“Mornin’ sunshine.” She smirked.

I picked her up at the Starbucks attached to the Tuckahoe stop on the Harlem line. I was giving an informal talk at her alma mater that evening, and she agreed to show me around campus. From Yonkers, it was pretty much all highway, and assuming no traffic, it was less than four hours. Driving was the obvious choice.

Technically, it was a business trip. We were both going to expense it, that’s for sure. She’d be drinking, I wouldn’t. It wasn’t the lecture, which, like most things, would’ve been better with scotch. It was the driving and the logistics. I had to get us in there that day, get her out the next morning (I worried that’d be the hardest part), then get us both to Philadelphia, where I’d be giving the exact same lecture the very next day.

I didn’t drive intoxicated, not even short distances. For that I deserve exactly no plaudits. Refraining from the unconditionally stupid surely doesn’t get you points with any cosmic scorekeeper. Even if it did, it wouldn’t much change the salvation math in my case, I’m afraid.

She lived in Brooklyn. I was in White Plains. Yonkers wasn’t exactly halfway, and for her it was the wrong way compared to where we were going. But I refused to drive into the city. That’s the kind of person I was — ask someone for a favor, then insist they inconvenience themselves to get it done. Besides, I had a place I kept at “Monarch,” a condo complex that counted as upscale for Yonkers. There was a shopping center across the street. Nothing special to be sure, but you could spend some money and have a good time there, at least for one night. It was right up the street from the Tuckahoe stop.

“Thanks again for tagging along.” Another smirk. We were a disaster waiting to happen. Kindling and matches. Not on that trip, but eventually. She tossed her travel bag into my chest. “I’m getting tea. You’re buying it.” “Whatever you want, princess.”

Two paid travel days to be my campus tour guide wasn’t the easiest sell with her boss, so we lined up a second corporate promotion to justify her expenses. I’d give my lecture and she’d do a taped interview with campus career services, explaining how she was able to use her degree to build an advertising career in New York City. It was basically a campus recruiting trip, and it went well enough that I turned it into a broader initiative.

Over the next several months, I crisscrossed the northeast by train for a tour of more than half a dozen campuses. I took an Amtrak to Rochester and bought the bar at a Carrabba’s after a well-attended event at the university. Then on to Buffalo where, after giving the same talk to another group, a faculty couple in the business department suggested dinner at a restaurant they couldn’t afford. On them. Maybe you’ve been there. Not to the restaurant, but in that situation. “Please, get whatever you like. You came all this way.” Then they order two house Merlots. You know where it’s going from there. No appetizers. They had a late lunch. They’ll split a chicken entree. Does it come with a salad? No. That’s fine. They had a late lunch. (I didn’t care. I had the duck anyway.) In Cambridge, by contrast, nobody had to say “get whatever you like.” It was understood. Dinner was paid for. Ahead of time. For everybody. And there were a lot of people there. It wasn’t a lecture, it was an event for sponsors. My company was a sponsor. But so was Goldman. Suffice to say I wasn’t the headliner.

All in all, it was a successful initiative, but it didn’t conjure any nostalgia for the nearly 14 years I spent as a student. The culture was clearly different from my time, which, by the way, wasn’t that long ago, or at least not on the grand arc of human history. I still have the signup sheets from some of the talks I gave and a copy of the informational packet I handed out to students. As far as I’m aware, there are no other existing mementos from my travels. I remember the bars. And the drinks. The rest of it too, but not as vividly. Probably because of the bars. And the drinks. Someone should put that on a placard at my wake.

Fewer and fewer young adults in America want anything to do with a college education. Those who do enroll increasingly shun the humanities in favor of STEM-related programs or cookie cutter business degrees to avoid being subjected to derisive jokes about the apocryphal basket-weaving major who graduates with a six-figure debt burden. Those two, related phenomena are emblematic of a broader crisis enveloping higher education in America.

On December 30, 2019, less than three months before the pandemic dealt struggling colleges and universities yet another body blow, Gallup released a startling set of survey results. Just half of US adults considered college to be “very important,” down nearly 20 points in just six years. More concerning still, the percentage of adults aged 18-29, which is to say college-aged adults, who considered higher education important was just 41%, down an astounding 33 points since 2013.

Gallup called the drop among young adults “particularly concerning.” “That this group is growing more skeptical about the importance of college degrees requires colleges and universities to reflect on their educational promise and approach to attracting new students,” Stephanie Marken wrote.

Spiraling costs are the elephant in the room, but there’s a lot more going on than that. One particularly troubling dynamic is the feedback loop between political rhetoric targeting the humanities (and, to a lesser but still meaningful degree, the social sciences) and the extent to which a body politic not trained in the humanities is more vulnerable to such rhetoric. That can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Indeed, it’s fair to suggest it already has.

In the Gallup poll, the partisan split was pronounced. Just 41% of Republicans said a college education is very important compared to nearly two-thirds of Democrats and half of Independents. Consistent with the overall figures, those shares were dramatically lower compared to 2013, when 68% of Republicans and 83% of Democrats thought obtaining a higher education was critical.

Do take a moment to let this sink in: In 2019, the percentage of Democrats who viewed college as mission critical was lower than the share of Republicans who said the same just six years previous.

Although disenchantment with college is a bipartisan issue, it’s more acute on the Republican side of the political divide, and not by accident either. Increasingly, the Republican party relies on a web of conspiratorial narratives to perpetuate the culture wars in America and otherwise promote the brand of divisive identity politics the GOP believes is critical to holding key constituencies in thrall. One of those narratives says liberal professors are indoctrinating college students with so-called “woke” ideas at the expense of “traditional” American values. Such accusations aren’t reserved solely for the humanities and social sciences (indeed, the natural sciences are very often described not just as accomplices in the alleged plot to corrupt young minds, but in fact as ringleaders), but they do make for easy targets.

As I look around my living room, where I tend to write, I see books. Lots of books. Tightly-compressed books on shelves, dog-eared books on coffee tables, sun-bleached books on a windowsill and books stacked precariously, Jenga-style on a sofa table. I see John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, Kant, Aristotle, a dingy hardcover of Wittgenstein’s 1914-1916 Notebooks with the names of previous owners scrawled inside the cover. I see Machiavelli (and not just The Prince). I see John Rawls, Thomas Aquinas, de Tocqueville and, particularly relevant in this context, John Dewey. I also see thousands of pages of classic literature, historical fiction, history texts, novels and collections of short stories.

What would we say, today, of someone who spent well more than a decade immersed in that material at considerable financial expense? We might say such a person wasted a meaningful portion of their life in pursuit of skills with little practical utility. And we might say that considering the juxtaposition between the very high cost of college and the relatively grim career prospects for, say, philosophy majors outside of academia, that such a person is destined to be a failure in a society where success is measured only in dollars and human worth by net worth.

Certainly, that’s the perception among (too) many college students. Indeed, enrollment in the humanities and social sciences is falling fast enough to constitute an existential crisis, or at least according to some observers in academia. The stigma associated with non-STEM majors and the fear of graduating with a heavy debt burden and little in the way of job prospects, is more than enough to override students’ desire to study what they love.

An exhaustive account published by The New Yorker in February laid bare the scope of the problem. And make no mistake: It’s a problem. A student at the University of Pittsburgh suppressed a lifelong passion for writing and an affinity for “the long, hard classics with fancy language,” like Don Quixote, to toggle between computer science, mathematics and astrophysics, “none of which brought him any sense of fulfillment,” according to his own account. Another student, at Arizona State University, where humanities graduates fell by half in the eight years leading up to the pandemic, was “in love” with Italian language and literature, but decided to study business instead because, as she put it, “There’s an emphasis on who is going to hire you.”

According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators, total bachelor’s degree completions in the humanities fell dramatically from 2012 to 2018, a period which largely overlaps the six years covered by the Gallup poll mentioned above. Still, at nearly 203,000, 2018’s figure was 68% higher than 1987’s tally, and surpassed figures for every year from 1987 to 2003. Where’s the crisis, right? Well, data on “historical categories” — which include some of the largest disciplines, like classical studies, English language, literature, history and philosophy — paints a more concerning picture. The 86,195 degrees awarded in those disciplines in 2018 was the fewest since 1990, represented a 37% decline from the record high reached in 1971 and counted as the smallest share of overall humanities degrees ever recorded.

The number of history degree completions in 2018 fell by 33% from 2012. Degree completions in English language and literature dropped by 26% over the same period. Of the large humanities disciplines, the only category that saw a meaningful increase in degrees awarded from 2012 to 2018 was communication.

As it turns out, this is a global trend, and it’s potentially disastrous. Nathan Heller, writing for The New Yorker, captured the problem in just a few words. Scholars, he wrote, “have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before.” Everyone knows the old adage about “those who don’t know history” or, in its modified form, those who “cannot remember the past.” If there’s any truth to that saying, current trends in higher education may be condemning society to repeat some of the worst mistakes humanity ever made. Indeed, you could argue there’s evidence of that all around us, and particularly in the political sphere.

Perhaps the decline in English majors isn’t as amenable to dour prognostications as the drop in history majors, but then again, it’s the furthest thing from obvious that a society with fewer language majors is a better society. Language, after all, is the key to human cooperation, which is why some are so concerned about the rapidly evolving capabilities of ChatGPT (itself a threat to higher education). Without language, humans aren’t the planet’s dominant species. As Yale helpfully reminds prospective English majors on its website, “The social world consists of discourse. Politics, religion and philosophy live in language. An English major learns to become a holistic person, versed in many facets of the world’s knowledge, capable of making sense of them in conversation and able to best express these insights to the world.”

As I wrote and refined this edition of the monthly, I came back again and again to the idea of a “holistic person.” Yale’s pitch for its English department suggests majoring in the humanities is the ticket to being a well-rounded individual, able to adapt and thrive in a variety of professional environments and social contexts. They’re quite explicit about it. “The English major’s tools will never be obsolete, and they will prove relevant to any classroom, office or creative venture,” the school says. The implication: An English major is a holistic person and a holistic person will never be lost or without decent prospects. The contrast with derisive memes about jobless humanities majors is stark. But the pitch is intuitive, at least on some levels. What’s a surgeon whose hands are injured irreparably in a car accident? Dr. Strange in a comic book. What about in the real world, though? A medical researcher maybe. But a very depressed person for the first several months after the accident most likely.

Still, we can’t ignore the reality of jobless humanities majors, deeply indebted social science graduates and aimless art students who discover that being holistic is of little use when it’s the last week of the month and the rent’s due. Moreover, we can’t pretend that all well-rounded people studied widely at the collegiate level, or that all people who study widely at the collegiate level become holistic people by default.

Although I have a graduate degree in business, and although I wasn’t an English major in my undergraduate days, I did major in a social science and minored in the humanities. Other than the business degree, all of my graduate work was in social sciences and humanities. While touring campuses all those years ago, I spoke exclusively to business students. They were, in general, single-minded. And I was, almost without fail, the only holistic person in the room, including the faculty members. The students showed up because, on paper, I came bearing a potentially interesting opportunity. And yet, no one was persuaded by the specifics, which weren’t even very compelling, certainly not compared to the constellation of opportunities available to business students at top-tier universities. Rather, they were interested in the holistic person making the pitch. I wanted to tell them the truth, but it would’ve been unprofessional: Nothing I learned in business school played any role whatsoever in shaping my analytical faculties, and if any part of the 14 years I spent on various campuses as a student was a waste of time and money, it was the graduate business program.

“Christ that was bad.” She exhaled a Parliament and passed it to me. I looked around, then took a drag. “Are cigarettes allowed these days?” She pinched her eyebrows between her thumb and forefinger in mock exasperation. “Yes. It’s not a high school. And what are you 14?” I gestured at nothing in particular and shrugged. “Times are changing. People don’t like smokers.” “We’re not smokers,” she reminded me. “And we’re visitors, not students.”

We’d just left an expensive-looking A/V room where she taped a kind of infomercial for a gaggle of earnest campus staff who apparently spent their days creating promotional content for the university. “Was it bad?” she pressed. I grinned and passed the Parliament back. “It was funny. Your makeup was good.” She scoffed, took the last drag and flicked the white, recessed filter at my shoes. Sparks.

To this day I wonder how many alumni and parents of prospective students watched that video. She told the story she was supposed to tell: Scarcely a week went by when she didn’t harken back to the classroom or channel a university mentor for inspiration while making million-dollar ad miracles happen in midtown. The crisp, professional cadence she adopted for the occasion was almost unrecognizable to the infallibly sarcastic, unapologetically condescending demeanor that made her an instant hit with me the first day we met. She was lying, for lack of a more polite way to put it. And so was I whenever I suggested, tacitly, that getting a business degree was a career accelerator.

Neither of us could draw anything like a straight line from the instruction we received while obtaining the degrees which ostensibly qualified us for the jobs we held, and the actual success we had while acting in our professional capacities. We were good at what we did because we were holistic people, or anyway more holistic than a lot of other people. But perhaps not in the sense that Yale meant. Much as I’d like to say that my claim on being holistic is the result of how seriously I took my course work in the humanities and social sciences, I can’t draw a straight line there either. Being steeped in history and the classics surely makes you more holistic. So does learning a second or third or fourth language. Or learning to sculpt, or weld or distinguish between different styles of architecture. But some of being holistic is about experiences, and some of it is intangibles. Some experiences can’t be replicated, and some intangibles can’t be learned, taught or bought.

You don’t need a business degree to do this cost-benefit analysis. Becoming a holistic person sounds like a noble goal, and it may well be that such a person is always in demand somewhere, but “holistic” is just Yale-speak for “well-rounded.” And while it’s true by definition that well-rounded people cast their nets far wider than those who train their tunnel vision on a single pursuit, casting a wide net could mean anything. There’s no reason it necessarily has to include reading Crito, On Liberty and Self-Reliance, let alone taking on $50,000 in debt to read them as part of a glorified book club. That being the case, considering you can’t learn experiences or intangibles and knowing full well that the Yale English department’s assurances aside, “MD,” “MBA” and “licensed plumber” are a lot easier for employers to wrap their minds around than “certified holistic person,” young adults are forgiven for choosing STEM majors, technical schools or skipping college altogether in favor of apprenticeships.

It’s no secret that the cost of education has skyrocketed on many metrics, nor is it a secret that America’s mountain of student debt will almost surely never be repaid. Some might chafe at that latter assessment, but the odds of a $1.8 trillion debt burden being repaid in full when the creditor is the government, the debtors are voters and a very large share of the electorate believes the asset being financed should be a public good, are exceedingly low in my view, notwithstanding the irritable protestations of those who argue (not implausibly) that taxpayers are at risk of being fleeced given the embedded moral hazard. In May of last year, Gallup found that among both noncollege Americans and those currently enrolled, less than 10% thought quality, affordable higher education was available to everyone.

For what it’s worth, Third Way, a think tank, has developed a relatively straightforward way to analyze the value proposition for students and taxpayers. Third Way, like all think tanks, has been scrutinized in the past for potential bias related to its funding sources, and in that context, some might quip that it’s not a coincidence they styled their college valuation metric after the most commonly used methodology for valuing equities. “Just as Wall Street investors use a price-to-earnings ratio to evaluate the value of individual stocks, consumers and lawmakers should similarly be able to assess the value that an individual institution provides to its students before they decide to write huge checks,” a piece published in 2020 read. Their approach — a “price-to-earnings premium,” or “PEP” — is aimed at calculating “the amount of time it usually takes to recoup the cost of obtaining a credential at a particular school.”

It’s not a bad idea, although it assumes (quite explicitly) that the primary value of a college education is the monetary return on investment, which I’d argue paints an incomplete picture. “If students who pursue a certificate or degree subsequently earn more than their non-college going peers because of that postsecondary training, their additional income can be used to recoup the amount they paid to obtain their certificate, associate’s, or bachelor’s degree [a]nd once they have recouped those expenses, that additional income quite literally becomes a ‘return on investment’ for those students,” Third Way explained.

When calculating a school’s PEP, Third Way takes into account scholarships and grants to get a net cost, then looks at the median salaries for students who graduate from a given institution versus the typical wage for a high school graduate in the relevant state. The difference between the latter two figures is the wage premium, and the PEP measure is just the number of years, based on that premium, that a graduate would need to work to recoup the entire cost of the degree. Of course, former students don’t plow the entirety of their “extra” earnings into paying off their college debt, so what you really need is an “adjusted PEP” (if you will) to account for what percentage of that earnings premium typically goes towards debt repayment, but I suppose that’s too much to ask.

Third Way’s conclusions, illustrated above, seem to suggest that a four-year degree isn’t necessarily a poor value proposition after all. “While the total net price of earning a credential at a four-year institution may be more than a two-year or certificate-granting institution, the overwhelming majority of institutions that primarily award bachelor’s degrees leave their students earning a high enough wage premium to justify the out-of-pocket cost to attend within just a few years,” the think tank explained.

As it turns out, students generally agree. A Gallup poll published this month showed 71% of currently enrolled bachelor’s degree students either agree or strongly agree that the degree they’re in the process of obtaining is worth the cost. Almost no one strongly disagreed.

Consistent with the notion that students overwhelmingly view college as a means to a financial end, the number one predictor of student attitudes around the value of their degrees was “preparation for life after college.” That could mean a lot of things, but it’s safe to say job security and monetary gain are the most important factors. Three quarters said their institution was “preparing them well for life outside of college.”

Of course, it’s hard to draw conclusions based on a sample of people who’ve already committed to college, in many cases at great cost. Once you’re into something (anything) for, say, $35,000 or more, it’s psychologically distressing to ponder the possibility that you’ve wasted your money. The same is true of those who become victims of scams or fall prey to political experiments that eventually go awry.

The survey gently suggested that administrators and university leaders should take note of the factors which predict student confidence in the value proposition on offer. “Amid declining national enrollment, that will be critical to assuring current and future students that the return of a college education is worth the price of admission,” the color accompanying the poll results said.

As Gallup alluded to, not everyone’s buying it — the general idea that a degree is worth it, I mean. Enrollment is down sharply, and the pandemic exacerbated the situation. “Why do I want to put in all the money to get a piece of paper that really isn’t going to help with what I’m doing right now?” a recent high school graduate who spoke to the AP for a foreboding piece published in March wondered. He was, apparently, accepted to every college he applied to, but chose instead to take a job directing a youth theater program in Jackson, Tennessee. He explained the mentality: “There were a lot of us with the pandemic, we kind of had a do-it-yourself kind of attitude of like, ‘Oh — I can figure this out.'”

But it started before the pandemic. Government data shows a precipitous drop in the enrollment rate for high school graduates from nearly 70% in 2016 to less than 62% in 2021. It’s most pronounced in men and whites. In fact, the data is mostly trendless for women, African Americans, Asians and Hispanics. In the first Gallup poll cited above, African American and Hispanic adults were far more likely (20 percentage points) than whites to describe a college education as very important, and women far more likely than men (12 percentage points).

There are any number of factors which could explain the trend. So many, in fact, that the deeper you dive and the more granular you get, the more confused you’re likely to be. The figure above uses the simplest of simple datasets. It’s derived from public, readily accessible BLS figures. Colleges and universities employ countless PhDs, statisticians and administrators to analyze enrollment data. The Department of Education likewise. Books are written on the subject. And so on.

To say an exhaustive analysis of college enrollment trends is beyond the scope of any one article, bulletin or letter would be a good candidate for statistical understatement of the decade. Indeed, there’s a very strong case to be made that the overarching questions are impossible to answer, and that’s assuming you can settle on what questions to ask in the first place. The charts I employ in this piece are meant merely as snapshots — visual signposts, if you will.

Some things are clear enough, though. The combination of the pandemic disruption and soaring wages for jobs which don’t require a college degree amid America’s acute labor shortage has accelerated the decline in enrollment, or at least made an already unfavorable cost-benefit analysis even more daunting in the eyes of many would-be students. AP conducted “dozens” of interviews with educators, researchers and students for the piece mentioned above, on the way to painting a grim picture — at least if you believe declining college enrollment is problematic. Local leaders said young people in their cities are “taking restaurant and retail jobs that pay more than ever,” while others “are being recruited by manufacturing companies that have aggressively raised wages to fill shortages.” Still others are “flocking to jobs at Amazon warehouses or scratching together income in the gig economy.”

In one sense, it’s a good thing that young adults are able to make a decent wage right out of high school. The disappearance of good-paying jobs for Americans who don’t attend college was, without question, a contributing factor to the existential crisis facing white, working class males and, more broadly, to the long-running breakdown of societal cohesion documented in “Exiles On Main Street.”

But notwithstanding what some have (prematurely) described as a revival of union activity in America, a job at an Amazon warehouse or a Starbucks that’s begrudgingly acquiescing to the demands of temporarily empowered baristas, is no substitute for yesteryear’s factory jobs. You can’t feed and clothe a family of four working at an Amazon warehouse and you can’t build a community around a Starbucks. And let’s not forget: Real, inflation-adjusted wage growth was negative during 2021 and 2022 for many workers. It was positive at the very low-end of the pay scale, but that’s where people are barely scraping by. Bottom line: Wage increases or no, the menial work on offer for non-college graduates in the 21st century won’t be fulfilling and will thereby continue to perpetuate the same disaffection and resentment that leaves society vulnerable to noxious ideologies with the potential to erode democratic norms.

A college education can mitigate that situation. Majoring in a STEM field virtually guarantees gainful employment, and during the four years it’ll take to obtain that degree, students will be compelled, by curricular mandates, to take a series of courses in the humanities and social sciences. For a long list of reasons (including, ironically and paradoxically in this context, the disappearance of good-paying blue-collar jobs), voters in Western democracies are increasingly vulnerable to populism and associated demagoguery. Studying history at the college level won’t necessarily inoculate you from the siren song of populism, but at the least, you’d be apprised of how historical experiments in autocratic populist governance turned out (extremely poorly, in some cases).

Again: You generally can’t get a four-year degree (any four-year degree, regardless of major), without taking at least some humanities and social science courses. Those studies can be thought of as vaccines against various sorts of manipulation. Non-majors have less protection, but at least they have some. A software developer who didn’t sleep through American government and 20th century history isn’t likely to be duped by a power-thirsty demagogue reenacting Mussolini. A plumber might, though.

To be clear, we need plumbers. And roofers. And STEM majors. Lots of them. And we need lots of doctors. And all sorts of specialists who are avowedly not holistic people. If my roof’s leaking, I need it patched before it rains again, and I don’t generally care whether the person who climbs up there can tell me anything about Cézanne. If I’m diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, I need an oncologist, and ideally one who spends the vast majority of her time steeped in medical research. Whether she can recite the Meditations is wholly irrelevant (or at least until I’m terminal, at which point Marcus Aurelius might be helpful). No one disputes that society needs skilled manual laborers, nor does anyone dispute various statistics which show demand for experts in hard science, technology, engineering and math is accelerating rapidly.

However, it’s reasonable to suggest that the fewer humanities and social science majors we graduate, the smaller the share of society with full immunity to the range of ideological ills with the potential to infect and destroy democracy. Those who don’t attend college have no protection at all — they’re akin to the unvaccinated. Consider that as a share of total bachelor’s degrees awarded, degrees in historical humanities categories comprised just 4.4% in 2018, a record low. That figure was more than 17% in 1968.

Obviously, technological and scientific developments over the last half-century have changed the educational landscape. Demand for expertise in science and technology is on the rise. New degree programs were created to meet that demand and existing programs were modified to the same end. From that perspective, it makes sense that the share of so-called “historical” humanities degrees would be lower. But what’s interesting about the figure above is that at a very basic level, it suggests a preponderance of good-paying, blue-collar jobs can coexist with high levels of educational attainment in fields like classical studies, English language, literature, history and philosophy. We don’t have to choose between a society where good-paying jobs for high school graduates are plentiful and a society of philosophers. We can have both and we have had both.

But times have changed. The working class is increasingly confined to thankless jobs in a demeaning services sector, academia is virtually inaccessible from the proverbial ivory tower, the best jobs in cutting edge fields are sequestered away in Silicon Valley, Wall Street does what Wall Street’s always done and the country’s wealth becomes more concentrated every year.

Common ground is impossible to find in such a society of unequals and there’s no sense of shared purpose. Rather than be part of the solution, the political class has instead chosen to perpetuate the situation as a means of self-preservation. That’s a bipartisan indictment to be sure, but the American right seems to view demagoguery and identity politics (the harvesting of rage capital) as the only viable path to electoral victory.

In 2017, both Gallup and Pew flagged a widening partisan divide in views about America’s colleges and universities. “Republicans are not only less confident than Democrats about colleges and universities in general, but the reasons Republicans give for these attitudes differ from those provided by the smaller group of Democrats who are negative,” Gallup noted, adding that “Republicans with low levels of confidence in colleges are most likely to cite their belief that colleges and universities are too liberal and political, that colleges don’t allow students to think for themselves and are pushing their own agenda, or that students are not taught the right material or are poorly educated.”

Democrats, by contrast, cited rising costs, job-finding rates and other factors Gallup described as “practical aspects of higher education.” That seems to suggest that some Republicans are trapped in an echo chamber of their own making. Sure, you can cite evidence to support allegations of political bias on campus, but it won’t be as strong as evidence of deteriorating affordability or metrics which measure whether graduates are able to find work. Either costs are rising or they aren’t (they are), and students either get jobs after graduation or they don’t. You can quantify those criticisms of college, whereas alleging bias often entails qualitative judgements.

The point: Democrats are concerned with problems they can measure. Republicans seem increasingly predisposed to citing their own narratives in explaining why they’re “down on college,” as Gallup put it, on the way to posing a pair of troubling questions: “To what degree will diminished confidence in higher education among Republicans lead to decreased public support and funding for colleges and universities? Or, will Republican families be less likely to send their children to traditional colleges and universities, and instead seek other ways to educate them?”

The 2017 Pew poll found that 58% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents viewed colleges and universities as a negative influence on the country, up dramatically from 2016. In 2015, 54% of the same voters (not literally, but by party affiliation) said colleges had a positive impact. Two years and one presidential election later, that figure had collapsed by nearly 20 points to 36%. 2017 was the first time since Pew began asking the question in 2010 that a majority of Republicans said colleges had a negative impact on the way things were going in America.

As we’ve seen across the Western world over the past seven or eight years, being infected by the harmful ideological viruses associated with identity politics (xenophobia, overwrought nationalism and so on) can be psychology fatal. Some do survive and come away with very strong natural immunity. But many (I dare say most) are lost forever.

Those are avoidable casualties. Just a few basic courses in classic political philosophy could make all the difference when it comes to distinguishing between, for example, a true libertarian in the classical sense of the term and an opportunistic charlatan. That’s one reason today’s political opportunists sometimes demonize the four-year degree, lampoon the humanities and traffic in conspiratorial narratives about nefarious cabals of liberal professors.

You might fairly ask (and many have), why it should be a bad thing for students to think critically about America’s history and grapple with the many inconsistencies between word and deed that so vexed the Founders themselves. After all, it wasn’t lost on the men Americans still lionize as saints that there was something inherently ridiculous about the juxtaposition between the rhetoric used to justify the rebellion against the Crown and the institution of slavery. If it was “self-evidently” true that all men were created equal, then what was with the slaves? There’s nothing “liberal” about asking (and re-asking) that question, nor is there anything “woke” (if that’s supposed to be a derisive term) about all the questions that follow from it, including whether those who were held in bondage as capital assets deserve some redress for their considerable trouble, whether that means money for their descendants or favorable treatment in college admissions.

That’s just one example. There are countless others, and they all point to the same thing: Some (not all, and maybe not even most) on the American right are engaged in an ongoing war against higher education not because the system is broken, but rather because an educated public is more likely to recognize and resist attempts to usurp democracy, whether by subtle means or the more overt tactics which’ve become frighteningly common in recent years.

Importantly, that’s not to paint every Republican engaged in such efforts as maniacally anti-democratic. Not every GOP lawmaker who traffics in disingenuous rhetoric about the “liberal agenda” supports autocratic governance under a would-be authoritarian, for example. Some of this is just politics. Politics is a dirty game and virtually nothing is off limits. So it’s hardly surprising, although it’s unfortunate, to see elected officials (or those aspiring to get elected) cynically co-opt an otherwise legitimate debate about the value of a college education.

But this is a slippery slope. Absent structural economic change, more and more Americans will fall through the proverbial cracks as unfettered capitalism operating with no common sense guardrails perpetuates inequality. All efforts to re-industrialize and re-shore aside, and notwithstanding the “high” wages suddenly on offer at Amazon warehouses and the local Starbucks, the days of good jobs for Americans with no college degree are long gone. And they aren’t coming back. If college enrollment continues to fall, it could create a self-fulfilling socioeconomic crisis, whereby Americans are bereft of the credentials they need to avoid precarity and unprotected intellectually from those who might endeavor to leverage that precarity for their own gain, and to the detriment of civil society.

I stared vacantly across the tracks. It was dark. The Starbucks was closed, or if it wasn’t, you couldn’t tell.

It’d been six months, almost to the day, since our road trip. I’d spoken to her for the last time. I was starting a new job, and was due for drinks in the city with my new boss. The Metro-North was late.

“Goddammit. I should’ve drove.” It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to make it on time either way. Besides, I didn’t drive into the city. And I didn’t drive intoxicated.

I was nearly an hour late, but I needn’t have worried. I could’ve taken another hour and still beat him there. I was on my second drink (at least) by the time I finally saw him through the throng of suits crowded around the bar. I lifted my glass so he could spot me. We’d never met in person. His handshake was dead fish and he ordered a rum drink in a highball glass. Plainly, it wasn’t going to work, and in the end it didn’t. But I gave him the benefit of the doubt, and he extended the same courtesy. Mistakes, both.

“The political science. We can use that,” he told me. “It’s a passion,” I said. “We don’t really have — we can use that.” And we did. We made a lot of money with my skillset. One of the things you learn in social sciences and humanities programs is how to be persuasive. There’s a fine line between persuasion and manipulation, and I’ve leveraged my education in the service of both at different points in my life and in different contexts. Some of our clients were savvy. Some more so than I in a pure markets context. Some were wholly ignorant in every context, though. None were holistic people, and as such, all were vulnerable.

“You’re gonna fit right in.” We were standing on the curb outside the bar, and it was getting late. “I think so too,” I told him. “Want me to call you a car?” “Nah. I can make the last train.” “You sure?” “Yeah.”

It was 10 to 10 some years after Manhattan. I was arguing with a Siri-like voice coming from the speakers in an Acura I’d just bought. I’ve always been an Acura guy. Back then, you still had to follow a multi-step process to set up hands-free calling. It synced just in time for a call I was expecting from a reporter with a mainstream financial media outlet. “Can you hear me?” I asked, talking into the air vents. I must’ve shouted it. “Hey! Yeah!” she called, through the speakers. For some reason, reporters cared what I had to say, even then. “Look, I don’t have a lot of ti–” She cut me off: “I’ll just read it to you, and if you wanna toss me a quote or two, that’d be great.” She read some copy and I offered some extra color.

“Do me a favor. When you quote me, can you mention my degrees?” I was never enamored with the financial media’s penchant for contextualizing people solely by reference to their jobs. As if that’s all people are and all they ever will be — a job, or a series of them. “Huh?” She didn’t understand or, if she did, she didn’t see the point. “Why?” I started to elaborate, but it was 9:59. “Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “You sure?” “Yeah.”

I pressed the button on the steering wheel to end the call, opened the door and stepped out into a hot summer morning. I’d been back on the island where I vacationed as a child and teenager for a few months. Long enough to establish a rapport and a routine with a liquor store, which was important for me. The door swung open from the inside at 10 AM sharp. The red carpet treatment for a reliable customer, complete with the customary greeting: “Mornin’ sunshine.”

---