Higher education in trouble: Political reprecussions

Nine months after the 2024 election, we've been graced with definitive dissections of the electorate and how it has changed since that escalator ride 10 years and one month ago. There's wide agreement in the analyses of the Associated Press/Fox News Vote Cast, the Democratic firm Catalist's What Happened and the Pew Research Center analysis. All three conclude that President Donald Trump owed his first popular vote plurality to gains from racial minorities, especially Hispanics, and from the young, especially men. The result, as a Pew chart shows, is a less racially polarized electorate, contrary to the many earlier analyses that Trump's supposed "racism" would repel minority voters. This also confounds the optimistic projections of Democrats like pollster Stan Greenberg that Democrats would benefit from an "ascendant majority" of groups — Hispanics, millennials and college graduates — destined to be a growing share of the electorate. The Associated Press, Catalist and Pew reports also take note of what is now old news: the sharp polarization of white college graduates and white nongraduates. That came as a surprise in 2016: There was so little difference between these groups in previous elections that most pollsters didn't disaggregate results according to levels of education. Now, the contrast is stark. The Associated Press' Vote Cast showed former Vice President Kamala Harris carrying white college graduates 53-45 and Trump carrying noncollege white people by a whopping 65-34. And while white college graduates moved slightly toward Trump in 2024, the education gap hasn't narrowed nearly as much as the racial and ethnic gap. There's no doubt that Hispanic, millennial and Generation Z voters will be an increasing proportion of voters in the coming years and that their reduced or vanishing Democratic margins are bad news for that party. But will that be offset by the continuing growth of white college graduates casting relatively steady Democratic margins? Don't count on it. Current trends suggest the population of college graduates may be starting to decline, after more or less constant growth since World War II, from 5% of the adult population in 1940 to 38% in 2022. Now, the population of future college graduates looks set to decline. Births in the United States peaked in 2007 at 4.32 million, almost identical to the baby boom peak of 4.31 million in 1957. The number of births then dropped through the Great Recession, down to 3.62 million in 2024, a 16% drop. That means fewer Americans graduating from high school and applying to college in 2025 and 2026, with numbers declining into the 2040s. That's not just a projection; it's a continuation of a dozen-year trend. Higher education (college and university) full-time enrollment peaked in 2012 at 11.6 million, dropped to 10.1 million in COVID-19-stricken 2020, a 13% drop, and has rebounded only slightly since. With surveys showing that as many as a third of corporations drop college degree requirements for job applicants, one significant incentive for enrollment may be declining. Moreover, the job market for recent graduates has been declining over the last dozen years, as Derek Thompson noted in The Atlantic this spring, and may continue to deteriorate as artificial intelligence becomes more common. As he noted, the lifetime earnings gap between college and high school graduates stopped widening in 2010. Young people may be getting the news. An increasing number of teenagers are expressing interest in trade schools and apprenticeships, which can lead to higher-paying work than many college majors. Young men, especially, may be taking this route, avoiding 60%-plus female colleges with, as one conservative put it, campuses patrolled by the feminist thought police. There seems little question that the "woke" perspective of both high-paid professors and low-paid adjuncts has had some effect in shaping the political views of college graduates and widening the chasm between those of white graduates and nongraduates. here's also little question that many young people are not wired to benefit from higher education. The G.I. Bill of Rights, beginning in the 1940s, and the post-Sputnik scholarship school aid, beginning in the 1950s, enabled many people with the requisite skills and temperament to earn college and professional degrees, to great national benefit. But such people are never going to be 100% of the population, and if 5% is too low, perhaps 38% is too high. Generous student loans and promised loan forgiveness may have overshot the mark, and today, the Biden loan forgiveness program is gone, and Trump's limits on student loans have become law. For the larger society, subsidizing "woke" colleges and universities, with their speech codes and racial quotas, may have become not a value-added but a value-detracted segment of the economy. Higher education, long a growth industry, is at risk of decline. In any case, in electoral politics, the promise of an ever-increasing body of college graduates permanently swelling an ascendant Democratic majority seems uncertain of fulfillment, even as longstanding nine-to-one majorities among Black people and two-to-one among Hispanic people have been regressing toward the national mean. That doesn't mean that Republicans are guaranteed anything like a permanent majority. Far from it. It means that our partisan politics will continue to be sharply divided, with developments that help one party with one group sooner or later helping the other party with another. And election results will continue to be affected, in ways that almost no one anticipates, by developments like those that followed that escalator ride 10 years and one month ago. Michael Barone is a nationally-syndicated political columnist.