratic party will seem more like the party of “them” not “you”—so long as you see marginalized people as “them.”
• College teaches you the basics of how our political and economic systems work. Any sort of liberal-arts degree—the kind most targeted by Republicans and the Trump administration—will require some basic classes on history, politics, or sociology, no matter what major you end up declaring. One of the fundamental charges of a liberal-arts education institution is to create an informed, active citizenry. Regardless of party, people who understand how our political systems work are less likely to fall for (without being entirely immune to) reactionary populists who want to blame the failures of complex socioeconomic systems on “the Blacks,” “the illegals,” “the gays,” or “the elite media.”
• Having a college degree makes women and people of color less of a socioeconomic threat to you. This may sound highly cynical, but it is perhaps the most important factor in why whites who have a college degree are less likely to vote Republican. White workers with college degrees are pretty much at th
e top of the economic ladder in the pool of average Americans. For white households where the head of household has at least a bachelor’s degree, the average net worth is almost $400,000. For Hispanic households with a college degree, it is $74,000. For Black households, it is only $68,000.40 The only demographic group that earns more than college-educated white men is college-educated Asian men, but at less than 3 percent of the US population, Asian-American men are less of a threat to white workers than other workers of color. (That said, Asian Americans regularly face employment discrimination and are less likely to be promoted above middle management than their white peers, which indicates that they are indeed seen as a threat to their white coworkers.) Generally speaking, fewer white workers will end up working with—and therefore having to worry about competing with—Asian Americans than with other racial and ethnic minority groups.
• If you are a white man with a college degree, you are far less likely to have to worry about watching anyone that you feel might be undeserving move past you on the socioeconomic ladder. By contrast, if you are a white man without a college degree, although your household is still likely to hold more net worth than a Black or Hispanic household headed by someone with a college degree ($100,000 versus $74,000 and $68,000 respectively), and you will still likely earn higher wages than a Black or Hispanic woman with a college degree, yours is the white demographic most likely to compete directly with people of color for jobs, income, and status. As more people of color enter college, and the percentage of jobs requiring a college degree increases, the perceived threat to the socioeconomic status of white men who lack college degrees goes up. You don’t have to have a single person of color in your office to believe that women and other people of color are passing you by. Just log on to social media or turn on your television to see increasing numbers of images of successful minorities. You are being outpaced. If you are a white man without a college degree, Trump’s promises to bring back high-paying factory jobs and to lessen the importance of elite education will appeal to you in a way that it cannot to white people with college degrees.
In demonizing higher education—the same education that Trump ensured all his children received—Trump can maintain popularity among white voters who feel left behind by calls for increasingly skilled labor and who feel threatened by the seemingly rising socioeconomic status of women and people of color. Further, by undermining higher education, he can ensure future voters for himself and the Republican party.
At the root of all this we have a consolidation of power and knowledge by the elite, with the intention of keeping the working classes divided and disenfranchised. In Trump’s (and many other conservative politicians’) ideal world, the average American seeks only enough knowledge to fulfill his or her part of a capitalist system, while those born to privilege will learn the ways of world leadership at elite institutions.
This was Lowell’s aim when he goaded Harvard into setting Jewish quotas. It’s what Brigham was designing when he wrote the SAT. And it is a future that right-wing populists, those who have spent decades demonizing higher education in order to feed into white male fears of their own mediocrity, are actively creating.
I REALLY HATE DEFENDING HIGHER EDUCATION
I’ve spent a lot of time these last few years on college campuses. After the publication of So You Want to Talk About Race, I was invited to many colleges and universities that did, indeed, want to get better at talking about race.
These visits were never easy. More often than not I would meet with reluctant white professors who thought that race had nothing to do with the classes they taught, and with burned-out professors of color who were trying to teach their classes, advocate for students of color, and deal with white colleagues who refused to address racial issues in their work. At every college I went to—every single one—at least one teacher of color broke down in tears describing their struggle to advocate for their students of color in such a hostile environment.
Higher education is not the racial utopia that Republicans are scared of. It is not some bizarro world where students of color wield power over white students and faculty. It is a white supremacist system at its core, like all our other systems are. That is shown in the numbers. Black students, Hispanic students, Indigenous students, and Pacific Islander students all fare far worse on college campuses than white students—they are less likely to be admitted, and when they are admitted, they are far less likely to graduate than white students.41
I remember sitting with Black social work students on a campus in Illinois. They told me they had chosen social work because of all the ways in which they had been failed in their own lives by social workers and others who held similar positions of authority in local government. They wanted to be able to support people whom traditional social work had left behind, like them. The students shared their struggles to make it out of areas like Ferguson, Missouri, and into college when so many people had told them it wasn’t possible. Some students were homeless during their first years of college. They talked about how all their professors were white, and how in every class their professors pathologized people who looked like them and who came from the communities they grew up in. They talked about how they struggled to make good grades in classes that wanted to teach them that people who looked like them were fundamentally broken. They put up with these insults and hurdles so they would have a chance to be social workers who could tell their community members that they weren’t flawed.
I say all of this to make the point that I really hate defending higher education. It is a broken system that can do a lot of harm to marginalized people. Yet it’s the best place in America for our young people to formulate their social and political consciousnesses. How very sad.
I loved my days at Western Washington University. I loved them even though I had to take specific classes on race and politics if I wanted to hear any discussion about race in any of my political science classes. I loved them even though I only had one Black professor and one Asian American professor in a sea of white male professors. Even though I was the only Black person in every one of my classes. Even then, I loved college. I think I fundamentally knew that the occasional research paper written by a scholar of color, the chapter discussing queer activism in 1970s politics, the brief introduction to intersectionality and the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw—I knew that those few instances in which the scholarship of women, people of color, disabled people, and LGBTQ+ people were treated as valid and worthy of respect were the closest I would get to an America that respected and appreciated people who weren’t white and male. And when I looked at my classmates bent over the words of Black women and queer women, studying them intently and discussing them respectfully—I knew that this was the closest many of them would come to respecting the opinions and perspectives of people who weren’t white and male. If we lost that, then where would we be?
I am not defending higher education because I love, or even like, the institution. I am defending it because without it, we are lost. And because I have seen, in my own academic history and in the countless hours I’ve spent on campuses across the country, what higher education could be.
It could truly be the place that angry white men hate and fear if it put in the effort. It could be a place that dares to believe that the world does not revolve around white men. It could be a place that promotes the idea that people who aren’t white men have just as much right and ability to shape our future in their image as white men have. It could be a place where we learn to respect consent and pronouns, where we learn about intersectionality, where we learn the truth about our corrupt systems and begin to demand change, where we learn to respect and appreciate people who are different from us, where we start demanding justice for the oppressed, where we investigate our histories of bias and bigotry. Higher education could be all of that, and the world would be better for it.
The war on higher education is coming from both the outside and the inside. As Trump and others on the right try to delegitimiz
e higher education, conservative professors and administrators have long tried to delegitimize teachers and faculty who are dedicated to social justice in their fields. As funding is cut for higher education in states across the country, conservative think tanks are reaching out to the institutions and offering funds—but only for conservative teachers and courses.42 Across the country, race- and gender-studies professors are seeing their budgets slashed and their deans removed so their departments can be swallowed up by more “respectable” ones in science, technology, and business.
Trump and others on the right want to make sure that working-class white men don’t want to go to college and distrust those who do, and conservative educators want to make sure that people from marginalized communities don’t want to go either. All of this works by design. It is to ensure that enough of us keep our heads down, focus on surviving our nine-to-five jobs, don’t ask questions, and don’t demand more from a system that owes us a lot. The death of American higher education will harm the most vulnerable of us first, but its goal is not to harm or oppress only us—that work is fully implanted in all our systems. Its goal is to continue to oppress and exploit white supremacy’s most powerful tool: the angry white working-class man.