The degree is the divide

When midterm votes are counted on Nov. 3, few lines in the exit polls will have moved as far in 20 years as the one drawn by a four-year degree. In 2004, voters with a bachelor’s degree split evenly between Bush and Kerry, while voters without one favored Bush by 6 points. In 2024, the two groups were 27 points apart. The parties did not discover that divide. It was manufactured over the course of 60 years by the institutions that made the degree the price of admission to respectable adult life, and whichever party wins on Nov. 3 inherits it intact.Pew has tracked voters’ party identification since 1990. In 1994, voters with a four-year degree favored Republicans by 15 points, and voters without one were split. By 2004, both groups sat within 4 points of even. In 2008, both leaned Democratic. Then they parted. By 2023, they were 19 points apart, the sign reversed from 1994. The ballots agree. In midterm exit polls, the gap was roughly zero in 2006 and 2010, 5 points in 2014, 20 in 2018, and 22 in 2022. Recommended Stories The credentialed explanation flatters the credentialed: Education changes how people think, so the half that never finished college votes differently because it never learned what college teaches. It fails twice. Those who complete a degree differed from those who do not before either set foot on a campus, and the degree sorts those differences far more than it creates them. And it fails on the series itself: The half who never attended moved the other way, and nothing was taught to them. What changed after 2004 was less what the university teaches than what the credential had come to mean. The share of American adults with a bachelor’s degree was 8% in 1960, 17% in 1980, 26% in 2000, and 38% today. Somewhere past a third, a credential stops being a distinction and becomes a threshold. A society that makes the degree the threshold of respectable adult life has told the larger half of its people that their work is second-tier, in every voice it owns: in hiring software that screens for the degree before a human reads the application, in a press that staffs itself from the credentialed half and calls the other half low-information, and in elite liberal arts colleges whose faculties register Democratic over Republican by better than 10 to 1. Told long enough that it is second-tier, a population votes as a bloc against whoever did the telling. The university did not need to convert a single student. It needed only to sort, to certify, and to say which side of the line was respectable.STOP TELLING VOTERS CRIME IS DOWN WHEN THEIR LOCAL STORES ARE BOARDED UPThe sort is now the coalition. One party’s base is the credentialed half, and its signature higher-education policy, $183 billion of loan forgiveness by executive action, was a transfer to that half, paid for in part by the half that was told it had failed. The other party’s base is the uncredentialed half, and it has learned to win by naming the divide without closing it. Neither has a structural reason to end an arrangement that delivers its voters, which is why the gap has widened under both.What closes it is not a result on Nov. 3 but the removal of the threshold. More than 20 states, under governors of both parties, have dropped the degree requirement from state jobs since 2022. Beginning in 2027, Washington will measure whether a program’s graduates out-earn a high school graduate and cut off federal loans to programs whose graduates do not. These are the first admissions, in policy rather than rhetoric, that the credential was never the thing it certified. The voting booth is the last institution in American life that does not ask for a degree. On Nov. 3, the half of the country that was told it failed will use it, the institutions that drew the line will call the result a crisis of democracy, and it will be nothing of the kind. It will be a bill coming due.Jeffrey Janik is the author of University for All: A Societal Disaster.