What are the key takeaways from this The Daily (NYT) episode?

Key insights include: **The college degree devaluation cycle:** College degree attainment tripled from 10% of Americans in 1970 to 30% by 2010, flooding the market and diluting degree value. For-profit and open-admission universities expanded to meet demand, but graduates of non-selective institutions often saw costs exceed benefits, generating widespread economic disappointment across an entire generation.; **Student debt as a political catalyst:** Congress raised federal student borrowing limits multiple times between the early 1990s and 2009, causing total student debt to roughly double by 2020. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, graduates carrying this debt watched the government bail out Wall Street institutions while offering no equivalent relief to indebted individuals, radicalizing their political outlook.; **Corporate consolidation reduces worker leverage:** Industry mergers in healthcare, tech, and retail reduced the number of competing employers, suppressing wages for nurses, pharmacists, and back-office workers. Even high-earning doctors at consolidated hospital systems reported feeling micromanaged by non-medical MBAs, eroding professional autonomy and pushing white-collar workers toward labor-identifying political positions.

What did Noam Scheiber discuss on The Daily (NYT)?

NYT reporter Noam Scheiber traces how college graduates shifted from voting Republican by double-digit margins in the 1980s to supporting Kamala Harris by 15 points in 2024, driven by student debt, wage stagnation, the 2008 financial crisis, and corporate consolidation across healthcare and tech industries. Key topics include: **The college degree devaluation cycle:** College degree attainment tripled from 10% of Americans in 1970 to 30% by 2010, flooding the market and diluting degree value. For-profit and open-admission universities expanded to meet demand, but graduates of non-selective institutions often saw costs exceed benefits, generating widespread economic disappointment across an entire generation.; **Student debt as a political catalyst:** Congress raised federal student borrowing limits multiple times between the early 1990s and 2009, causing total student debt to roughly double by 2020. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, graduates carrying this debt watched the government bail out Wall Street institutions while offering no equivalent relief to indebted individuals, radicalizing their political outlook..

How long is this episode of The Daily (NYT)?

This episode is 37 minutes long. SignalCast provides an AI-generated summary so you can get the key insights in about 3 minutes.

The Daily (NYT)

The Young Economic Populists Reshaping the Left

June 11, 2026

37 min episode · 2 min read

Noam Scheiber

Episode

37 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Health & Wellness, Personal Finance, Investing

AI-Generated Summary

Published Jun 11, 2026

Key Takeaways

✓The college degree devaluation cycle: College degree attainment tripled from 10% of Americans in 1970 to 30% by 2010, flooding the market and diluting degree value. For-profit and open-admission universities expanded to meet demand, but graduates of non-selective institutions often saw costs exceed benefits, generating widespread economic disappointment across an entire generation.
✓Student debt as a political catalyst: Congress raised federal student borrowing limits multiple times between the early 1990s and 2009, causing total student debt to roughly double by 2020. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, graduates carrying this debt watched the government bail out Wall Street institutions while offering no equivalent relief to indebted individuals, radicalizing their political outlook.
✓Corporate consolidation reduces worker leverage: Industry mergers in healthcare, tech, and retail reduced the number of competing employers, suppressing wages for nurses, pharmacists, and back-office workers. Even high-earning doctors at consolidated hospital systems reported feeling micromanaged by non-medical MBAs, eroding professional autonomy and pushing white-collar workers toward labor-identifying political positions.
✓The diploma divide on economics is narrowing: Despite a visible partisan split by education level since 2012, college graduates and non-graduates have actually converged on core economic positions — taxing the wealthy, supporting unions, and expanding government healthcare — over the past two decades. Elections fought on cultural issues obscure this underlying economic alignment between the two groups.
✓AI is accelerating white-collar radicalization: Tech layoffs tied to AI adoption are generating measurable anger among workers who previously trusted their employers. As companies worth hundreds of billions concentrate AI gains among founders and owners while cutting tens of thousands of employees, the perceived gap between the 1% and everyone else widens, likely intensifying left-populist political identity among college-educated workers.

What It Covers

NYT reporter Noam Scheiber traces how college graduates shifted from voting Republican by double-digit margins in the 1980s to supporting Kamala Harris by 15 points in 2024, driven by student debt, wage stagnation, the 2008 financial crisis, and corporate consolidation across healthcare and tech industries.

Key Questions Answered

•The college degree devaluation cycle: College degree attainment tripled from 10% of Americans in 1970 to 30% by 2010, flooding the market and diluting degree value. For-profit and open-admission universities expanded to meet demand, but graduates of non-selective institutions often saw costs exceed benefits, generating widespread economic disappointment across an entire generation.
•Student debt as a political catalyst: Congress raised federal student borrowing limits multiple times between the early 1990s and 2009, causing total student debt to roughly double by 2020. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, graduates carrying this debt watched the government bail out Wall Street institutions while offering no equivalent relief to indebted individuals, radicalizing their political outlook.
•Corporate consolidation reduces worker leverage: Industry mergers in healthcare, tech, and retail reduced the number of competing employers, suppressing wages for nurses, pharmacists, and back-office workers. Even high-earning doctors at consolidated hospital systems reported feeling micromanaged by non-medical MBAs, eroding professional autonomy and pushing white-collar workers toward labor-identifying political positions.
•The diploma divide on economics is narrowing: Despite a visible partisan split by education level since 2012, college graduates and non-graduates have actually converged on core economic positions — taxing the wealthy, supporting unions, and expanding government healthcare — over the past two decades. Elections fought on cultural issues obscure this underlying economic alignment between the two groups.
•AI is accelerating white-collar radicalization: Tech layoffs tied to AI adoption are generating measurable anger among workers who previously trusted their employers. As companies worth hundreds of billions concentrate AI gains among founders and owners while cutting tens of thousands of employees, the perceived gap between the 1% and everyone else widens, likely intensifying left-populist political identity among college-educated workers.

Notable Moment

Scheiber reveals that roughly three-quarters of Occupy Wall Street participants were college graduates, and that student debt became a central grievance of the movement — marking the precise moment this demographic stopped identifying as future management and began identifying as exploited workers.

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Episode Transcript

With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep. Even on weekends. It's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capital1.com/bankguy. Capital One, n a, member FDIC. From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroev. This is The Daily. As Democrats wrestle over the direction of their party, a new crop of progressive candidates has made the case that the political future is economic populism. Among the biggest supporters of that platform are college graduates who used to lean right politically, but over the last few decades have moved increasingly to the left. Today, my colleague Noam Scheiber explains the economic forces that have left many college grads deeply indebted, underpaid, and angry, and how their unmet expectations are reshaping class politics in America. It's Thursday, June 11. Noam, to set the stakes of the conversation that we're about to have, can you describe the political transformation of college graduates that you've just written a book about and that you've been reporting on for years now? Yeah. So I think we sometimes forget that as recently as the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, college grads were actually pretty conservative politically. In the nineteen eighties, for example, they tended to vote Republican by double digit margins, at least on the presidential level. They used to favor things like smaller government, lower taxes, fewer regulations. And a lot of this, I think, was driven by the fact that college educated workers tended to see themselves as kind of management adjacent. Mhmm. They tended to expect that their lives would become much more affluent in the future. So this is very consistent with their worldview. If you're an affluent person and you run a business or you're an executive, you tend to want the government to stay out of your way. But if you fast forward a few decades, you really start to get a different picture. And if you look at the most recent election, you see that college grads actually shift really far in the other direction. They end up supporting Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by about a 15 margin. Right. And on the specific economic issues like government and taxes and regulation, they've actually moved much further to the left, much closer to people without a degree than they were in the nineteen eighties. And so what explains that? What is driving that transformation? Well, there are a number of factors that people point to when trying to explain this. But in my book, I focus first and foremost on economics. A lot of people who went to college were really sold on this idea that it would be …

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