Washington Monthly - September/October 2021 - 18

WHY CONSERVATIVES
HATE COLLEGE
It's not just anti-intellectualism. It's also about class.
By Kevin Carey
T
here was a room in my high school where they kept the
chopped-up carcass of an old car. You could take the engine
apart and put it back together, or slice pieces off
the door with a saw that made orange sparks fly. It was a dirty,
greasy place in a building where most of the kids wore tieddyed
Grateful Dead T-shirts or early J.Crew.
I rarely went there. Not because I didn't like engines and
sparks. I grew up watching my father, an electrical engineer
by training, work with a soldering iron and a table saw in our
garage. No, I stayed away-was, for all intents and purposes,
kept away-because that wasn't where people who were going
to college were supposed to be.
We lived in the prosperous suburbs of a decaying city in
the postindustrial Northeast. The giant conglomerate my father
worked for had stopped manufacturing things in town
and built an R&D park nearby where they invented things
that were manufactured somewhere else. The whole apparatus
of local government, from municipal boundaries to tax
18 September/October 2021
rates to deployment of police, was built to funnel money into
the suburban school system, where the children of the R&D
park employees prepared to follow their parents into one of
the good engineering schools or the Ivy League. Almost everyone
was white. The room with the old car was for the few kids
from the city who accidentally ended up on the wrong side of
the school district line.
In the decades that followed, America transformed itself
into a continent-size version of my hometown. College
graduates flourished while everyone else stagnated or fell behind.
People were increasingly segregated by class, geography,
and ideology. Higher education became a political fault line,
particularly during the Trump years, when college-educated
white suburbanites surged into the Democratic Party while
white people without degrees ran toward the Republicans.
This realignment, which is far from complete, leaves colleges
and universities in a dangerous position. The strong bipartisan
commitment to affordable public higher education is
Amy Swan

Washington Monthly - September/October 2021

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