Why College Graduates Feel Betrayed

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Why College Graduates Feel Betrayed

Their anger goes far beyond the recent rise of unemployment and the looming threat of A.I.

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Marcos Chin

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By

Noam Scheiber

Noam Scheiber covers white-collar workers. This article has been adapted from his forthcoming book, “Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class.”

March 27, 2026

Political observers on the left and right had very different views on whether Zohran Mamdani would be a good mayor of New York City. But

one thing

they

agreed

on

was why so many young college graduates supported the self-proclaimed democratic socialist.

As Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and Trump backer, put it in

an interview

with The Free Press after last fall’s election: Too many people graduate from college with useless degrees, sky-high debt and long odds of owning a home. The graduates saw Mamdani as a solution to these problems. “If you proletarianize the young people,” Mr. Thiel said, “you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist.”

He’s not wrong, at least about the economic challenges facing recent college graduates. Student debt has

escalated

over the past few decades

, while housing is

increasingly inaccessible

for young Americans, especially in

high-priced areas

like New York and San Francisco.

Perhaps most alarmingly, recent college graduates are having a harder time finding work. Between 1990 and 2018, it was

almost unheard-of

for the unemployment rate of recent college graduates to exceed the country’s overall rate. But that has been the case for

five straight years

now.

It appears

that the white-collar job market will continue to soften this year. And almost all of these problems

precede the impact

of artificial intelligence, which is still in the early stages of cannibalizing human labor.

As a result, poll after poll shows that college graduates are unusually dour. In

surveys by the University of Michigan

dating back to the 1960s, the college educated had never been more downbeat about economic conditions than over the past four years. Gallup

recently found

that the portion of college graduates who thought it was a good time to find a “quality job” was a mere 19 percent, down from over 70 percent in 2022.

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