Renting While Educated: The Housing Crisis and the Rise of the Educated Underclass

In the United States, a college degree once promised a path to stability — a steady job, a livable wage, and a secure place to call home. Today, that promise has fractured. Millions of degree-holders and would-be graduates find themselves unable to afford even modest housing, trapped in what can only be described as the educated underclass: people with credentials but without the economic security those credentials were supposed to guarantee.

The latest data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) makes clear that the housing crisis is not just about poverty — it is about the shrinking distance between the working poor and the working-educated. The gap between wages and rent has widened so dramatically that even college-educated workers, adjunct faculty, nonprofit staff, social workers, and early-career professionals are drowning in housing costs.

The Housing Wage and the Broken Promise of Higher Ed

According to NLIHC’s Out of Reach 2025 report, a full-time worker in the U.S. needs to earn $33.63 an hour to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment and $28.17 an hour for a one-bedroom. That’s far higher than what many degree-holders earn, especially those in education, public service, healthcare support, and the nonprofit sector.

The academic workforce itself is emblematic of the problem: adjunct instructors with master’s degrees — sometimes PhDs — often earn poverty-level wages. Yet the rents they face are no different from those of skilled professionals in high-paying industries.

Higher education promised mobility; instead, it delivered a generation of renters one missed paycheck away from eviction.

An Educated Underclass Renting in Perpetuity

NLIHC’s data shows a national shortage of affordable housing: only 35 affordable and available homes exist for every 100 extremely low-income renters. While this crisis hits the lowest-income Americans hardest, it also drags down millions of educated workers who now compete for the same shrinking stock of affordable units.

This convergence — between the working poor and the working educated — reflects a structural breakdown:

• New graduates carry student debt while starting in low-wage jobs.

• Millennial and Gen Z workers face rents that have grown far faster than wages.

• Former middle-class professionals, displaced by automation and recession, re-enter the workforce at lower wages that no longer match their credentials.

• Public-sector and nonprofit workers do “mission-driven” work but cannot afford to live in the communities they serve.

Increasingly, higher education is not a safeguard against housing insecurity — it is a gateway into it.

The Spiral: Student Debt, Rent Burden, and Delayed Adulthood

The educated underclass faces a double bind:
High rents prevent saving, while student debt prevents mobility.

NLIHC data shows that renters who are cost-burdened (spending more than 30% of income on housing) or severely cost-burdened (over 50%) are forced to cut spending on essentials. For many degree-holders, this means:

• Delaying or abandoning homeownership

• Working multiple jobs to cover rent

• Moving back in with parents

• Delaying marriage and child-rearing

• Relocating constantly in search of slightly cheaper housing

This is not “adulting” — it’s economic triage.

The educated underclass is increasingly indistinguishable from the broader working class in terms of economic vulnerability, yet still burdened by expectations that their degrees should have delivered them stability.

When Housing Costs Undermine Higher Education Itself

The affordability crisis is reshaping entire higher education ecosystems:

• Students struggle to find housing close to campus, leading to long commutes, couch surfing, or dropping out.

• Graduate students and postdocs — essential academic labor — increasingly rely on food aid, emergency grants, and organizing unions just to survive.

• Colleges in high-cost cities cannot hire or retain staff because employees cannot afford to live nearby.

• Public institutions face declining enrollment because families see no payoff to degrees that lead to poverty wages and unaffordable housing.

If higher education cannot provide a pathway out of housing insecurity, its legitimacy — and its future — is in question.

Toward Real Solutions: Housing as an Educational Issue

Solving this crisis requires acknowledging a simple truth: housing policy is higher-education policy.
The educated underclass is not a natural outcome of individual failure; it is the product of a system that overcharges for education and underpays for labor while allowing rents to skyrocket.

Real solutions would include:

• Large-scale public investment in deeply affordable housing

• Expansion of rental assistance and housing vouchers

• Living-wage laws that reflect real housing costs

• Student-housing development tied to public colleges

• Forgiveness of rental debt accumulated during economic shocks

• Strengthening unions among educators, adjuncts, graduate workers, and other low-paid professionals

The promise of higher education cannot be realized while a degree-holder earning $20, $25, or even $30 an hour still cannot afford a one-bedroom apartment.

The Verdict: Housing Is the Fault Line of the New Class Divide

NLIHC’s data confirms what millions of renters already know: the U.S. housing market punishes workers regardless of education level, and higher education no longer protects against precarity. The educated underclass is not a fringe category — it is becoming the norm.

Until wages align with housing costs and the housing system is restructured to serve people rather than profit, the divide between those who can afford stability and those who cannot will continue to widen. And higher education, once marketed as the bridge to a better life, will remain yet another broken promise — one rent payment away from collapse.

Sources
National Low Income Housing Coalition, Out of Reach 2025
NLIHC Research and Policy Briefs
NLIHC Affordable Housing Data and Fact Sheets

Academic Capitalism and the next phase of the College Meltdown (updated January 26, 2022)

It appears we have entered a new phase of Academic Capitalism and the College Meltdown. The previous phase involved College Mania! and the growth of the "educated underclass" (including gig workers, adjuncts and postdocs), Wall Street over-speculation, the divestment of corporations from employee benefits, and the rise and fall of for-profit colleges: Corinthian Colleges, ITT Tech, Education Management Corporation, Apollo Group, Education Corporation of America, and Laureate Education.  

Enrollment at proprietary schools is down about 40 percent from its peak in 2010 and higher education enrollment has dropped every year for the last decade.  In absolute numbers, community colleges have taken the largest hit.  Regional public universities have also experienced large enrollment declines.

At other schools, student aid has shifted from "needs based" to "merit based" making college choice for low- and moderate income families an even riskier choice. 

Student loan debt has crippled millions of working families, but neoliberal experts at Goldman Sachs and the Federal Reserve do not see a significant problem. 

According to the Federal Reserve, the student debt problem is ameliorated by the decline in births to people of lower socio-economic status.  The FED has also consistently reported that the debt is not a huge drag on the economy (less than 0.05 percent per year). Those developments, along with an anemic but growing student debt movement, have meant that the chance for progressive and meaningful change is limited under the Biden administration, but possible in the long run.  

This new phase of the College Meltdown has strong roots in the 1980s and involves the continued growth of the educated underclass (including elite overproduction in higher education) and more bulls*t jobs, the privatization of public higher education, the proliferation and consolidation of online program managers (OPMs) working for name brand and lesser known schools, non-profit subprime colleges, robocolleges, continued grade inflation, and the fall of the US federal student loan program. In 2020 and 2021, higher education also received three massive federal bailouts.  

Larger developments include the resurgence of authoritarianism, the hollowing out of America, and the global climate change crisis.  Despite these glaring existential problems, a looming college enrollment cliff in 2026, and growing dismay by working families, irrational exuberance and false optimism continues among most college business officers and middle-class consumers.  

Will austerity and excesses in the system lead to even more dramatic failures? Will the states and federal government ask for more transparency and accountability of the government funds that keep the system afloat?

What should we be observing in this new phase:  

1. The growth (and power) of the "educated underclass"

2. The effects of student loan debt on working families and social institutions (including religion and the economy) 

3. The state of the student loan forgiveness movement and popular opinion about student loan forgiveness

4. The health of the US Department of Education's Student Loan Portfolio

5. The growth of Online Program Managers

6. The degree that public universities are serving their citizens

7. The amount of money spent on marketing and advertising in higher education

8. Analyses of the FED, big banks, and rating agencies about the K-12 pipeline, higher education, student loan debt, and the growth of the educated underclass 

9. Local, state, and federal responses to "savage inequalities" in the K-12 pipeline, student loan debt, and the growth of the "educated underclass"

10. The rise of authoritarianism/neofascism in US education and the US as a whole  (e.g. mass surveillance, anti-intellectualism, hate crimes)

11. In deference to Bryan Alexander and his upcoming book "Universities on Fire" I must include global climate change as a phenomenon that must be observed and dealt with.  Failure to address this existential problem makes the other issues irrelevant.  

References

• Lawsuit alleges top colleges illegally collude to limit financial aid (Ivana Saric, Axios)
• USC Pushed a $115,000 Online Degree. Graduates Got Low Salaries, Huge Debts (Lisa Bannon and Andrea Fuller, WSJ)
• The Semi-Rich and Elite Overproduction (Matthew Stewart, Peter Turchin and Higher Ed)
• Student Debt From Private Lenders Hits All-Time High (Alexis Gravely, Inside Higher Education)
• Students Are Living In Hotels & Cars Due To Lack Of Campus Housing In California (Dantee Ramos)
• The Grade Inflation–College Completion Connection (Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Education)
• Low Literacy Levels Among U.S. Adults Could Be Costing The Economy $2.2 Trillion A Year (Forbes)
• Colleges See Best Gains in Decades Thanks to Private Investments (Janet Lorin, Bloomberg)
• Enrollment algorithms are contributing to the crises of higher education (Alex Engler, Brookings Institution)
• A Generation of American Men Give Up on College: ‘I Just Feel Lost (Douglas Belkin, WSJ)
• The Great Master’s-Degree Swindle (Kevin Carey, CHE)
• The Number of Colleges Continues to Shrink (Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Education)
• Pennsylvania system board votes to merge 6 institutions into 2 (Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, Higher Ed Dive)
• ‘Financially Hobbled for Life’: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off (Melissa Korn and Andrea Fuller, WSJ)
• Spring Numbers Show 'Dramatic' Drop In College Enrollment (Elissa Nadworny, NPR)
• States Step In To Stop Colleges Holding Transcripts Ransom For Unpaid Bills (Jon Marcus, NPR)
• Bond Boom Comes to America’s Colleges and Universities (Juliet Chung and Melissa Korn, WSJ)
• Colleges Could Lose $183 Billion During Pandemic (Emma Whitford, IHE)
• A Brutal Tally: Higher Ed Lost 650,000 Jobs Last Year (Dan Bauman, CHE)
• Tempering the Baby Bust Financial Hit (Phillip B. Levine, IHE)

This article was updated November 11, 2021 to include a link to elite overproduction in higher education and on January 26, 2022 to include a list of recent references.  

College Meltdown 2025, Quarter 1: Here we are, at another fork in the road.

In an August 2022 interview with Gary Stocker of College Viability, I offered a chilling projection for U.S. higher education and the College Meltdown:

“The worst-case scenario is that colleges are involved on both sides of a Second US Civil War between Christian Fundamentalists and neoliberals. Working families will take the largest hit.”

It’s a stark and provocative warning, but one grounded in decades of neoliberal policy, predatory capitalism, and ideological warfare. From our perspective at the Higher Education Inquirer, the College Meltdown is not a future risk—it’s a slow-moving catastrophe already unfolding.

Two Fronts in a Cultural and Economic War

On one side of this looming conflict are Christian fundamentalists who seek to remake public education in their own image: purging curricula of critical perspectives, defunding public universities, and promoting ideological orthodoxy over inquiry.

On the other side are neoliberal technocrats, who have transformed higher education into a marketplace of credentials, debt, and precarious labor. Under their regime, colleges prioritize growth, branding, and profit over education, equity, and labor rights.

Both groups, while ideologically different, are willing to use colleges as instruments of power. In doing so, they turn institutions of higher learning into ideological battlegrounds, undermining their civic purpose.

The Educated Underclass: Evidence of Collapse

One of the most visible outcomes of this dysfunction is the rise of the educated underclass. These are people who did what they were told: they went to college, took on debt, and earned degrees. Yet instead of opportunity, they found instability.

“A large proportion of those who have attended colleges have become part of a growing educated underclass,” Shaulis noted in his interview with Stocker.

This includes:

• Adjunct instructors working multiple jobs without benefits

• Degree holders underemployed in gig work

• Students lured into expensive, low-return programs at subprime colleges

These individuals are too educated for social support but too broke for economic stability. They are the byproduct of a system that treats education as a private investment rather than a public good.

Colleges in Crisis: A Systemic Failure

At the Higher Education Inquirer, our concept of the College Meltdown describes a long-term decline marked by falling enrollment, rising costs, debt peonage, and declining academic labor conditions:

• Enrollment has been falling since 2011, with sharp declines in community colleges and regional publics.

• Student debt has exploded, with minimal returns for many graduates.

• Academic labor is being deskilled, with "robocolleges" relying on underpaid, non-tenure-track staff or automated instruction.

• State funding is shrinking, as aging populations drive up Medicaid costs and crowd out investment in public higher education.

Enter the Trump Administration (2025)

The return of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2025 has further accelerated the higher ed crisis. His administration is now actively contributing to the system’s unraveling:

Deregulation and Predatory Practices

Trump’s Department of Education is dismantling federal oversight of for-profit colleges, weakening gainful employment protections and allowing discredited institutions back into the federal aid system. This benefits subprime colleges that trap students in cycles of debt.

Political Weaponization of Higher Ed

Trump-aligned state governments and federal agencies are targeting DEI initiatives, restricting academic freedom, and enforcing ideological conformity. Public colleges are increasingly being used to wage cultural wars.

Funding Cuts and Favoritism

Funding is being diverted from public institutions toward private religious colleges and corporate-friendly training programs. Meanwhile, community colleges and regional universities are being left to die on the vine.

Undermining Debt Relief

Efforts to reform or forgive student loans have been stalled or reversed. Borrowers are left stranded in opaque systems, while private loans surge in popularity—often with worse terms and even less accountability.

A Best-Case vs. Worst-Case Future

When asked what the next few years could look like, I offered a fork in the road:

Best case: Colleges become transparent, accountable, and aligned with the public good, confronting crises like climate change, inequality, and authoritarianism.

Worst case: Colleges become entrenched ideological battlegrounds, deepening inequality and social fragmentation. The educated underclass grows, and higher education becomes an engine of despair rather than mobility.

Conclusion

The College Meltdown is not a singular event—it is a long-term systemic crisis. Under the combined forces of privatization, political polarization, and demographic stress, U.S. higher education is being hollowed out.

As colleges pick sides in a broader culture war, the public mission of higher education is being sacrificed. The working class and the educated underclass are the casualties of a system that promised prosperity but delivered precarity.

In this volatile moment, the future of American higher education may well mirror the broader American crisis: one defined by deepening divides, fraying institutions, and a desperate need for accountability, justice, and reinvention.

When Parenthood Feels Like a Trap: Regret, Trumpism, and the Educated Underclass

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

The Working-Class Recession: How the Educated Underclass is Already in Crisis

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.

The Confidence Crisis: Why Young Workers Are Losing Faith in the Job Market

In May 2025, worker confidence in the U.S. labor market sank to its lowest point in nearly a decade. Glassdoor reports that only 44.1% of employees expressed a positive six-month business outlook, citing mounting economic instability, tariff threats, and rising layoffs. For entry-level workers—the newest entrants into the workforce—the numbers were even worse: just 43.4% expressed confidence, the lowest since Glassdoor began tracking this data in 2016.

These numbers reflect more than just a cyclical downturn—they point to a deeper structural issue at the heart of the U.S. economy and higher education system.

Layoffs Rising, Job Growth Slowing

According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, U.S.-based employers cut 93,816 jobs in May, a 47% increase over the same month last year. Meanwhile, the U.S. added just 139,000 jobs, down from April’s total of 147,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Despite headlines touting “full employment,” many workers—especially younger ones—see fewer opportunities and reduced mobility.

The Collapse of Upward Mobility

For recent college graduates, the path from education to employment is increasingly blocked. Hiring has slowed across multiple sectors, particularly in roles that were once considered reliable entry points into the professional world. According to Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor, “The low hiring environment we’re in right now means it’s hard for young grads to get onto the career ladder in the first place.”

For those who do land jobs, internal advancement has become more difficult. Companies are not promoting or hiring at the same rates as before, and competition has intensified as experienced workers, displaced by layoffs, vie for the same positions.

As Zhao notes, this creates “more bunching at the bottom of the career ladder,” further reducing the chances for advancement. The result is a stagnant and oversaturated early-career labor market that undermines the basic assumption that education leads to mobility.

The Rise of the Educated Underclass

This moment underscores what sociologist Gary Roth has called the emergence of an “educated underclass”—a growing segment of workers with college degrees who find themselves in precarious, low-wage, or unstable employment. The promise that higher education guarantees success in the labor market has unraveled for many, replaced by a cycle of job insecurity, career stagnation, and rising debt.

Colleges and universities continue to promote degree attainment as the key to upward mobility, yet millions of graduates are discovering that the market does not need, or will not absorb, their skills at a level commensurate with their education. What began as a student debt crisis is now a broader economic phenomenon: the creation of a surplus class of credentialed workers whose aspirations exceed the system’s capacity to deliver.

This “educated underclass” is not simply the result of poor individual choices or bad timing—it is a structural outcome of a labor market and education system misaligned with one another and increasingly shaped by financialized logics. As more employers demand degrees for routine work, and as automation and outsourcing reduce the number of stable middle-class jobs, the role of college becomes less about opportunity and more about gatekeeping and economic sorting.

Higher Education’s Complicity

The current crisis also raises hard questions about the higher education industry itself. Institutions have continued to expand enrollment and raise tuition, fueling a multi-trillion-dollar student debt industry, while offering little accountability for post-graduation outcomes. Marketing campaigns still sell the dream of transformation through education—even as graduates enter a labor market defined by instability, underemployment, and diminished returns on investment.

A System in Crisis

The ongoing decline in worker confidence, especially among the young, may signal not just temporary economic anxiety, but a legitimacy crisis for both the labor market and the education system that feeds it. As job cuts increase and growth stagnates, more Americans—especially those carrying degrees and debt—are beginning to question the rules of the game.

At the Higher Education Inquirer, we continue to track the rise of the educated underclass, the erosion of labor market mobility, and the complicity of institutions that have sold debt-financed credentials as a ticket to the middle class. The gap between educational promise and economic reality has become too large to ignore.

“Dream School” vs. Harsh Realities: Comparing Jeff Selingo’s Hopeful Guide to the Critical Work of Gary Roth and Peter Cappelli

 Jeff Selingo’s Dream School: Finding the College That’s Right for You arrives this September with an uplifting premise: students and families can reframe their college search by looking beyond brand-name schools and toward institutions that truly match their needs, values, and goals. It’s a hopeful, user-friendly guidebook for navigating a system in crisis.

But how does this vision compare to more critical takes on higher education, like Gary Roth’s The Educated Underclass or Peter Cappelli’s Will College Pay Off? These books don’t offer roadmaps—they offer warnings.

Together, these three works highlight the gap between the dream of higher education and its troubling socioeconomic realities.

Jeff Selingo: Navigating Within the System

Selingo’s Dream School leans into optimism. Drawing on years of reporting and interviews, he offers practical tools to help families think more holistically about fit, outcomes, and experience. He acknowledges the pressures of student debt and market uncertainty, but ultimately believes that better choices can lead to better results. His book is about informed agency: using available resources to make strategic decisions in a system that still—despite its flaws—offers life-changing opportunities.

Importantly, Selingo writes for a very different audience than Roth or Cappelli. His core readers are middle- and upper-middle-class families, high school counselors, and education-minded parents who are already invested in the idea of college. His book is not a systemic critique—it’s a self-help manual for those trying to optimize their place within the system. He assumes readers have at least some cultural capital, if not financial capital, to navigate the process.

That contrasts sharply with Roth’s and Cappelli’s work, which more directly speaks to broader questions of inequality, economic risk, and the failure of higher education to deliver on its promises for the working class and lower-middle class.

Gary Roth: Education as Class Reproduction

Gary Roth’s The Educated Underclass: Students and the False Promise of Social Mobility tells a darker story. For Roth, the U.S. higher education system has become a mechanism for class reproduction, not mobility. Degrees no longer guarantee a middle-class life. Many graduates enter an economy saturated with credentialed labor and devalued degrees, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Roth argues that working-class and first-generation students are often funneled into less selective schools that provide limited return on investment while saddling them with debt.

Roth’s educated underclass is not a group of empowered dreamers, but of frustrated and underemployed degree-holders. His is a structural critique: the system is rigged to absorb ambition but deny reward. From that angle, Dream School could be seen as encouraging students to better decorate their cages, not escape them.

Peter Cappelli: A Risky Bet in a Shifting Market

Peter Cappelli’s Will College Pay Off? occupies a middle ground between Selingo’s optimism and Roth’s pessimism. Cappelli, a labor economist at the Wharton School, unpacks the complex relationship between degrees and economic outcomes. He emphasizes that some degrees from some institutions in some fields pay off—but the variability is enormous, and the risk increasingly falls on students and families.

Cappelli also warns that the job market is no longer tightly aligned with higher education. Employers want experience and specific skills, not just credentials. In this climate, college becomes a speculative investment with uncertain return, especially for students who choose the wrong major, drop out, or attend low-performing institutions.

Cappelli would likely agree with Selingo’s emphasis on “fit” and outcomes, but caution that even the best-laid plans can be undone by macroeconomic forces and institutional failures. His argument underscores the need for stronger public data, better advising, and more employer accountability.

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Competing Visions of the College Experience

Author	Core Message	Systemic Critique	Hope Offered	Primary Audience
Jeff Selingo	Find the school that fits you best	Mild	Yes – through smarter choices	College-bound middle- and upper-middle-class families
Gary Roth	The system reproduces inequality	Strong	No – the system is broken	Working-class students, critical scholars
Peter Cappelli	College may or may not pay off – it’s a gamble	Moderate	Conditional – depends on strategy and luck	Policymakers, economists, pragmatic families

Final Thoughts: Hope, Strategy, or Exit?

Dream School provides an encouraging map for families still trying to believe in the American higher education promise. But Roth and Cappelli serve as stark reminders that the terrain is treacherous—and for many, the dream may already be out of reach.

Jeff Selingo offers hope within the system, assuming the reader has the resources to navigate it. Gary Roth questions the system’s core legitimacy. Peter Cappelli urges caution and calculation. Together, these authors paint a more complete picture of what college means in 21st-century America: a dream for some, a trap for others, and a high-stakes gamble for nearly everyone else.

Sources:
Jeff Selingo, Dream School (2025)
Gary Roth, The Educated Underclass (2020)
Peter Cappelli, Will College Pay Off? (2015)
National Center for Education Statistics, College Scorecard
Federal Reserve Bank reports on student debt and labor outcomes

The Brown University Killing, the Educated Underclass, and the Politics of Control

When a killing becomes associated with an elite institution such as Brown University, the public narrative hardens quickly. The event is framed as an unforeseeable rupture—either the product of individual pathology or evidence that universities have failed to control dangerous people in their midst. Missing from both accounts is a deeper examination of how elite higher education produces an educated underclass, how mental illness is managed rather than treated, how international students are uniquely exposed to risk, and how mass surveillance and reporting regimes increasingly substitute for care.

Elite universities project an image of abundance: intellectual freedom, global opportunity, and moral seriousness. Yet beneath that image lies a population living with chronic insecurity. Graduate students, adjuncts, postdoctoral researchers, and international students occupy a paradoxical position—highly educated, institutionally dependent, and structurally disposable. They are central to the university’s labor model and global prestige, yet peripheral to its safety nets and decision-making structures.

Mental illness must be addressed directly, but not in the reductive way it is often invoked after violence occurs. Campus mental health systems are overwhelmed, under-resourced, and shaped by liability concerns rather than therapeutic commitments. Students in severe psychological distress frequently encounter long waitlists, fragmented care, or administrative responses that blur the line between support and discipline. Crisis is managed, not resolved.

For international students, these failures are magnified. Visa status is typically contingent on continuous enrollment and academic performance. A mental health crisis can threaten not only a student’s education but their legal right to remain in the country. Seeking help may carry perceived—or real—risks: loss of funding, forced leaves of absence, housing instability, or immigration consequences. Cultural stigma, racism, language barriers, and social isolation further discourage engagement with already inadequate systems.

Rather than expanding care, universities have increasingly expanded surveillance. Elite campuses now operate dense ecosystems of monitoring: security cameras, access controls, data analytics, behavioral intervention teams, and anonymous “concerned citizen” tip lines. These systems are justified as preventative safety measures, but they often function as tools of social control. “Concerning behavior” is deliberately undefined, allowing subjective judgments to trigger institutional scrutiny.

Such systems disproportionately affect those who already stand out—students who are foreign, mentally ill, socially isolated, or racially marginalized. For international students in particular, being flagged by a tip or threat assessment process can escalate rapidly, drawing in campus police, local law enforcement, or federal immigration authorities. Surveillance does not replace care; it displaces it.

In the aftermath of violence, political responses tend to reinforce this displacement. Donald Trump’s reactions to campus-related violence and crime have followed a consistent pattern: emphasis on “law and order,” denunciations of universities as irresponsible or ideologically corrupt, and calls for stronger policing, harsher penalties, and increased monitoring. Mental illness is often invoked rhetorically, but rarely accompanied by proposals for expanded treatment, housing stability, or protections for vulnerable students—especially non-citizens.

This framing matters. When elite campus violence is interpreted through a punitive lens, it legitimizes further surveillance, broader reporting mandates, and closer coordination between universities and law enforcement. It shifts responsibility away from institutional structures and onto individuals deemed dangerous or deviant. For foreign students and members of the educated underclass, this environment deepens fear and discourages help-seeking, even as pressure intensifies.

The concept of the educated underclass helps explain why these dynamics are so volatile. Contemporary higher education produces vast numbers of highly trained individuals for a shrinking set of secure positions. International students are recruited aggressively, charged high tuition, and celebrated as evidence of global prestige, yet offered limited pathways to stable employment or belonging. Universities benefit enormously from this arrangement while externalizing its human costs.

None of this excuses violence. Accountability is essential, and the suffering of victims must remain central. But focusing exclusively on individual blame—or on punitive political responses—allows institutions to preserve comforting myths about themselves. It obscures how structural precarity, untreated mental illness, immigration vulnerability, and surveillance-based governance interact in predictable ways.

What incidents connected to elite universities ultimately reveal is not merely individual failure, but institutional contradiction. Universities claim to value diversity while subjecting foreign students to heightened scrutiny. They speak the language of wellness while expanding systems of monitoring and reporting. Political leaders denounce campuses while endorsing the very control mechanisms that exacerbate isolation and distress.

Until universities invest seriously in mental health care, protect international students from cascading penalties, and confront the harms of surveillance-first approaches—and until political leaders move beyond carceral reflexes—elite campuses will remain places where suffering is managed rather than addressed. When that management fails, the consequences can be catastrophic.

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Sources

American Psychiatric Association. Mental Health in College Students.
https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/college-students/mental-health-in-college

Eisenberg, D., et al. “Mental Health and Academic Success in College.” The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2009.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books.

Institute of International Education. Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange.
https://opendoorsdata.org

Lipson, S. K., & Eisenberg, D. “Mental Health and Academic Attitudes and Expectations in University Populations.” Journal of Adolescent Health, 2018.

Monahan, Torin. Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity. Rutgers University Press.

Newfield, Christopher. The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Johns Hopkins University Press.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security. SEVP Guidance for International Students.
https://www.ice.gov/sevis

Trump, Donald J. Public statements and campaign remarks on crime, universities, and law enforcement, 2016–2024.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs.

Indeed and the Illusion of Opportunity: The Platform Monopoly on Jobs and Careers

In the platform-dominated economy, Indeed.com has established itself as the central marketplace for jobseekers and employers alike, boasting tens of millions of listings across industries and geographies. But behind its user-friendly design lies a powerful, opaque system that reinforces labor precarity, exploits the desperation of the underemployed, and facilitates fraud and exploitation—including through job scams designed to funnel people into for-profit colleges and dubious training schemes.

Indeed’s rise is emblematic of a larger pattern in the U.S. political economy, where platforms extract profit from human need—especially from the millions of Americans struggling to find secure employment in a shrinking labor market. While claiming to connect jobseekers with opportunity, Indeed increasingly operates as a gatekeeper and a filter, favoring employers with the ability to pay for prominence, and quietly profiting from a user base navigating worsening inequality.

From Opportunity to Exploitation: The Platform Economy

Indeed’s near-monopoly over online job listings positions it as the Amazon of employment—a central aggregator of job ads, resume submissions, employer reviews, and workforce data. Its business model is rooted in ad-based revenue: companies pay to boost job visibility, while jobseekers receive a flood of suggested listings—many of which are irrelevant, low-quality, or outright deceptive.

One particularly disturbing trend: a growing number of "job postings" on Indeed are not job offers at all, but veiled advertisements for for-profit colleges and unaccredited training programs. These listings typically appear legitimate, bearing the titles of medical assistant, phlebotomist, cybersecurity technician, or paralegal. But once an applicant shows interest, they are quickly routed to admissions representatives, not employers. In short, they’ve fallen for a bait-and-switch scheme.

Indeed does little to prevent these tactics. Despite flagging mechanisms and user complaints, scammers and aggressive recruiters return repeatedly under new listings or shell company names. And because these advertisers pay to promote their listings, there is a built-in conflict of interest: Indeed profits from ads designed to exploit vulnerable jobseekers, many of whom are already burdened by unemployment, underemployment, or student debt.

The Job Training Charade: A National Problem

As labor economist Gordon Lafer argues in The Job Training Charade, job training programs have long functioned as a public relations tool for elected officials, who promise “skills-based solutions” rather than structural labor reform. Publicly funded retraining programs and for-profit career schools capitalize on this narrative, convincing jobseekers that their struggles stem from a personal “skills gap” rather than systemic inequality.

Indeed’s platform reinforces this logic by flooding users with listings that promote training and certification programs as prerequisites for jobs that often don’t exist or pay poorly. Even in legitimate industries—like healthcare and IT—the overabundance of credential inflation and unnecessary gatekeeping leads to further debt accumulation without guaranteeing meaningful work.

As Lafer writes, “Training has become a substitute for economic policy—a way of appearing to do something without actually improving people’s lives.” And Indeed is a willing partner in this substitution, profiting from a constant churn of dislocated workers trying to retool their résumés and lives to meet an ever-shifting set of employer demands.

The Educated Underclass and Platform Paternalism

Gary Roth, in The Educated Underclass, identifies another critical aspect of this ecosystem: the overproduction of college graduates relative to the needs of the labor market. As more people earn degrees, the wage premium diminishes, and once-secure professions become crowded with overqualified applicants chasing scarce opportunities.

Indeed’s platform becomes the proving ground for this underclass: college-educated workers competing for service jobs, temp contracts, or entry-level roles barely above minimum wage. Meanwhile, the site’s tools—resume scores, AI-based job match algorithms, and automated rejection letters—reinforce the idea that unemployment is a personal failure rather than a structural outcome.

This is platform paternalism at its worst. Jobseekers are “nudged” into applying for low-quality work, “encouraged” to pursue unnecessary training, and surveilled through behavioral data that is packaged and sold to employers and third-party marketers. Career development becomes not a public good but a private product—sold back to workers in pieces, with no guarantee of outcome.

Job Scams and Regulatory Blind Spots

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state attorneys general have received thousands of complaints about online job scams—including fake recruiters, phony employers, and misleading school advertisements. Yet enforcement remains weak, and platforms like Indeed enjoy limited legal liability, protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields them from responsibility for user-generated content.

Even when caught, fraudulent advertisers often reappear. As one whistleblower told The Higher Education Inquirer, “We’d flag scam listings, and two days later they’d pop back up under a new name. It was like a game of whack-a-mole—and no one at the top cared.”

Indeed's user agreement explicitly disclaims responsibility for the authenticity of job listings. And although the company has instituted basic verification and reporting tools, they are inadequate to stem the tide of predatory postings, especially those tied to the multibillion-dollar for-profit education industry.

A Broken System Masquerading as Innovation

The consolidation of online job markets under platforms like Indeed represents a profound shift in the political economy of labor. No longer mediated by public institutions or strong unions, the search for work is now a privatized experience, managed by algorithms, monetized through ads, and vulnerable to deception.

To be clear: Indeed does not create jobs. It creates the illusion of access. It obscures labor precarity behind UX design and paid listings. It enables fraudulent training pipelines while pushing the burden of risk and cost onto workers. And it profits from the widening chasm between what higher education promises and what the economy delivers.

At The Higher Education Inquirer, we demand accountability—not just from institutions of higher learning but from the platforms that now mediate our futures. The illusion must be pierced, and jobseeking must be reclaimed as a public function, free from predation, profiteering, and platform capture.

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Sources:

• Lafer, Gordon. The Job Training Charade. Cornell University Press, 2002.

• Roth, Gary. The Educated Underclass: Students and the Promise of Social Mobility. Pluto Press, 2019.

• U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). “Job Scams: What You Need to Know.” 2024.

• Recruit Holdings. Annual Reports and Investor Presentations, 2020–2024.

• U.S. Department of Labor. “Contingent and Alternative Employment Arrangements.” 2023.

• Brody, Leslie. “Students Lured Into For-Profit Colleges Through Fake Job Ads.” Wall Street Journal, 2022.

• Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019.

• Glassdoor, Indeed, and CareerBuilder community complaint forums (2021–2025).

The Educated Underclass and the Enshittification of Job Platforms

The Higher Education Inquirer has long examined how digital labor platforms shape the trajectories of college graduates. For years, Indeed, LinkedIn, and an expanding universe of niche job boards promised to democratize opportunity and connect graduates to meaningful work. Today, they increasingly represent something else: evidence of a broken system in which educated workers—often carrying significant debt—are funneled into precarious labor markets mediated by platforms whose incentives are misaligned with student success. What Cory Doctorow has described as enshittification is no longer an exception but the operating model.

Indeed’s trajectory is the clearest expression of this decline. The site began as a transparent aggregator designed to make employment searchable and accessible. Over time, it has transformed into a pay-to-play environment in which sponsored listings overshadow organic results, duplicates and recycled ads clutter searches, and misleading postings reduce trust. Users on both sides—job seekers and employers—report diminishing value even as the company extracts more revenue from each.

LinkedIn has followed a parallel arc. Once positioned as a professional network that expanded access and visibility, it now privileges those who can pay for premium placement or “boosted” visibility. The platform’s feed is increasingly dominated by engagement-optimized content, sales pitches, and algorithmic noise. Genuine networking—the discovery of mentors, colleagues, and opportunities—has been pushed to the background by monetized features and incessant upselling. Graduates hoping to build relationships now find themselves navigating a digital marketplace that treats their careers as data points to be monetized.

Niche job boards, often touted as more curated alternatives, have also succumbed to similar dynamics. As private equity money flows into the sector, these boards increasingly rely on subscription fees, visibility boosts, lead-generation schemes, and paywalls that frustrate both applicants and employers. The promise of specialization is overshadowed by the same structural pressures: monetization first, user value second.

For graduates—especially those from working-class backgrounds—the consequences are profound. They enter the labor market carrying debt, often underemployed, and reliant on platforms that promise opportunity while quietly undermining it. The search for stable employment becomes a cycle of misdirection: applying to ghost jobs, fighting algorithmic opacity, and competing in markets distorted by platform-driven gatekeeping. Instead of delivering upward mobility, digital labor platforms frequently reproduce inequality, masking structural failures in higher education and the U.S. economy behind glossy interfaces and “skills gap” rhetoric.

Employers, meanwhile, face their own frustrations: rising costs for visibility, declining applicant quality driven by algorithmic prioritization of click-throughs rather than fit, and a sense that recruitment has shifted from a relational process to a transactional one. The platforms that were supposed to streamline hiring have introduced new layers of friction, opacity, and expense.

The deeper issue is systemic. Digital labor markets now operate on extractive logic: workers and employers are commodities to be converted into revenue streams. For the educated underclass—graduates who followed the prescribed path but find the rewards collapsing beneath them—these platforms do not solve structural inequality. They obscure it.

Higher education institutions must acknowledge this reality. Career centers cannot simply direct students to LinkedIn or Indeed and hope for the best. Instead, institutions should cultivate critical digital literacy, teaching students how to understand the incentives and limitations of platform-mediated job markets. They must invest in direct employer engagement, build relationships that bypass intermediaries, and challenge the outdated narrative that degrees alone guarantee upward mobility. The task is not merely to help students navigate broken systems but to recognize how these systems perpetuate precarity.

The enshittification of job platforms is not a marginal story. It is a window into the lived experience of millions of graduates—and an indictment of an economy that relies on debt-financed education feeding into precarious labor. The Higher Education Inquirer will continue to track these developments, expose the structural forces behind them, and advocate for approaches that put students and workers before platform profits.

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Sources

Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (Verso, 2023).
Cory Doctorow, “Tiktok’s Enshittification,” Pluralistic (2023).
David Streitfeld, “The Cost of Posting a Job on Indeed Keeps Rising,” New York Times, 2022.
Emily Stewart, “LinkedIn Has a Spam Problem,” Vox, 2023.
Suresh Naidu and Eric Posner, Labor Market Power (2024).
Annie Lowrey, “The College Debt Crisis Is Now a Labor Crisis,” The Atlantic, 2022.
Philipp Staab, Digital Capitalism (Polity, 2019).
Alex Hern, “Job Platforms and the Algorithmic Trap,” The Guardian, 2021.
Higher Education Inquirer archives on digital labor markets, platform capitalism, and the educated underclass.