Recently the New York Times reported the following:
Why College Graduates Feel Betrayed (1/3)
Their anger goes far beyond the recent rise of
unemployment and the looming threat of A.I.
The NYT - By Noam Scheiber
(Noam Scheiber covers white-collar workers. This article has
been adapted from his forthcoming book, “Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the
College-Educated Working Class.”)
March 27, 2026
Political observers on the left and right had very different
views on whether Zohran Mamdani would be a good mayor of New York City. But one
thing they agreed on was why so many young college graduates supported the
self-proclaimed democratic socialist.
As Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and Trump backer, put it in an interview with The Free Press after last fall’s election: Too many people graduate from college with useless degrees, sky-high debt and long odds of owning a home. The graduates saw Mamdani as a solution to these problems. “If you proletarianize the young people,” Mr. Thiel said, “you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist.”
He’s not wrong, at least about the economic challenges facing recent college graduates. Student debt has escalated over the past few decades, while housing is increasingly inaccessible for young Americans, especially in high-priced areas like New York and San Francisco.
Perhaps most alarmingly, recent college graduates are having a harder time finding work. Between 1990 and 2018, it was almost unheard-of for the unemployment rate of recent college graduates to exceed the country’s overall rate. But that has been the case for five straight years now.
It appears that the white-collar job market will continue to soften this year. And almost all of these problems precede the impact of artificial intelligence, which is still in the early stages of cannibalizing human labor.
As a result, poll after poll shows that college graduates are unusually dour. In surveys by the University of Michigan dating back to the 1960s, the college educated had never been more downbeat about economic conditions than over the past four years. Gallup recently found that the portion of college graduates who thought it was a good time to find a “quality job” was a mere 19 percent, down from over 70 percent in 2022.
Of course, the economic turmoil of the last decade or two has taken a toll on millions of Americans. Most of them lacked degrees, and many fared even worse financially than the college educated.
But for young college graduates, extended bouts of unemployment, or long periods stuck in a low-paying job that didn’t make use of their degrees, upended the entire picture of adulthood they had been taught to expect. In effect, a gap has opened up between the life that many graduates believed they had been promised and their actual prospects. And they’re seething about it.
The College Admissions Arms Race
For people in their 20s and early 30s, those expectations
were forged as early as elementary school, when “college for all” became a
national obsession — the way every American could achieve middle-class
affluence.
One of the country’s largest charter school networks, KIPP, helped popularize the mantra “College starts in kindergarten” after it was founded in 1994, not long before this cohort was in fact entering kindergarten.
Presidents reminded families that “the return on a college investment” was nearly double that of the stock market (Bill Clinton) and that college was no longer a luxury but an “economic imperative” (Barack Obama).
With an eye toward future college enrollment, students slogged through longer school days and labored over more homework. One scholar found that the average amount of time that younger children in elementary school spent studying at home increased roughly threefold between 1981 and 2003.
In high school, when it was time for actual college prep, as opposed to just the preparation for the prep, they stuffed their résumés full of university-level classes. The number of students taking Advanced Placement courses grew tenfold from the 1980s to the early 2010s, as the author Malcolm Harris has noted. At Edina High School, in an upper-middle-class suburb of Minneapolis, the now-34-year-old Teddy Hoffman took more than half a dozen A.P. classes before being admitted to Grinnell College in Iowa. It was a fairly common course load for someone who aspired to attend a competitive college.
And it wasn’t just affluent white students who became foot soldiers in the college admissions arms race. At the Baltimore County high school that Chaya Barrett, now 32, attended, students were tracked into classes where they studied vocabulary words and took practice SATs so that no manner of test question would faze them.
In this relentless race to the college quad, money was no
object. Dylan Burton, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, already had a lot of
college credit when they enrolled in the video game design program at the
University of Texas at Dallas in 2017. It would still cost them nearly $70,000
over two and a half years to earn their bachelor’s degree, after room and
board. But they had wanted to make video games since childhood, and the
industry was exploding in popularity and revenue.
So millions of people like Mr. Hoffman and Ms. Barrett and
Mx. Burton applied for scholarships and part-time jobs, and took out loans to
cover the difference. Mx. Burton borrowed the full amount. For several years
these students juggled finals and term papers and the night shift at the dining
hall or the weekend shift at the mall.
And then, once they graduated, many found themselves with
tens of thousands of dollars in loans, and no path to a job in line with their
credentials.
(to be continued by part 2)
Translation
大學畢業生為何感到被出賣（1/3）
他們的憤怒遠不止於近期失業率的上升和人工智能迫在眉睫的威脅
左翼和右翼的政治觀察家對於Zohran Mamdani是否能勝任紐約市長一職持有截然不同的看法。但他們一致認同的是，為什麼這麼多年輕的大學畢業生支持這位自稱為民主社會主義者的人。
正如創投家、特朗普的支持者Peter Thiel在去年秋季大選後接受《自由報》採訪時所說：太多人大學畢業後拿著毫無用處的學位，背負著巨額債務，而且幾乎沒有機會擁有自己的房子。畢業生們把Mamdani視為解決這些問題的方案。Mamdani先生說 “如果你把年輕人無產階級化” ， “他們最終變成共產主義者，你也不應該感到驚訝。”
至少在新近大學畢業生面臨的經濟挑戰方面，他的說法不無道理。在過去幾十年裡，學生債務不斷攀升，而住房對美國年輕人來說也越來越難以負擔，尤其是在紐約和舊金山等高房價地區。
或許最令人擔憂的是，新近大學畢業生找工作越來越難。 1990年至2018年間，新近大學畢業生的失業率幾乎從未超過全國平均失業率。但這超過情況已經連續五年出現了。
看來，今年白領就業市場也將持續疲軟。而且，幾乎所有這些問題都發生在人工智能的影響之前，人工智能目前仍處於蠶食人類勞動力的早期階段。
因此，一項又一項的民調顯示，大學畢業生異常沮喪。密西根大學自上世紀60年代以來進行的調查顯示，受過大學教育的人對經濟情勢的悲觀情緒從未像過去四年那樣高漲。蓋洛普最近的調查發現，認為現在是找到「好工作」的好時機的大學畢業生僅佔19%，遠低於2022年的70%以上。
當然，過去一二十年的經濟動盪給數百萬美國人帶來了沉重打擊。他們中的大多數人沒有大學學位，許多人的經濟狀況甚至比受過大學教育的人還要糟糕。
但對於年輕的大學畢業生來說，長期失業或長期從事低薪且無法發揮其專業技能的工作，徹底顛覆了他們原本對成年生活的預期。事實上，許多畢業生曾經憧憬的生活與現實之間出現了巨大的鴻溝。他們對此感到憤怒不已。
爭取大學錄取的軍備競賽
對二、三十歲的年輕人來說，這憧憬早在小學時期就已經形成。 當「全民上大學」成為一種全國性的執着 - 這是每個美國人實現中產階級富裕的途徑。
該國最大的特許學校網絡之一 KIPP，在 1994 年成立後，幫助推廣「大學從幼稚園開始」的口號，不久之後，這群體實際上就進入了幼稚園。
總統們不斷提醒家長，「大學投資的回報」幾乎是股市的兩倍（克林頓），而大學不再是奢侈品，而是「經濟必需品」（奧巴馬）。
為了將來能上大學，學生們每天上課時間更長，作業也更多。一位學者發現，1981年至2003年間，小學生在家學習的平均時間增加了近三倍。
到了高中，為考入大學做準備真正開始, 而非只為考入大學的預科做準備，他們在履歷上大量堆滿了已讀了的大學水平課程。正如作家Malcolm Harris所指出的，從20世紀80年代到21世紀10年代初，選修大學先修課程（AP課程）的學生人數增加了十倍。現年34歲的Teddy Hoffman就讀於明尼阿波利斯郊區中上階層的Edina高中，在被愛荷華州的Grinnell學院錄取之前，他選修了六門以上的AP課程。對於渴望進入競爭激烈的大學的學生來說，這樣的課程量安排相當普遍。
而且，並非只有富裕的白人學生才會成為這場大學錄取軍備競賽的參戰的士兵。現年32歲的Chaya Barrett曾就讀於Baltimore縣的一所高中。在那裡，學生們被分班學習詞彙，並進行SAT模擬考試，以確保任何考題都難不倒他們。
後來畢業於馬裡蘭州的Towson大學的Barrett女士說道:「學校的口號是：『我們希望你們都能上大學』」 ;「『我們是一所黑人學生佔多數的學校。我們的大學錄取率很高，我們希望保持這個優勢』 」。
在這場衝向大學校園的殘酷競爭中，金錢不被計較。使用中性代名的Dylan Burton君在2017年進入Texas大學達拉斯分校的電子遊戲設計專業學習時，已經積累了相當多的大學學分。即便如此，扣除食宿費用後，他們仍需花費近7萬美元，歷時兩年半才能獲得學士學位。他們從小就夢想製作電子遊戲，而當時該行業的受歡迎程度和收入都呈爆炸式增長。
因此，有像Hoffman先生、Barrett女士和Burton君這樣的數百萬學生去申請獎學金、兼職工作，並去貸款來應付其餘的開支。Burton君甚至貸款支付了全部費用。在接下來的幾年裡，這些學生一邊忙於期末考、學期論文，一邊還要在食堂當夜班或在商場當週末班。
畢業後，許多人發現自己背負著數萬美元的貸款，卻找不到與自身資歷相符的工作。
（見第二部分繼續）
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