Revolution and disruption rarely stem from the poor and destitute, but from what Alexis de Tocqueville described as “a revolution of rising expectations”. After all, it was the bourgeoisie who forged both the American and French revolutions. In the 20th century, it was the educated middle classes, often underpaid and feeling unappreciated, who flocked to Vladimir Lenin’s banner or that of the Nazi Party.
Today we may again be creating an assertive and angry class — as evidenced in the recent LA riots and the pro-Palestine protests on US campuses over the last year and a half — made up of degree holders. We can see this in recent reports that show the job market getting tougher for graduates. Hit hardest are those professionals on the “soft” side of the economy (finance, accounting, law, coding) whose jobs are increasingly threatened by the rise of artificial intelligence.
These industries tend to have a higher proportion of humanities graduates and countries in the West more generally have a problem with elite overproduction. As AI grows, there won’t be enough jobs to go round, and even if those graduates do get a job, their employers, with so many candidates to choose from, won’t pay well.
These developments may be felt most by upper-middle class young women, who make up almost two thirds of humanities graduates. This demographic has also been the driving force for campus radicalism. If they were alienated before by the patriarchy and capitalism, just wait till they can’t find a decent job and lose economic power.
More broadly the changing labour dynamics also undermine the future of universities, now the prime institutional bulwark of the American Left. The roots of this crisis were being dug up by economic forces well before Donald Trump started attacking them. This is due in large part to demographic declines among the young: by 2029 there will be 700,000 fewer people entering high school than in 2010. Since 2011 enrollments have fallen by roughly 15%. The ratio of college students to the total American population has declined even more, by around 20%.
At the same time, employers are increasingly disappointed with the quality of college students, according to the Harvard Business Review. Even the students know the score: more than half (53%) of these college graduates feel unqualified for an entry-level job in their field with nearly half (42%) admitting they did not have all the skills listed in the job description.
Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Deepak Pal, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.
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