For millions of Americans with college degrees, the headlines about a “possible recession” feel like a cruel joke. While official statistics lag, the lived reality for the educated underclass—those with bachelor’s or advanced degrees who are struggling to maintain stability—is nothing short of an economic depression. Rising costs of living, stagnating wages, and dwindling job security have already reshaped daily life, and many are barely hanging on.
Unemployment figures tell only part of the story. College graduates now make up a record 25% of the unemployed, with white-collar layoffs in tech, finance, and even healthcare rising. Those who are employed are often underemployed, working multiple part-time jobs or in positions that barely require a degree. The promise that a college credential ensures upward mobility is eroding rapidly, leaving a generation of highly educated Americans questioning the value of the very investment that was supposed to secure their future.
Housing costs are skyrocketing, especially in urban centers where jobs are concentrated. Even modest apartments demand incomes far above what many professional graduates earn. Student loan debt compounds the pressure, forcing difficult trade-offs between basic living expenses and debt repayment. For many, “making it” now means moving back in with parents or sharing crowded apartments with friends—situations reminiscent of a pre-adult adolescence prolonged indefinitely.
Meanwhile, inflation eats away at savings. Food prices, healthcare, and transportation costs continue to climb, leaving little room for discretionary spending or emergency funds. The safety net that the previous generation relied on—a stable job, homeownership, a modest retirement plan—is increasingly inaccessible. For the educated underclass, financial precarity has become normalized, even invisible to those who still enjoy some buffer in the broader economy.
The psychological toll is real. Anxiety, depression, and burnout are rampant among highly educated professionals facing underemployment or precarious work conditions. The “American Dream” has shifted from upward mobility to merely surviving, with little room for long-term planning or security.
Policymakers continue to debate whether a recession is coming, but for many, the recession has already arrived. It’s not marked by dramatic market crashes or bold headlines—it is quiet, slow, and insidious, felt in empty savings accounts, missed rent payments, and jobs that fail to match education and ambition. Recognizing this reality is the first step toward meaningful change. Until then, the educated underclass is living through an economic depression, one degree at a time.
Jessica Werner, Ph.D., CEO and Founder of Northshore Learning, has spent more than 20 years as an educator, specialist, and advocate for students with complex needs. But the turning point in her work didn’t come in a classroom or at a conference. It came the day her own son was asked to leave preschool.
Her son, who has a behavior disorder, was struggling in a setting that wasn’t prepared to support him. Eventually, the preschool told Jessica that his needs were too complex and that he could no longer attend.
In an instant, the roles shifted. Jessica, who had spent years helping schools strengthen their systems and better support students, suddenly found herself on the other side of the table — as a parent being told that her child didn’t fit.
“He won’t be the last child you see like this,” Werner told the preschool administration. “While I understand that you can’t support him now, just know, there will be more coming.”
She was right.
A Full-Circle Moment
Several years later, the same school reached back out to Jessica.
They were now seeing more students like her son. They saw children with higher needs, complex behaviors, and significant regulation and emotional challenges. Their teachers were overwhelmed. Their existing tools, training, and systems weren’t enough.
They needed help.
Jessica agreed without hesitation. Today, she partners with that school to train and mentor its teachers. The same system that once had to ask her son to leave is now working with her to build capacity, compassion, and practical tools for the next generation of students.
What was once a personal heartbreak has become a catalyst for change.
“The Hardest Part of Teaching Wasn’t the Teaching”
Jessica’s journey started like that of so many teachers: with passion, heart, and a deep belief that she could make a difference.
She did not expect what she experienced in her first year.
“The hardest part of teaching wasn’t the teaching,” she recalls. “It was the behavior, regulation, and emotional needs of my students, and I wasn’t prepared.”
Like many new educators, she had strong content knowledge and a solid academic foundation. But she quickly realized that her students needed more than lessons. They needed support with self-regulation, behavior, and emotional safety. And she needed a different kind of training to meet those needs.
Determined not to leave the profession, Jessica made a decision that would shape the rest of her career. She spent an entire summer interviewing experts, seeking out mentors, attending trainings, and rebuilding her approach from the ground up.
She returned to the classroom as, in her words, “a completely new teacher.”
A Story Playing Out in Schools Everywhere
Jessica’s experience is no longer an exception; it is increasingly the norm.
Schools across the country and around the world are grappling with a similar reality:
Teachers are overwhelmed by rising student behavior and mental-health needs.
Parents are navigating systems that are stretched thin and often not designed for the level of complexity they now face.
Administrators are struggling to support staff and maintain stability in a post-COVID landscape.
Schools are searching desperately for tools, training, and models that actually work in today’s classrooms.
The gap between what students need and what schools are prepared to provide has grown too large to ignore. Teachers report burnout at record levels. Classrooms are more complex than ever. And children like Jessica’s son are often the first to fall through the cracks when systems can’t keep up.
Bridging the Gap
Jessica’s work now sits directly in that gap.
Drawing on her experience as a teacher, specialist, and mother of a child with a behavior disorder, she partners with schools worldwide to:
Train and mentor educators in behavior and regulation support
Help schools build systems that are proactive rather than reactive
Equip staff with practical tools for de-escalation, connection, and co-regulation
Support administrators in creating sustainable, teacher-friendly frameworks
Her mission is simple, but profound: support teachers, understand students, and prepare schools for today’s classrooms.
That mission is rooted in both research and lived experience. Jessica knows the strain educators are under. She knows the heartbreak parents feel when systems can’t support their children. And she knows that with the right training and structures, schools can become places where both kids and adults are more regulated, supported, and successful.
Preparing for the Students Already Walking Through the Door
When Jessica told her son’s preschool, “There will be more coming,” she wasn’t issuing a threat. She was naming a truth that many schools are only now beginning to fully confront.
The students are already here: children with trauma histories, behavior disorders, anxiety, depression, autism, ADHD, and complex emotional needs. Post-pandemic, their numbers and needs have only intensified.
What began as a painful personal experience, having her own child turned away, has become a full-circle story of partnership and possibility. The same school that once said, “We can’t do this,” now says, “Help us learn how.”
For Jessica Werner, the work is deeply professional and personal. And for the schools she serves, it’s essential.
For decades, America was gripped by college mania, a culturally and structurally manufactured frenzy that elevated higher education to near-mythical importance. Students, families, and society were swept up in the belief that a college degree guaranteed status, financial security, and social validation. This was no mere aspiration; it was a fevered obsession, fueled by marketing, rankings, policy incentives, and social pressure. Today, the spell is breaking, but the demand for credentials persists.
Historically, the term “college mania” dates to the 19th century, when historian Frederick Rudolph used it to describe the fervent founding of colleges in the United States, driven by religious zeal and civic ambition. Over time, the mania evolved. Postwar expansion of higher education through the GI Bill normalized college attendance as a societal expectation. Rankings, elite admissions, and media coverage transformed selective schools into symbols of prestige. By the early 2000s, for-profit colleges exploited the frenzy, aggressively marketing to students while federal and state policy incentivized enrollment growth over meaningful outcomes.
The early 2010s revealed the fragility of this system in what I have described as the College Meltdown: structural dysfunction, declining returns on investment, predatory practices, and neoliberal policy failures exposed the weaknesses behind the hype. At its height, college mania spun students and families into a cycle of aspiration, anxiety, and debt.
Now, even students at the most elite institutions are disengaging. Many do not attend classes, treating lectures as optional, prioritizing networking, internships, or social signaling over actual learning. This demonstrates that the spell of college mania is unraveling: prestige alone no longer guarantees engagement or meaningful educational outcomes. Families are questioning the value of expensive degrees, underemployment is rising, and alternative pathways, including vocational training, apprenticeships, and nontraditional credentials, are gaining recognition.
Yet the paradox remains: for many jobs, credentials are still required. Nursing, engineering, teaching, accounting, and countless professional roles cannot be accessed without degrees. The waning mania does not erase the need for qualifications; it simply exposes how much of the cultural obsession — the anxiety, overpaying, and overworking — was socially manufactured rather than inherently necessary for employment. Students are now forced to navigate this tension: pursuing credentials while seeking value, purpose, and meaningful learning beyond the symbol of the degree itself.
The breaking of the spell is not unique to higher education. History demonstrates that manias — economic, social, or cultural — rise and fall. College mania, once fueled by collective belief and systemic reinforcement, is now unraveling under the weight of its contradictions. Institutions must adapt by emphasizing authentic education rather than prestige, while policymakers can prioritize affordability, accountability, and outcomes. Students, in turn, may pursue paths aligned with practical skills, personal growth, and career readiness rather than chasing symbolic credentials alone.
The era of college mania may be ending, but with the spell broken comes an opportunity. Higher education can be reimagined as a system that serves public good, intellectual development, and genuine opportunity, balancing the need for credentials with the pursuit of meaningful education.
Sources:
Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (1962).
Frank Bruni, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania (2015).
Dahn Shaulis, Higher Education Inquirer, “College Meltdown and the Manufactured Frenzy” (2011–2025).
Stanford Law Review, Private Universities in the Public Interest (2025).
Higher Education Handbook of Theory & Research, Volume 29 (2024).
Recent reporting on student engagement, class attendance, and labor-market requirements for degrees, 2023–2025.
Across the United States, far-right networks have quietly built their presence on college campuses—not through mass rallies or overt displays, but through a loose coalition of digital activists and in-person operatives known as Groypers.
The Groypers, inspired by the alt-right, white-nationalist, and “America First” ecosystems of the late 2010s and early 2020s, represent a new iteration of extremist youth organizing: savvy, antagonistic, and optimized for a social-media landscape where attention is currency and disruption is strategy.
Their influence is not as visible as Turning Point USA tabling events or Young America’s Foundation speaker tours. Instead, the Groyper presence grows through infiltration, targeted disruption, and online radicalization that spills into student life. As economic anxiety and political distrust intensify, campuses have become fertile ground for this phenomenon.
What Are Groypers? Groypers are part of a decentralized far-right subculture aligned with white-nationalist figures and Christian nationalist ideologues. They are not a formal organization; rather, they are a network of memetic identities, recognizable by: the cartoon Groyper frog mascot (an offshoot of the Pepe image ecosystem), online anonymity/alter-egos, ideological tropes centered on nativism, Christian nationalism, and “white identity,” disruptive tactics aimed at embarrassing mainstream conservatives and intimidating progressive students.
Their overall goal is to pull young conservatives—and disaffected apolitical students—toward a more extreme worldview.
Why Campuses Are Targets 1. Transitional Vulnerability First-year students often experience isolation, uncertainty, and identity formation. Groypers prey on this transitional moment by offering belonging, brotherhood, and contrarian confidence.
2. Political Vacuum As universities retreat from serious civic education and as student affairs offices shrink under austerity, space opens for fringe networks to fill the ideological void.
3. Online Radicalization Pipelines Groypers thrive in places like:
Campus life becomes an extension of these networks, where online provocations evolve into real-world harassment or orchestrated spectacle.
4. Conservative Student Groups as Entry Points Mainstream Republican or “free speech” groups are often targeted for infiltration. Groypers show up: to push Q&A sessions into racist or antisemitic talking points, to pressure student Republicans to shift further right, to create rifts between libertarian, traditional conservative, and MAGA factions.
The strategy is division, not dialogue.
Common Groyper Tactics on Campus 1. Ambush Questioning At public lectures or campus Republican events, Groypers coordinate to dominate Q&A sessions, posing racially charged or conspiratorial questions designed to go viral.
2. Online Harassment and Dogpiling Students—often women, LGBTQ+ students, or activists—find themselves targeted with:
brigade attacks, doxxing attempts, edited clips taken out of context, swarm-like intimidation.
3. Misery Farming Groypers intentionally provoke negative reactions to harvest “proof” that campuses are hostile to conservatives. This content is then fed into national media pipelines.
4. Grooming and Recruitment They seek out students who feel: lonely unsupported resentful ideologically adrift economically anxious
A mix of dark humor, contrarian bravado, and “insider knowledge” becomes the grooming pathway.
The Institutional Problem: Campuses Are Not Prepared Universities often misread these actors as: “just trolls,” “rowdy conservatives,” “free speech activists.”
They’re not.
Groypers are engaged in ideological recruitment and targeted harassment that can escalate into threats, coordinated disruption, and offline violence. Yet institutions remain slow to respond because: they lack digital literacy, they fear backlash from right-wing media, they outsource security and student affairs to PR firms, administrators underestimate decentralized extremist networks.
Faculty—especially contingent or early-career academics—often feel unsupported or intimidated.
How Groypers Fit into the Larger Campus Crisis The Groypers’ rise exposes deeper fractures: neoliberal hollowing of the university growing distrust in democratic institutions political polarization fueled by billionaire-backed media the decline of genuine civic education surveillance capitalism and algorithmic radicalization
Campuses have become battlegrounds—not by accident, but because they sit at the intersection of youth, identity, technology, and national politics.
What Higher Education Must Do Now Universities need to respond with clarity, not panic, and with structural solutions, not symbolic statements.
1. Treat Digital Extremism as Part of Student Safety This means training staff, hiring specialists, and supporting targets of online harassment.
2. Reinvest in Human Infrastructure Student Affairs, counseling centers, and campus journalism must be strengthened—not cut or replaced with outsourcing contracts.
3. Support Independent Investigative Student Journalism Student reporters are often the first to detect radicalization trends—but only if their newsrooms are funded and protected.
4. Protect Academic Freedom Without Ceding Ground to Harassment “Free speech” cannot be a shield for sustained intimidation campaigns.
5. Strengthen Civic Education Rooted in Truth and Inclusion The real antidote to extremism is not censorship—it’s meaningful democratic literacy.
Seeing the Threat Clearly Groypers are not the dominant force on campus. Most students reject their worldview. But they are a growing presence within a broader crisis where U.S. higher education lacks the stability, funding, and courage to defend its mission.
The real danger is not the meme or the mascot—it’s the vacuum that allows extremist networks to flourish.
The Higher Education Inquirer will continue monitoring this issue as the 2026 and 2028 election cycles approach, when radical groups often intensify campus recruitment and provocation.
Moral capital has become a contested currency in American public life. It is deployed by political elites to justify austerity, by campus executives to rationalize managerial authority, and by think tanks to discipline the working class. Yet moral capital also rises from below—from students building mutual-aid networks, from adjuncts organizing for fair wages, from communities confronting the harms universities have helped produce. In an era defined by climate peril, surveillance capitalism, and proliferating wars, the stakes of who controls moral capital—and who gets to exercise real agency—have never been higher.
At the center of this struggle lies a fraught psychological and sociological concept: locus of control. Higher education constantly toggles between narratives of internal control (grit, resilience, personal responsibility) and external control (the market, political pressures, funding cycles). Powerful actors encourage an internal locus of control when it shifts blame downward, and an external locus of control when it shields institutional failure. Students, staff, and faculty live suspended in this contradiction, expected to absorb the consequences of decisions made far above them.
Quality of Life as Moral Imperative
Quality of Life—once peripheral to higher education policy—is now a defining moral issue. Students and workers contend with unstable housing, food insecurity, unsafe campuses, inaccessible mental health care, and relentless economic pressures. For many, these burdens are compounded by existential crises: climate anxiety, global conflicts, democratic backsliding, and precarity amplified by technological surveillance.
Institutions often portray these crises as personal challenges requiring self-management. But Quality of Life is not an individual moral failure; it is a metric of collective conditions. When a university community’s quality of life declines, it signals a profound imbalance between agency and structure—a distorted locus of control.
The Industry’s Manufactured Moral Capital
Universities have long crafted narratives that elevate their own moral standing while displacing responsibility onto individuals. The “grateful striver” student, the “self-sacrificing” adjunct, the “visionary” president—these tropes protect managerial systems from scrutiny and allow elites to accumulate moral capital even as Quality of Life deteriorates for everyone else.
This manufactured moral authority collapses under existential pressures. As campuses confront heatwaves, flooding, militarized policing, housing crises, widening wars, and state-sanctioned surveillance, it becomes impossible to sustain the fiction that individuals can simply “grit” their way to stability.
Reclaiming Moral Capital
Moral capital is not owned by institutions. It can be reimagined, reclaimed, and reoriented. Four longstanding modes of internal discipline—temperance, celibacy, critical thinking, and solidarity—take on new urgency when placed in the context of planetary and political crisis.
Temperance
Temperance, stripped of its historical misuse, becomes a strategy of mindful refusal in the face of consumption-based exploitation. It includes rejecting burnout culture, resisting technological tools that monitor student behavior, and refusing to internalize blame for systemic failures. In an era of climate breakdown, temperance also signifies ecological responsibility—a modest but meaningful form of internal control aligned with global survival rather than institutional convenience.
Celibacy
Broadly interpreted, celibacy represents intentional self-limitation that protects one’s emotional and cognitive bandwidth. Amid surveillance-driven social media, algorithmic manipulation, and institutions that increasingly commodify student identity, celibacy can be a form of psychological sovereignty. It creates space for reflection in a world designed to keep people reactive, distracted, and easily governed.
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking remains the academy’s most subversive tradition—especially when deployed against the university itself. It helps students analyze the interplay between personal agency and systemic constraint. It equips them to understand climate injustice, militarism, and the geopolitics of knowledge production. And it exposes the ways mass surveillance—from learning analytics to campus police technologies—erodes autonomy and shifts the locus of control away from individuals and communities toward powerful institutions.
Solidarity
Solidarity transforms private moral commitments into collective action. It breaks the isolation manufactured by surveillance systems, precarity, and competitive academic cultures. Solidarity has historically been the source of the most effective nonviolent strategies—from civil rights sit-ins to anti-war mobilizations to student debt strikes. Today, as geopolitical conflicts escalate and authoritarian tendencies rise, the power of organized nonviolence becomes an existential necessity. It is one of the few tools capable of confronting militarized policing, resisting state repression, and challenging the corporate infrastructures that profit from crisis.
Nonviolent Strategies in an Era of Global Threat
Nonviolent action remains a potent form of moral capital—and one of the most effective forms of collective agency. Research across conflicts shows that sustained, mass-based nonviolent movements often outperform violent struggles, especially against highly resourced opponents. For universities, which increasingly collaborate with defense contractors, data brokers, and state surveillance agencies, nonviolent resistance has become both a safeguard and a moral compass.
Sit-ins, teach-ins, encampments, divestment campaigns, and labor actions reassert external locus of control as something communities can influence—not by force, but by moral clarity, strategic discipline, and the refusal to comply with harmful systems.
Mass Surveillance as a Threat to Moral Agency
Mass surveillance is now woven into the fabric of academic life. Learning management systems track student behavior down to the minute. Proctoring software uses biometrics to police exams. Campus police drones and public-private security networks feed data into law enforcement databases. Administrative dashboards quantify student “risk” and worker “efficiency” in ways that reshape institutional priorities.
This surveillance apparatus corrodes moral capital by reducing human judgment to automated metrics. It also distorts locus of control: individuals are told to take responsibility while being monitored and managed by opaque systems far beyond their influence.
Reclaiming agency requires dismantling or limiting these systems, demanding transparency, and reasserting human dignity in spaces now governed by algorithms.
Toward a More Honest Locus of Control
Moral capital and locus of control are not academic abstractions. They are lived realities shaped by climate disruption, war, inequality, and surveillance. Higher education must stop using moral narratives to deflect responsibility and instead cultivate practices that reinforce real agency: temperance, celibacy, critical thinking, solidarity, and the disciplined power of nonviolent resistance.
In a world marked by existential threats, reclaiming moral capital from below is not simply an intellectual exercise—it is a condition for survival, and a pathway to collective liberation.
Sources
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Erica Chenoweth & Maria Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Astra Taylor, Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone
The ambush shooting of two National Guardsmen near the White House on November 27, 2025, by Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national, is the latest in a growing wave of politically motivated violence that has engulfed the United States since 2024. Lakanwal opened fire on uniformed service members stationed for heightened security, wounding both. Federal authorities are investigating whether ideological motives drove the attack, which comes against a backdrop of escalating domestic and international tensions. This ambush cannot be understood in isolation. It is part of a larger pattern of domestic political violence that has claimed lives across ideological lines.
Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University during a campus event in September 2025. Minnesota state representative Mary Carlson and her husband were murdered in their home by a man impersonating law enforcement, while a state senator and spouse were injured in the same spree. Governor Josh Shapiro survived an arson attack on his residence earlier this year. Even Donald Trump was the target of an assassination attempt in July 2024. Added to this grim tally are incidents such as the 2025 Manhattan mass shooting, in which young professionals, including two Jewish women, Julia Hyman and Wesley LePatner, were killed, and the Luigi Mangione case, in which a former student allegedly killed a corporate executive in New York. Together, these incidents reveal a nation in which lethal violence increasingly intersects with politics, identity, and ideology.
The domestic escalation of violence cannot be separated from broader structures of oppression. Migrants and asylum seekers face detention, family separation, and deportation under the authority of ICE, often in conditions described as inhumane, creating fear and vulnerability among refugee communities. Routine encounters with law enforcement disproportionately harm Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other marginalized communities. Excessive force and lethal policing add to communal distrust, reinforcing perceptions that violence is a sanctioned tool of the state. Political rhetoric compounds the problem. President Trump and other political leaders have repeatedly framed immigrants, political opponents, and even students as threats to national security, implicitly legitimizing aggressive responses and providing fodder for extremist actors.
The domestic situation is further complicated by U.S. foreign policy, which has often contributed to global instability while modeling the use of violence as an instrument of governance. In Palestine, military aid to Israel coincides with attacks on civilians and infrastructure that human-rights organizations describe as ethnic cleansing or genocide. In Venezuela, U.S. sanctions, threats, and proxy operations have intensified humanitarian crises and political instability. Complicity with the governments of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Russia enables human-rights abuses abroad while emboldening domestic actors who mimic state-sanctioned violence. These global policies reverberate at home, influencing public discourse, shaping extremist narratives, and creating a climate in which political and ideological violence is increasingly normalized.
Higher education sits at the nexus of these domestic and global pressures. Universities and colleges are not merely observers; they are active participants and, in some cases, victims. The assassination of Charlie Kirk on a campus underscores that institutions of learning are no longer insulated from lethal political conflict. Alumni, recent graduates, and professionals—such as the victims of the Manhattan shooting—are affected even after leaving school, revealing how closely academic networks intersect with broader societal risks. International and refugee students, particularly from Afghan and Middle Eastern communities, face heightened anxiety due to restrictive immigration policies, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and the real threat of violence. Faculty teaching topics related to immigration, race, U.S. foreign policy, or genocide are increasingly targeted by harassment, threats, and institutional pressures that suppress academic freedom. The cumulative stress of political violence, systemic oppression, and global conflicts creates trauma that universities must address comprehensively, both for students and faculty.
Higher education cannot prevent every act of violence, nor can it resolve the nation’s deep political fractures. But it can model ethical and civic engagement, defending inquiry and speech without succumbing to fear or political pressure. It can extend support to vulnerable communities, promote critical thinking about the domestic roots of political violence and the consequences of U.S. foreign policy, and foster ethical reflection that counters the normalization of aggression. Silence or passivity risks complicity. Universities must recognize that the threats affecting campuses, alumni, and students are interconnected with broader systems of power and oppression, both domestic and global.
From the White House ambush to Charlie Kirk’s assassination, from the Minnesota legislators’ murders to the Manhattan mass shooting, from Luigi Mangione’s high-profile killing to systemic violence enforced through ICE and police overreach, and amid the influence of incendiary political rhetoric and U.S. complicity in violence abroad, the United States is experiencing an unprecedented convergence of domestic and international pressures. Higher education sits at the center of these converging forces, and how it responds will shape not only campus safety and academic freedom but also the broader civic health of the nation. The challenge is immense: to uphold democratic values, protect communities, and educate students in a society increasingly defined by fear, extremism, and violence.
Sources
Reuters. “FBI probes gunman’s motives in ambush shooting of Guardsmen near White House.” The Guardian. Coverage on suspect identification and political reaction. AP News. Statements by national leaders following attacks. Washington Post. Analysis of domestic violent extremism and political violence trends. People Magazine. Reporting on Minnesota legislator assassination. NBC/AP. Statements by Gov. Josh Shapiro after Charlie Kirk’s killing. Utah Valley University and local ABC/Fox affiliates on the Kirk shooting. Jewish Journal, ABC7NY. Coverage of Manhattan mass shooting and Jewish victims. Reuters. Luigi Mangione case and court proceedings. Human Rights Watch / Amnesty International reports on Palestine, Venezuela, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. Brookings Institute. Analysis of political violence and domestic extremism. CSIS. “Domestic Extremism and Political Violence in the United States.”
In the aftermath of each new outrage involving Nick Fuentes, pundits scramble to explain how a 20-something suburban Catholic kid became one of the most influential white supremacists in America. Many insist Fuentes is an anomaly, a glitch, a fringe figure who somehow slipped through the cracks of democracy and decency. But this narrative is both comforting and false.
Fuentes is not an anomaly. He is the logical product of the systems that shaped him—especially American higher education.
While institutions obsess over rankings, fundraising, and branding campaigns, they have quietly abandoned entire generations of young people to debt, alienation, status anxiety, and a digital culture that preys on male insecurity. In this vacuum, extremist networks thrive, incubating figures like Fuentes long before the public notices.
HEI warned about this trend years ago. Since 2016, the publication tracked the rise of Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA, noting how TPUSA used campus culture wars to radicalize disaffected young men. HEI saw that for-profit-style marketing, donor-driven politics, and relentless culture-war agitation were creating an ecosystem where reactionaries could build both influence and profit. Fuentes did not arise outside that ecosystem—he evolved from it, even as he later turned on Kirk as insufficiently extreme.
What fuels this pipeline? A generation of young men raised on the promise of meritocracy but delivered a reality of spiraling costs, precarious futures, and institutional betrayal. Many arrive at college campuses burdened by debt, anxious about their place in an unforgiving economy, and deeply online. They bear the psychological bruises of a culture that has replaced community with competition and replaced meaning with metrics.
This is also the demographic most vulnerable to incel ideology, a misogynistic worldview built around grievance, rejection, humiliation, and resentment. Incel communities overlap heavily with the digital spaces where Fuentes built his early audience. The mix is combustible: sexually frustrated young men who feel mocked by mainstream culture, priced out of adulthood, and invisible to institutions that once guided them. The result is a fusion of white nationalism, male resentment, Christian nationalism, ironic fascism, and livestream entertainment—perfectly tailored to a generation raised on Twitch and YouTube.
And yet the higher-education establishment insisted for years that white supremacists were primarily rural “rednecks”—poor, uneducated, easily dismissed. This stereotype blinded journalists, academics, and administrators to the reality developing right in front of them. Higher Education Inquirer knew better because we corresponded for years with Peter Simi, one of the country’s leading scholars of extremism. Simi’s research demonstrated clearly that white supremacists were not confined to rural backwaters. They were suburban, middle-class, sometimes college-educated, often tech-savvy, and deeply embedded in mainstream institutions.
Simi’s work showed that white supremacist movements have always thrived among people with something to lose, people who feel their status slipping. They recruit in fraternities, gaming communities, campus political groups, military circles, and online spaces where young men spend their most lonely hours. They build identities around grievance and belonging—needs that universities once helped students navigate but now too often ignore.
This is the world that produced Nick Fuentes.
Fuentes entered higher education during a moment of fragmentation and distrust. Tuition was skyrocketing. Campuses were polarizing. Students were increasingly treated as revenue streams rather than whole human beings. Administrators were more focused on donor relations and culture-war optics than on the psychological welfare of their students. And universities outsourced so many vital functions—to police, to lobbyists, to tech platforms—that they ceded responsibility for the very students they claimed to educate.
Into that void stepped extremist influencers who offered simple answers to complex problems, validation for resentment, and a community that cared—if only in the performative, transactional sense of internet politics.
The tragedy is not simply that Fuentes emerged. The tragedy is that the conditions to generate many more like him remain firmly in place.
American higher education created the environment: hyper-competition, abandonment of the humanities, the collapse of community, the normalization of precarity, and a relentless emphasis on personal failure over systemic dysfunction. It created the audience: anxious, isolated, indebted young men looking for meaning. And it created the blind spot: a refusal to take extremism seriously until it reaches mainstream visibility.
Fuentes is not a glitch in the system. He is the system’s mirror held up to itself.
Unless universities confront their complicity in this radicalization pipeline—economically, culturally, and psychologically—the next Nick Fuentes is already in a dorm room somewhere, streaming at 2 a.m., finding thousands of followers who feel just as betrayed as he does.
Sources
Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (2017).
Peter Simi & Robert Futrell, American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement’s Hidden Spaces of Hate (2010, updated 2015).
Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (2018).
Joan Donovan & danah boyd, “Stop the Presses? The Crisis of Misinformation” (Harvard Kennedy School).
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (2020).
Michael Kimmel, Healing from Hate: How Young Men Get Into—and Out of—Violent Extremism (2018).
Whitney Phillips, “The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists.”
Brian Hughes & Cynthia Miller-Idriss, “Youth Radicalization in Digital Spaces.”
David Futrelle, We Hunted the Mammoth archive on incel ideology.
Higher Education Inquirer (2016–2025 coverage of TPUSA, Charlie Kirk, and campus extremism).
Over the past four decades, neoliberalism has reshaped higher education into a market-driven enterprise, producing what can only be described as a global College Meltdown. Once envisioned as a public good—a tool for civic empowerment, social mobility, and national progress—higher education in the United States, the United Kingdom, and China has been transformed into a competitive market system defined by privatization, debt, and disillusionment.
The United States: From Public Good to Profit Engine
Nowhere has neoliberal ideology had a more devastating effect on higher education than in the United States. Beginning in the 1980s, with the Reagan administration’s cuts to federal grants and the expansion of student loans, higher education funding shifted from public investment to individual burden. Universities adopted corporate governance models, hired armies of administrators, and marketed education as a private commodity promising personal enrichment rather than collective advancement.
The results are visible everywhere: tuition inflation, student debt exceeding $1.7 trillion, and the proliferation of predatory for-profit colleges. Elite universities transformed into financial behemoths, hoarding endowments while relying on contingent faculty. Meanwhile, working-class and minority students were lured into debt traps by institutions that promised upward mobility but delivered unemployment and despair.
The U.S. College Meltdown—a term that describes the system’s moral and financial collapse—is a direct consequence of neoliberal policies: deregulation, privatization, and austerity disguised as efficiency. The profit motive replaced the public mission, and the casualties include students, adjuncts, and the ideal of education as a democratic right.
The United Kingdom: Marketization and Managerialism
The United Kingdom followed a similar trajectory under Margaret Thatcher and her successors. The introduction of tuition fees in 1998 and their tripling in 2012 marked the formal triumph of neoliberal logic over public investment. British universities became quasi-corporate entities, obsessed with league tables, branding, and global rankings.
The result has been mounting student debt, declining staff morale, and a hollowing out of intellectual life. Faculty strikes over pensions and pay disparities underscore a deeper crisis of purpose. Universities now function as rent-seeking landlords—building luxury dorms for international students while cutting humanities departments. The logic of “student-as-customer” has reduced education to a transaction, and accountability has been redefined to mean profit margin rather than social contribution.
The UK’s College Meltdown mirrors that of the U.S.—a story of financialization, precarious labor, and the erosion of public trust.
China: Neoliberalism with Authoritarian Characteristics
At first glance, China seems to defy the Western College Meltdown. Its universities have expanded rapidly, producing millions of graduates and investing heavily in research. But beneath this apparent success lies a deeply neoliberal structure embedded in an authoritarian framework.
Since the 1990s, China’s higher education system has embraced competition, rankings, and market incentives. Universities compete for prestige and funding; families invest heavily in private tutoring and overseas degrees; and graduates face a saturated labor market. The result is mounting anxiety and unemployment among young people—known online as the “lying flat” generation, disillusioned with promises of meritocratic success.
The Chinese model fuses state control with neoliberal marketization. Education serves as both an instrument of national power and a mechanism of social stratification. In this sense, China’s version of the College Meltdown reflects a global truth: the commodification of education leads to alienation, regardless of political system.
A Global System in Crisis
Whether in Washington, London, or Beijing, the pattern is strikingly similar. Neoliberalism treats education as an investment in human capital, reducing learning to a financial calculation. Universities compete like corporations; students borrow like consumers; and knowledge becomes a tool of capital accumulation rather than liberation.
This convergence of economic and ideological forces has created an unsustainable higher education bubble—overpriced, overcredentialized, and underdelivering. Across continents, graduates face debt, underemployment, and despair, while universities chase rankings and revenue streams instead of justice and truth.
Toward a Post-Neoliberal Education
Reversing the College Meltdown requires more than reform; it demands a new philosophy. Public universities must reclaim their civic mission. Education must once again be understood as a human right, not a private investment. Debt forgiveness, reinvestment in teaching, and democratic governance are essential first steps.
Neoliberalism’s greatest illusion was that markets could produce wisdom. The College Meltdown proves the opposite: when education serves profit instead of people, it consumes itself from within.
Sources:
Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos (2015)
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005)
Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed (2017)
The Higher Education Inquirer archives on the U.S. College Meltdown
BBC, “University staff strikes and student debt crisis,” 2024
Caixin, “China’s youth unemployment and education anxiety,” 2023
For Generation Z, the old story of social mobility—study hard, go to college, work your way up—has lost its certainty. The class divide that once seemed bridgeable through education now feels entrenched, as debt, precarious work, and economic volatility blur the promise of progress.
The new economy—dominated by artificial intelligence, speculative assets like cryptocurrency, and inflated housing markets—has not delivered stability for most. Instead, it’s widened gaps between those who own and those who owe. Many young Americans feel locked out of wealth-building entirely. Some have turned to riskier bets—digital assets, gig work, or start-ups powered by AI tools—to chase opportunities that traditional institutions no longer provide. Others have succumbed to despair. Suicide rates among young adults have climbed sharply in recent years, correlating with financial stress, debt, and social isolation.
And echoing through this uncertain landscape is a song that first rose from the coalfields of Kentucky during the Great Depression—Florence Reece’s 1931 protest hymn, “Which Side Are You On?”
Come all you good workers,
Good news to you I’ll tell,
Of how the good old union
Has come in here to dwell.
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Nearly a century later, those verses feel newly urgent—because Gen Z is again being forced to pick a side: between solidarity and survival, between reforming a broken system or resigning themselves to it.
The Class Divide and the Broken Ladder
Despite record levels of education, Gen Z faces limited social mobility. College remains a class marker, not an equalizer. Students from affluent families attend better-funded universities, graduate on time, and often receive help with housing or job placement. Working-class and first-generation students, meanwhile, navigate under-resourced campuses, heavier debt, and weaker professional networks.
The Pew Research Center found that first-generation college graduates have nearly $100,000 less in median wealth than peers whose parents also hold degrees. For many, the degree no longer guarantees a secure foothold in the middle class—it simply delays financial independence.
They say in Harlan County,
There are no neutrals there,
You’ll either be a union man,
Or a thug for J. H. Blair.
The metaphor still fits: there are no neutrals in the modern class struggle over debt, housing, and automation.
Debt, Doubt, and the New Normal
Gen Z borrowers owe an average of around $23,000 in student loans, a figure growing faster than any other generation’s debt load. Over half regret taking on those loans. Many delay buying homes, having children, or even seeking medical care. Those who drop out without degrees are burdened with debt and little to show for it.
The debt-based model has become a defining feature of American life—especially for the working class. The price of entry to a better future is borrowing against one’s own.
Don’t scab for the bosses,
Don’t listen to their lies,
Us poor folks haven’t got a chance
Unless we organize.
If Reece’s song once called miners to unionize against coal barons, its spirit now calls borrowers, renters, adjuncts, and gig workers to collective resistance against financial systems that profit from their precarity.
AI and the Erosion of Work
Artificial intelligence promises efficiency, but it also threatens to hollow out the entry-level job market Gen Z depends on. Automation in journalism, design, law, and customer service cuts off rungs of the career ladder just as young workers reach for them.
While elite graduates may move into roles that supervise or profit from AI, working-class Gen Zers are more likely to face displacement. AI amplifies the class divide: it rewards those who already have capital, coding skills, or connections—and sidelines those who don’t.
Crypto Dreams and Financial Desperation
Locked out of traditional wealth paths, many young people turned to cryptocurrency during the pandemic. Platforms like Robinhood and Coinbase promised quick gains and independence from the “rigged” economy. But when crypto markets crashed in 2022, billions in speculative wealth evaporated. Some who had borrowed or used student loan refunds to invest lost everything.
Online forums chronicled not only the financial losses but also the psychological fallout—stories of panic, shame, and in some tragic cases, suicide. The new “digital gold rush” became another mechanism for transferring wealth upward.
The Real Estate Wall
While digital markets rise and fall, real estate remains the ultimate symbol of exclusion. Home prices have climbed over 40 percent since 2020, while mortgage rates hover near 8 percent. For most of Gen Z, ownership is out of reach.
Older generations built equity through housing; Gen Z rents indefinitely, enriching landlords and institutional investors. Without intergenerational help, the “starter home” has become a myth. In America’s new class order, those who inherit property inherit mobility.
Despair and the Silent Crisis
Behind the data lies a mental health emergency. The CDC reports that suicide among Americans aged 10–24 has risen nearly 60 percent in the past decade. Economic precarity, debt, housing insecurity, and climate anxiety all contribute.
Therapists describe “financial trauma” as a defining condition for Gen Z—chronic anxiety rooted in systemic instability. Universities respond with mindfulness workshops, but few confront the deeper issue: a society that privatized risk and monetized hope.
They say in Harlan County,
There are no neutrals there—
Which side are you on, my people,
Which side are you on?
The question lingers like a challenge to policymakers, educators, and investors alike.
A Two-Tier Future
Today’s economy is splitting into two distinct realities:
The secure class, buffered by family wealth, education, AI-driven income, and real estate assets.
The precarious class, burdened by loans, high rents, unstable work, and psychological strain.
The supposed democratization of opportunity through technology and education has in practice entrenched a new feudalism—one coded in algorithms and contracts instead of coal and steel.
Repairing the System, Not the Student
For Generation Z, the American Dream has become a high-interest loan. Education, technology, and financial innovation—once tools of liberation—now function as instruments of control.
Reforming higher education is necessary, but not sufficient. The deeper work lies in redistributing power: capping predatory interest rates, investing in affordable housing, curbing speculative bubbles, ensuring that AI’s gains benefit labor as well as capital, and confronting the mental health crisis that shadows all of it.
Florence Reece’s song endures because its question has never been answered—only updated. As Gen Z stands at the intersection of debt and digital capitalism, that question rings louder than ever:
Which side are you on?
Sources
Florence Reece, “Which Side Are You On?” (1931).
Pew Research Center, “First-Generation College Graduates Lag Behind Their Peers on Key Economic Outcomes,” 2021.
Dēmos, The Debt Divide: How Student Debt Impacts Opportunities for Black and White Borrowers, 2016.
EducationData.org, “Student Loan Debt by Generation,” 2024.
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Gen Z Student Debt and Wealth Data Brief, 2022.
CNBC, “Gen Z vs. Their Parents: How the Generations Stack Up Financially,” 2024.
WUSF, “Generation Z’s Net Worth Is Being Undercut by College Debt,” 2024.
Newsweek, “Student Loan Update: Gen Z Hit with Highest Payments,” 2024.
The Kaplan Group, “How Student Debt Is Locking Millennials and Gen Z Out of Homeownership,” 2024.
CDC, Suicide Mortality in the United States, 2001–2022, National Center for Health Statistics, 2023.
Brookings Institution, “The Impact of AI on Labor Markets: Inequality and Automation,” 2024.
CNBC, “Crypto Crash Wipes Out Billions in Investor Wealth, Gen Z Most Exposed,” 2023.
Zillow, “U.S. Housing Affordability Reaches Lowest Point Since 1989,” 2024.
Recent neuroscience is challenging everything we thought we knew about adulthood. A landmark study from the University of Cambridge finds that our brains remain in an “adolescent” phase until around age 32. During this extended period, the brain undergoes major structural rewiring, improving connectivity, executive function, and decision-making. In other words, young adults in their 20s and early 30s are still biologically refining the very skills society expects them to rely on for financial independence.
Yet economic realities tell a different story. In the United States, the average college graduate carries over $30,000 in student loan debt, with repayment often starting immediately after graduation. For students pursuing graduate or professional school — law, medicine, business, or PhDs — debt often doubles or triples, and repayment is further delayed, sometimes beginning in the late 20s or early 30s. This period coincides precisely with the brain’s extended adolescent development phase, when executive function, risk assessment, and long-term planning are still maturing.
For many working-class students, this biological-economic mismatch is compounded by trauma and systemic inequality. Students from lower-income families may enter college already carrying family debt, needing to work multiple jobs, or facing housing insecurity. Borrowing to attend graduate school can trigger stress responses in the brain, affecting decision-making, emotional regulation, and risk assessment at a time when these very circuits are still developing. Early-life adversity, including exposure to poverty, unstable housing, or family stress, can alter brain development and magnify the challenges of managing debt during the extended adolescent phase. The combination of prolonged brain maturation, massive student debt, and class-based stressors can increase anxiety, depression, and burnout, especially for first-generation and working-class students who may lack generational financial knowledge.
Graduate education intensifies these pressures. Graduate students often juggle heavy workloads, research obligations, and living costs while navigating large financial obligations at a developmental stage where executive functions are still stabilizing. High debt and extended schooling push milestones such as homeownership, family formation, and career stability into the early-to-mid 30s, overlapping with the final phase of brain maturation. For working-class students, who often have fewer safety nets, financial missteps or delayed income can be more consequential and stressful, amplifying the inequities embedded in higher education financing.
Addressing student loan burdens requires policies that recognize both neurodevelopmental science and socioeconomic realities. Repayment programs that delay full payments until the late 20s or early 30s would reduce stress during a critical brain development window. Income-contingent or progressive repayment plans can scale obligations with early-career earnings, particularly for graduate students carrying high debt burdens. Financial literacy and counseling programs must also integrate trauma-informed support, teaching budgeting and debt management while recognizing the emotional impacts of financial stress. Mental health resources should be accessible for students navigating the combined pressures of debt, class-based disadvantage, and developmental transitions. Systemic reform in higher education financing, including expanded grants, debt-free programs, fellowships, and living stipends, would reduce structural disadvantages for working-class students and support more equitable access to higher education.
Prolonged adolescence reframes the student debt crisis, particularly for graduate students and working-class borrowers. Our brains continue to mature into the early 30s, yet financial systems demand fully developed decision-making skills much earlier. For students from lower-income families, this gap is widened by trauma, structural inequality, and fewer safety nets. To support healthy, resilient, and economically secure generations, policymakers must recognize that growing up biologically and psychologically takes longer than society allows, and that debt obligations should not compound trauma or class disadvantage. Aligning financial policy with developmental science and social equity is not just fair — it is essential. Sources
Arslan, S., et al. “Modular Segregation of Structural Brain Networks Supports Executive Function in Youth.” NeuroImage, 2016. https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.03619
Bethlehem, R.A.I., et al. “Preferential Detachment During Human Brain Development: Age- and Sex-Specific Structural Connectivity in DTI Data.” 2014. https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.0240
U.S. Federal Reserve. “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households: 2025.” https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-well-being-of-us-households.html
Generation Z faces a challenging labor market as unemployment among recent graduates reached 8.6% in June 2025. Entry-level jobs often demand two to three years of experience, creating a catch-22 for young workers. Stagnant starting salaries, rising living costs, and student debt averaging $33,500 per borrower add economic pressure. Companies prioritize retaining staff, while tariffs, inflation, and hiring freezes limit new opportunities. Gig work and delayed financial independence are common, with only 29% of Gen Z workers feeling engaged. Long application processes, reduced internships, and intense competition further hinder career entry, creating widespread professional anxiety and underemployment.
The recent MSN article “I Regret Having Children — It Has Stripped My Life of Meaning” is not just a private confession. It is a mirror reflecting a collapsing social order — one where parenting, education, and labor are all defined by debt, exhaustion, and disillusionment.
In today’s America, the family, the school, and the workplace no longer promise progress; they reproduce precarity. The personal regret of parents becomes a collective symptom of a society that demands self-sacrifice but offers little reciprocity.
The Privatization of Care and the Myth of the “Good Parent”
Since the Reagan era, neoliberal ideology has reduced social problems to personal failures. Families are told to work harder, plan better, and be grateful — while the state retreats from childcare, healthcare, and education.
Parenting, once understood as a shared civic project, is now a private ordeal. The “good parent” myth demands endless self-denial while ignoring the structural forces that make family life unsustainable: stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, unaffordable education, and the erosion of community networks.
The parent who whispers, “I regret having children,” isn’t rejecting love — they are acknowledging betrayal. They were promised fulfillment through family, but abandoned by a system that commodifies care and isolates suffering.
The Dobbs Decision and the Politics of Coerced Parenthood
The 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling — which overturned Roe v. Wade — deepened this betrayal. By stripping away the constitutional right to abortion, the Supreme Court forced millions into unwanted pregnancies under conditions of economic and emotional strain.
This was no accident of jurisprudence. It was the political offspring of neoliberal neglect and Trump-era authoritarianism — a regime that exalts “family values” while defunding the social infrastructure that makes family life possible.
Dobbs represents coerced parenthood in a nation without paid leave, affordable childcare, or universal healthcare. It is the culmination of a system that insists on reproduction but refuses responsibility — transforming bodily autonomy into a political battleground while leaving families to fend for themselves.
Trumpism, Despair, and Manufactured Nostalgia
Trumpism feeds on the despair that neoliberalism creates. It promises to restore “traditional America” — stable jobs, strong families, obedient children — but it offers only resentment as consolation.
When exhausted parents or debt-ridden graduates look for meaning, Trumpian populism channels their frustration toward scapegoats: immigrants, educators, feminists, the poor. It converts structural despair into cultural war.
Trump’s America is a paradox: it glorifies the family while destroying the material base that sustains it. It preaches “Make America Great Again” while keeping its base desperate, indebted, and emotionally dependent on rage.
The Rise of the Educated Underclass
Nowhere is this contradiction clearer than in the making of the educated underclass — the millions of Americans who did everything “right” but found the social contract shredded beneath them.
They earned degrees, followed career advice, and invested in the myth of meritocracy. Yet decades of wage stagnation, precarious employment, and student debt have left them economically fragile and politically disoriented.
Many are parents who believed education would secure their children’s futures. Instead, they see their own children inheriting instability — locked out of homeownership, burdened with loans, and facing a world where credentials no longer guarantee dignity.
This educated underclass, spanning teachers, social workers, adjunct professors, nurses, and mid-level professionals, represents the human fallout of the neoliberal university and the marketized economy it feeds. Their disillusionment — like parental regret — is both personal and systemic.
Higher Education as a Debt Factory
Colleges once promised upward mobility; now they manufacture anxiety and debt. The family that sacrifices for tuition does so on faith that a degree still matters. But as corporate consolidation and automation erode stable work, that faith collapses.
Parents, particularly those from the working and lower-middle class, internalize this collapse as failure — not recognizing that the problem lies in a system that sells hope on credit. Their children, emerging into a gig economy with record debt, form the next generation of the educated underclass: credentialed, precarious, and politically volatile.
Regret as a Rational Response
In this context, parental regret is not deviance — it is rational. It reflects the exhaustion of trying to raise children, pay loans, and sustain meaning in a society where everything, including love, has been commodified.
It reflects the psychic cost of neoliberalism’s lie: that education, work, and family can still deliver self-realization without collective solidarity or public investment.
And it warns of what happens when a nation loses faith not only in its institutions but in the very act of reproduction itself.
Toward a Politics of Care and Repair
To break this cycle, we must confront the intertwined crises of reproduction, education, and inequality. A humane alternative would demand:
Universal reproductive freedom — protecting the right not to bear children, and the resources to raise them with dignity.
Tuition-free higher education and student debt relief — dismantling the educated underclass.
Guaranteed childcare, healthcare, and paid leave — treating parenting as collective labor, not private suffering.
Living wages and housing justice — reestablishing the economic base of real family life.
Democratized higher education — ending the capture of universities by finance and corporate boards.
Only by restoring care as a public good — not a private burden — can we move beyond regret toward renewal.
From Regret to Resistance
The parent who says, “I regret having children,” and the graduate who says, “My degree ruined my life,” are not failures. They are witnesses. Their grief exposes the moral bankruptcy of a system that exploits care, education, and aspiration for profit.
Trumpism thrives on that despair, offering nostalgia instead of justice. Neoliberalism rationalizes it, calling it “personal responsibility.”
But the truth is collective: meaning cannot survive where solidarity has been destroyed. The antidote to regret is not silence — it is organizing. It is rebuilding a society where care, education, and dignity are shared, not sold.
Sources
MSN News, “I Regret Having Children — It Has Stripped My Life of Meaning,” 2025.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. ___ (2022).
Donath, Orna. Regretting Motherhood: A Sociopolitical Analysis. North Atlantic Books, 2017.
Fraser, Nancy. Cannibal Capitalism. Verso, 2022.
Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos. Zone Books, 2015.
Giroux, Henry. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Haymarket, 2014.
Hochschild, Arlie. Strangers in Their Own Land. The New Press, 2016.
Shaulis, Dahn. The College Meltdown (Higher Education Inquirer archives).
