CHAPTER 6
Why Doesn’t the Working Class Get with It and Go to College?
EDUCATIONAL LEVELS DO NOT just reflect social class, they are constitutive of it.
Graduating from college is a class act that both enacts class status and reproduces it.
Pierre Bourdieu, whose name is associated with the idea that class is expressed through
cultural differences, urges us to pay attention to the taken-for-granted assumptions
different groups use to create their reality.^95 Higher education is a perfect example: in
elite families, it’s simply unthinkable not to go to college (no matter how much debt you
have to take on to do it). A common sentiment among the white working class is that
college is optional—and sometimes, undesirable.
Michael Long* expressed it this way: “You don’t need a college degree, you need to have
a skill that people will pay you for. It’s as simple as that.... [S]ometimes the poor
decision is going to college.” That is a common working-class attitude. A typical elite
response comes from a software engineer: “My seemingly cutting-edge job [is] only as
secure as I made it for myself... why in God’s name am I supposed to feel sympathy for
people whose laziness and sense of entitlement runs so deep that they are pining for jobs
that were already gone before they were born?”
“And they refuse any other work except the jobs that have been lost to advances in
technology and trade? The kind of jobs that are NEVER coming back?” commented
Amanda Fernandez.* “I feel terrible about your father-in-law but for some reason, he did
not pursue a path out of his plight,” Rachel Corbett wrote me. “Why did he not pursue
education or learn a trade? So that he could work at a job he may have liked?... If the
white working class’s lot in life is so bad, why don’t they do something? Go to school.”
As blue-collar jobs disappeared and communities withered in rural areas and Rust Belt
cities, we have not responded with good jobs for “school leavers” (as the British call
them). That phrase says it all: if you want a good living, get a college education and a
white-collar future. If you leave school, you get what you deserve.
On the right, the talk is of bootstraps and college loans. On the left, it’s of Pell grants and
affordable tuitions. But the prescription is the same: a college degree. This ignores an
important fact: only 33% of Americans obtain college degrees.^96 Two-thirds of
Americans do not have college degrees. I’m always surprised by how few people in the
PME know this fact.
- Why Doesn’t the Working Class Get with It and Go to College?