Degrees of Discontent: How Higher Education Created a Downwardly Mobile Elite
America has produced more credentialed elites than the economy has room for—and the DSA is where the surplus is landing
In February 2010, evolutionary biologist and complexity scientist Peter Turchin published an essay in Nature arguing that the United States and Western Europe were headed toward a period of political instability.
He pointed to widening inequality, stagnant wages, exploding public debt, and an overproduction of college graduates with advanced degrees.
These trends, Turchin argued, had historically preceded periods of political turmoil.
As academics often do, many challenged his theory of history and questioned his methods; the New Statesman ran a piece in June 2023 dismissing Turchin’s prophecies as “empty.”
But Nate Silver’s recent essay, “The DSA Sweet Spot: Highly Educated, Downwardly Mobile,” brings renewed attention to Turchin’s warning about college graduate overproduction, or elite overproduction: the idea that societies become unstable when they produce more highly credentialed elites than there are elite positions for them to occupy.
Silver finds that the most reliably Democratic voting bloc in America consists of voters with postgraduate degrees earning between $30,000 and $60,000 a year. He notes that this is “very much also the sweet spot for the DSA” (Democratic Socialists of America).
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Not every DSA proposal is outrageous. Some readers, for example, may sympathize with its call to scale back military spending. Others may find its emphasis on strengthening protections for the working class appealing, a concern that J.D. Vance recently discussed with Bishop Robert Barron. But the DSA is no ordinary progressive advocacy group. It calls for replacing capitalism with democratic socialism, abolishing prisons, abolishing the U.S. Senate and the presidency, nationalizing major corporations, and defunding or dismantling immigration enforcement.
The organization’s own membership survey, Silver notes, found that 80 percent of members age 25 or older hold at least a bachelor’s degree, while 45 percent report household incomes below $60,000—a modest income almost anywhere in the country and an especially difficult one to live on in high-cost metropolitan areas.
Those attracted to the DSA appear to be people whose credentials are misaligned with their economic outcomes. Its members are disproportionately rich in credentials yet occupy positions that fall short of the status and financial success their credentials were expected to deliver.
You can read Silver’s essay and make your own inferences, but what I infer from the data is that Turchin was right.
Rather than producing a prosperous professional class, American higher education has produced more graduates with elite aspirations than the economy has elite careers to offer. The result is a growing class of frustrated members of an overproduced elite.
Students were promised prestige, upward mobility, and financial security. But college graduates are instead discovering that a degree is no guarantee of any of the three.
My colleague Glenn Ricketts reminded me that concerns about an emerging credentialed elite long predate Turchin. Thinkers such as James Burnham and Joseph Schumpeter warned of the rise of a technocratic class decades ago. But, as Glenn put it to me, “I think it’s even more a question of what the elites are being taught.” He points to the influence of the Frankfurt School, the Kinsey Report, and C. Wright Mills as reminders that universities have not merely overproduced credentialed graduates but have also inculcated a deeply critical view of capitalism and American institutions.
I am not surprised that many college graduates have become politically disillusioned. I’ve reported on this workforce pipeline problem before, and my colleague Mason Goad wrote an extended essay about how this same cohort of over-credentialed graduates is radicalizing on campus.
However destructive the DSA’s politics, organizations like it offer disillusioned graduates both an explanation for why the promises made to them went unfulfilled and a movement through which to express their frustration.
To redistribute a familiar term for this letter, many graduates have become the “have-nots.” I find little in Silver’s essay to suggest that these have-nots will become a stabilizing force in American politics.
Jared Gould is the Managing Editor of Minding the Campus. This essay can be found at Minding the Campus. It first appeared in Gould’s weekly newsletter, Top of Mind.
Minding the Campus is a project of the National Association of Scholars, a non-profit that “upholds the standards of a liberal arts education that fosters intellectual freedom, searches for the truth, and promotes virtuous citizenship.”
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The College and University Professional Association for Human Resources reports that "Across U.S. colleges and universities, there are more than 650,000 adjunct faculty. In 2024-25, adjuncts accounted for approximately 40% of the higher education faculty workforce. The median pay per credit hour for adjuncts is $1,166, with the median total pay for an academic term being $4,998.5 This low pay is especially notable considering the education level of adjuncts, as many colleges and universities require an advanced degree for these positions. In addition to low pay, adjuncts are seldom offered retirement savings plans by their college or university,6 and they are typically ineligible to receive healthcare benefits from their institution.7 In 2024-25, only 37% of institutions offered health benefits to their adjunct faculty."
If a DSA member is typically well-credentialed yet underemployed, the college adjunct professor would fit the profile almost exactly.
DSA = Definitely Seems Asinine.
Danny Rensch's memoir "Dark Squares" can predict what happens when a socialist/communist utopia is tried out on a small scale in the middle of the US. He lived it in his childhood through a cult. Blurbs say it's a religious cult, but it was straight up communism in Tonto Village, AZ. It's a great read.
Of course, none of the DSA members will read it because he is probably deemed a capitalist with white male privilege. Today, the cult leaders went completely broke, lower members started in-fighting and wondering why the leaders had second homes at the beach while they lived in poverty and owned nothing in their name after years of tithing to the Collective.