大學畢業生為何感到被出賣（2/3）

Recently the New York Times reported the following;

Why College Graduates Feel Betrayed (2/3)

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

(continue from part 1)

The Baristas With Degrees

While this generation was focused on earning degrees, the job market was worsening — slowly at first, then all at once. According to a paper by the Berkeley economist Jesse Rothstein, recent graduates started doing significantly worse than older graduates around 2005, then fell much further behind during the Great Recession. The employment rate for recent graduates had yet to fully recover by the Covid-19 pandemic, which upended the job market all over again.

At the highest altitude, the problem was that the economy was producing more graduates but not as many of the jobs they traditionally held. Some economists argue that software had begun to eliminate jobs in fields like financial services and merchandise planning well before the rise of generative A.I.

On average, college graduates still earned a large premium over people with only a high school diploma. But the averages concealed the fact that some graduates were doing very well — like people who worked on Wall Street and in Big Tech — while many others were falling behind.

For decades, many young graduates had earned good money even if their jobs didn’t require a degree, according to researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. But many of those roles — like insurance agent and human resource worker — appeared to start paying less or disappearing in the 2000s and never recovered. A larger portion of these overqualified graduates ended up in jobs that didn’t pay well.

After earning his degree from Grinnell in 2014 and spending a year abroad on a prestigious Watson Fellowship, Mr. Hoffman became a barista at Starbucks. The idea was to buy time while he settled on a career path. (He had studied English and theater.) But seven years later, he was still at Starbucks — partly because the pandemic had delayed his professional plans. With a child on the way and money getting tight, he and his wife applied for temporary public assistance. The state rejected their application.

Mx. Burton, who in college had led a team that made a playable video game called KaiJr, struggled to find work as a designer after graduating in 2019. It turned out that designing video games, notwithstanding the university’s optimistic marketing material, was more akin to becoming a Hollywood actor than a computer programmer: The field could support only a small fraction of the millions of people eager to enter it. Mx. Burton eventually took a much more tedious job testing video games for glitches, for $15 an hour.

“My student loans were about to kick in, and I don’t have a job yet,” Mx. Burton said. “You have to not be picky anymore.”

As Ms. Barrett prepared to graduate with a degree in communications from Towson in 2018, she applied for dozens of jobs in fields like marketing and professional training at the likes of Accenture, Amazon and Stanley Black & Decker. After getting no bites, and with roughly $50,000 in debt, she went full time at the Apple Store where she had worked in college. The store often seduced college graduates with job titles like “Genius” and “Expert,” along with its generous benefits, but Ms. Barrett had still hoped for more.

Class Confidence

In his 2000 book, “Bobos in Paradise,” David Brooks identified a new upper class of bourgeois bohemians — a demographic of techies, financiers and tenured professors who had the earning power and ideology of the bourgeois but the tastes and habits of bohemians. They favored balanced budgets and free trade. They went on expensive ski vacations and kept second homes. But they decorated them with reclaimed-wood furniture and grew heirloom produce in the backyard.

By the early 2020s, young college-educated adults were in some sense the mirror image of Mr. Brooks’s Bobos. They were often bourgeois in their tastes. They cradled sleek smartphones and watched prestige TV on demand. But the previous decade and a half had bequeathed them the bank accounts — and the politics — of the proletariat.

Polling by the Pew Research Center showed that the portion of college graduates with positive views of socialism roughly doubled during the 2010s, to over 40 percent. The shift helped fuel the rise of politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — left-wing figures who built mass appeal.

The ideology of these disaffected college graduates didn’t end with economics. At the most fundamental level, their politics elevated the underdog. They were more likely than non-graduates to call out the harassers of women and gay and transgender people. They worried about racism and climate change, were growing skeptical of law enforcement and believed the Iraq war had been a mistake.

Perhaps the most visible expression of this ideology came at work, where many college graduates increasingly saw themselves as the underdog. They began to unionize at previously nonunion workplaces, like video game studios, architecture firms and banks. In 2023, hundreds of doctors in Minnesota and Wisconsin, fed up with mergers and acquisitions that had made them feel like cogs in the medical-­industrial complex, formed what was the largest union of private-sector physicians in the country.

And it was the college graduates stuck in jobs that didn’t require a degree who seemed most determined to take on their employers. College had taught them to question. It had instilled in them what the sociologist Ruth Milkman called “class confidence” — a sense of agency that comes from knowing how to work the system, a broader perspective than the day-to-day grind.

But at the cash register, with the manager looking on, they had to smile and take whatever the customer gave them.

“I have been pretty hard on myself thinking the exhaustion was just me having an attitude problem,” Mr. Hoffman wrote to a friend during his second year at Starbucks. “But there are just too many human interactions in which you aren’t recognized as a human.” He was darkly amused by a customer who, referring to the name displayed on his apron, remarked: “I didn’t know you guys had names!”

Mr. Hoffman helped organize his store in Chicago, one of more than 600 that would unionize beginning in 2021, after years of perceived indignities.

“If you’re going to be disrespected like this,” he told me, “you have to have a bigger piece of the pie.”

(to be continued in part 3)

Translation

大學畢業生為何感到被出賣（2/3）

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

2026年3月27日

（接第一部分）

擁有學位的咖啡師

當這一代人專注於獲得學位時，就業市場卻在惡化 - 起初緩慢，隨後急劇惡化。根據Berkeley經濟學家Jesse Rothstein的一篇論文，新近畢業生的就業狀況從2005年左右開始明顯遜於之前畢業生，然後在經濟大衰退期間進一步落後。新近畢業生的就業率尚未完全從新冠疫情爆發後恢復，疫情再一次顛覆了就業市場。

在最高的角度來看，問題在於經濟培養了更多畢業生，但傳統上他們所從事的工作卻沒有相應增加。一些經濟學家認為，早在生成式人工智能興起之前，軟件就已經開始取代金融服務和商品規劃等領域的工作。

平均而言，大學畢業生的收入仍然比只有高中學歷的人高出許多。但平均收入掩蓋了一個事實：有些畢業生發展得非常好 - 例如在華爾街和大型科技公司工作的人 - 而許多其他畢業生則落後了。

紐約聯邦儲備銀行的研究人員指出，幾十年來，許多年輕畢業生即使從事不需要大學學位的工作也能獲得不錯的收入。但許多這類工作 - 例如保險代理人和人力資源管理員 - 在21世紀初似乎開始降薪甚至消失，而且再也沒有恢復。在這些高學歷畢業生中，很大一部分最終從事了收入不高的工作。

Hoffman先生在2014年從Grinnell學院畢業後，憑藉著名的華生獎學金 (Watson Fellowship) 在海外學習了一年。畢業後，他成為星巴克的咖啡師。他的想法是利用這段時間尋找職業方向。 （他曾學習英語和戲劇。）但七年過去了，他仍然在星巴克工作 - 部分原因是疫情打亂了他的職業規劃。由於妻子即將為人父，經濟拮据，他和妻子申請了臨時公共援助。但州政府拒絕了他們的申請。

Burton君在大學期間曾帶領團隊製作了一款名為KaiJr的可玩電子遊戲。 2019年畢業後，他卻難以找到遊戲設計師的工作。事實證明，儘管大學的宣傳資料樂觀，但遊戲設計更像是成為好萊塢演員，而不是一名程式設計師：這個領域只能容納數百萬渴望進入其中的人中的一小部分。最終，Burton君找到了一份枯燥乏味的測試遊戲是否存在漏洞的工作，時薪15美元。

Burton君說: “我的學生貸款馬上就要開始還了，但我還沒找到工作”; “你不能再挑剔了。”

當Barrett女士2018年即將從Towson大學獲得傳播學學位時，她向Accenture, Amazon  和Stanley Black & Decker等公司投遞了數十份市場營銷和職業培訓方面的工作申請。在沒有反應之後，在背負著近5萬美元債務的情況下，她回到了大學時打工的蘋果專賣店全職工作。這家店經常用“天才”、“專家”之類的職位頭銜以及優厚的福利來吸引大學畢業生，但Barrett女士仍然抱有更大的期望。

階級自信

在2000年出版的《天堂裡的波波族》一書中，David Brooks提出了一個新的資產階級之上層的波西米亞人(bohemians) - 即一群科技從業者、金融家和終身教授，他們擁有資產階級的收入和意識形態，卻有著波西米亞人的品味和習慣。他們支持預算平衡和自由貿易，去昂貴的滑雪度假，並擁有第二居所。但他們用回收的木製家具裝飾，並在後院種植傳家寶級的農作物。

到了2020年代初期，受過大學教育的年輕人在某種程度上成了Brooks先生筆下「波波族」的再現。他們的品味往往帶有資產階級色彩，他們擁有時尚的智慧型手機，也喜歡點播觀看高級電視節目。過去十五年的歲月已經把無產階級原來擁有的銀行帳戶 - 和政治權力 - 送贈給了他們。

Pew研究中心的民調顯示，2010年代，對社會主義持正面態度的大學畢業生比例幾乎翻了一番，超過40%。這一轉變助長了Bernie Sanders和Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez等左翼政治人物的崛起 - 他們贏得了廣泛的民眾支持。

這些心懷不滿的大學畢業生的意識形態並不局限於經濟領域。從根本上講，他們的政治理念是為弱勢群體發聲。與非大學​​畢業生相比，他們更傾向於譴責騷擾女性、同性戀者和跨性別者的行為。他們擔憂種族主義和氣候變化，並且對執法部門日益抱持懷疑態度。他們認為伊拉克戰爭是個錯誤。

這種意識形態最明顯的體現或許是在職場上，許多大學畢業生越來越覺得自己處於弱勢。他們開始在以前沒有工會的場所，例如電子遊戲工作室、建築事務所和銀行，組成工會。 2023年，明尼蘇達州和威斯康辛州的數百名醫生，厭倦了併購活動，因併購讓他們感覺自己只是醫療產業複合體中一顆螺絲釘，而組建了當時全美最大的私營醫生工會。

而那些困在不需要學位的工作上的大學畢業生，似乎最有決心挑戰他們的雇主。大學教會了他們質疑。向他們灌輸了社會學家Ruth Milkman所說的「階級自信」- 一種源自於懂得如何運作體制的自主感，一種超越日常瑣碎工作的更廣闊的視野。

但在收銀台之前，在經理的注視之下，他們不得不面帶微笑，接受顧客永遠是對的。

Hoffman先生在星巴克工作的第二年寫信給一位朋友說: 「我一直很自責，覺得疲憊只是因為我態度不好」。「但在太多的人際接觸中，你根本沒有被當人來看待」。一位顧客指著他圍裙上的名字說：「我都不知道你們是有名字的！」，讓他覺這略帶威脅的語氣好笑。

在經歷了多年感受到不尊重之後的Hoffman先生協助了芝加哥門市的員工組織工會。這家門市是600多家門市之一，於2021年開始組建工會。

他告訴我:“如果你將要遭受這樣的不尊重，那你就得要爭取更大的權益。”

（第三部分繼續）

Note:

1. The Thomas J. Watson Fellowship (托馬斯·J·華生獎學金) is a grant that enables graduating seniors to pursue a year of independent study outside the United States. The Fellowship provides graduates with a year to "explore with thoroughness a particular interest, test their aspirations and abilities, view their lives and American society in greater perspective and, concomitantly, develop a more informed sense of international concern." (Wikipedia)

2. Bobos in Paradise 《天堂裡的波波族》is a book written by David Brooks that explores the rise of the “bourgeois bohemians” class. It analyzes how this new class shapes culture, work, and consumption, revealing tensions between idealism and materialism in modern society while offering sharp, witty social commentary. The word bobo, Brooks' most famously used term, is an abbreviated form of the words bourgeois and bohemian, suggesting a fusion of two distinct social classes (the counter-cultural, hedonistic and artistic bohemian, and the white collar, capitalist bourgeois). (ChatGPT)

3. “Bohemians” (波希米亞人), in terms of cultural or lifestyle meaning, are those people who live an unconventional, artistic, or free-spirited lifestyle. Often associated with artists, writers, musicians, and creatives. They treasure creativity, individuality, and freedom over wealth or social norms. Historically linked to communities in cities like Paris in the 1800s. Example of Bohemians are someone who travels, makes art, and rejects a typical 9–5 lifestyle. (Chat GPT)