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Politics > Government

Stop Government from Making Bets on the Future

College education worked, for a while. But now it seems that only a few jobs need a college education.

Christopher Chantrill | March 2, 2026

Michael Lind at UnHerd is wailing about the end of the upper middle class job, because AI. Back in the day, you got to be in the upper-middle-class with:

a well-paying job that requires a college diploma, preferably in a large, high-status institution, along with a trophy house in a prestigious neighborhood that functions both as a display room for fancy furniture and a speculative asset.

a well-paying job that requires a college diploma, preferably in a large, high-status institution, along with a trophy house in a prestigious neighborhood that functions both as a display room for fancy furniture and a speculative asset.

And the lower-middle-class in the 50s and 60s meant:

a decently-paid job that requires only a high school diploma or some additional training and sometimes a bachelor’s degree; a house that is productive[.]

a decently-paid job that requires only a high school diploma or some additional training and sometimes a bachelor’s degree; a house that is productive[.]

But then the experts decided that everyone should go to college:

And Americans listened. The number with a BA or higher has exploded from 16.2% in 1980 to 38.7% in 2024.

And Americans listened. The number with a BA or higher has exploded from 16.2% in 1980 to 38.7% in 2024.

How is that going? Not too well.

[We have] too many college graduates chasing too few well-paid professional jobs. In 2025, only 19.3% of job postings in the US required a bachelor’s degree or higher, at a time when those qualifications are possessed by around 40% of the population.

[We have] too many college graduates chasing too few well-paid professional jobs. In 2025, only 19.3% of job postings in the US required a bachelor’s degree or higher, at a time when those qualifications are possessed by around 40% of the population.

The result, of course, is all those Mamdani voters totally outraged that they can’t take their expensive degrees to New York City and live a life of abundance and affordability while sneering at the Trump voters.

How did we get here? With “politicians, corporate executives, nonprofit reformers, and self-interested academic bureaucrats” pouring money and grants into the Narrative that a college diploma was the royal road to “upward mobility.”

Thing is, this is just a teeny tiny example of the typical modus operandi of our glorious rulers for the last 200 years. Someone cranks up a propaganda machine and sells our betters on a cool idea. They write a law. They pour money, our money, into it. It’s going to change the world, just you wait.

And it seems to work, for a while.

Government childhood education worked, for a while. But now we have Randi Weingarten.

Wage-and-hour laws and worker rights worked for a while. But then unionized auto workers got wiped out by cheap imports.

Social Security worked for a while. But now it’s eating the budget.

Civil rights worked, for a while. But then we nuked the black family with welfare.

NASA worked for a while. But now we have Elon Musk and SpaceX while Artemis sits on the launch pad.

College education worked, for a while. But now it seems that only a few jobs need a college education.

Zoning worked, for a while. But now it is a corrupt system for rich liberals to play NIMBY on the rest of us.

Environmental cleanup worked, for a while. But now it is killing the planet with the Green New Scam.

You and I know that the problem is quite simple. In “the knowledge problem” Hayek

argues that efficient economic planning is impossible for a central authority because necessary information -- dispersed, subjective, and local knowledge -- cannot be concentrated in one mind.

argues that efficient economic planning is impossible for a central authority because necessary information -- dispersed, subjective, and local knowledge -- cannot be concentrated in one mind.

I wonder what it would take to convince our liberal friends that their “one mind” plans tend to make things worse. We are talking about fans of President Obama, famous for prefacing every remark with “My Plan is.”

Truth is that nothing will convince our liberal friends to stop reducing human life to a government plan. Their faith is that progressive politics is the way to end injustice and poverty and all the ills of mankind. The only thing that will convince them is the collapse of their regime. And even then, in hopeless exile, as they gather together in faded cafés, they will be constructing Plans and organizing Mostly Peaceful Protests to reverse the horrors and right the wrongs of the new regime.

But back to Michael Lind and the two middle classes and the failure of the college-for-everyone program.

Who would have imagined that giving everyone student loans to go to college would result in a generation of college graduates burdened by crushing loan payments and a job market that does not reward their college degrees?

I mean, the experts all agreed that making college accessible to all was a no brainer, and the only just thing to do.

What is the lesson from all this?

I think it is fairly simple. We Americans have a national institution for making bets on the future. It is called the stock market, and nobody knows anything until it’s all over. I remember wondering about Amazon in 2000 when it was drenched in debt and not making a profit. Today the price is 250 times the price in 2000. I remember wondering about the kids buying iPods in the early 2000s. Today Apple’s stock is 500 times the price in the early 2000s.

You think that any politician or activist or professor or bureaucrat would have done better?

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

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