The warning signs were there two decades ago—long before ChatGPT, long before anyone worried about a robot taking their job. Around 2005, something quietly shifted in the American labor market. College degrees kept multiplying. Good jobs did not.
“This is a generation of people that was really given the hardest sell of any generation in history of why they need to go to college,” says Noam Scheiber, a New York Times labor reporter whose new book, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, chronicles the revolt brewing inside America’s credentialed workforce. “Everyone, from their parents and family members to the president, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton—talking about how in the 21st century, everyone’s got to go to college … And unfortunately, all of this was happening at the precise moment when a college degree was becoming less valuable than it had been in many decades.”
