American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears

by Farah Stockman

It’s easy to feel that advanced degrees are “normal” when everyone around you has one, but in fact, just 13 percent of American adults do. Yet people with those credentials make almost all of the big decisions in the country. If college degree holders were a tribe, we would control almost everything: nearly every seat in Congress, every Supreme Court ruling, every White House since 1953, every Fortune 500 company, every trade delegation, every editorial board. Is it any wonder that we have done pretty well over the last twenty or thirty years? During the era of globalization, the median family net worth of college graduates rose from around $238,000 in 1989 to $291,000 in 2016, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Meanwhile, people without college degrees have seen their net worth decline. It hasn’t always been this way. In the 1960s, about a quarter of the members of Congress did not hold a college degree. But since 2000, people who haven’t graduated from college have been “virtually absent from elective office” in the United States and much of Europe,