The college-educated are not ruining America

However, there is evidence that the non-college educated are content to keep it that way. Hastings College of the Law Prof. Joan Williams, author of “White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America,” explained to the Northwest Labor Press why many working-class families actively shun college: “Kids from professional families go away to college and they have an instant national network consisting of other elite kids. … Blue-collar kids … have very dense, very local, very rooted networks of people who are family, friends that they’ve known forever [who] provide things that more privileged people buy, such as good child care or help with home repair. … [T]he family [expects] the kids will stay close to the home, not only so grandma can help with child care but so that the kids can help when grandma gets older. The social support that professional and managerial kids get when they move far from home often does not exist for blue collar kids.”

Williams also notes that college is a bigger financial risk for working-class families, not because college doesn’t help graduates land lucrative work, but “because you may feel so culturally ill-at-ease and you may be so poorly prepared academically that you’re much more likely to drop out, in which case you’re going to be paying huge college debt on a high school graduate salary.” Her assessment of blue-collar attitudes is backed up by recent PRRI poll that found 54 percent of the white working class see college as a “risky gamble.”