The Disillusioned College Grads Turning to the Labor Movement

Starting in about 2005, something nearly unthinkable began to happen: The lifetime value of a college degree began to decline. Up until then, and really for quite a while afterward, a degree was considered a smart bet on a person’s future income and prospects. Possessing a college degree (any degree!) generally meant higher income. At the late date of 2013, Barack Obama called higher education an “economic imperative.”

Once upon a time, very few people got college degrees. About 6 percent of the population in 1950 had one (which itself, thanks to the GI Bill, was a remarkable high). College was, at some level, affordable, and by 2010 degree holders received a glorious 75 percent pay bump. And if you didn’t go to college, no sweat: Nondegree holders had plenty of options for work that paid OK, too—for instance, in skilled trades like electrical work or union jobs in hospitality.

Over the years, more and more people went to college, and today more than 50 percent of working-age adults have college degrees. Overall, they still make more money than people without college degrees. But after 2005, the ever-rising prospects for degree holders began to slouch. The job market for grads shrank, wages flatlined or backslid, and college got so expensive that the debt some people took on to get their degree almost permanently ate into their expected windfall. Degree holders had been promised the world, and a vaunted place in the professional or managerial class. Yet five years after graduation, only 55 percent of college graduates were employed in jobs that require a degree, according to a 2024 report. Many ended up working in the service industry. Caught in low-wage, often precarious jobs, some sought to form unions.

This is the basic story of decline told by Noam Scheiber in his new book, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class. The book expands on the early reporting Scheiber did on Starbucks Workers United at his day job as the workplace reporter at The New York Times. In Mutiny, Scheiber reports in depth on multiracial, cross-class organizing campaigns at Starbucks, Apple stores, video game design studios, and among screenwriters for television. These campaigns were not entirely composed of college-educated people, but many of their participants certainly fit the bill.

The story of a highly educated yet disillusioned generation has been told repeatedly since roughly 2011, when Occupy Wall Street gave voice to the frustration of a struggling mass of college debtors, unemployed degree holders, and others. They have formed a vocal and enthusiastic base of support for left populists from Bernie Sanders to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and have pushed for relief from crushing student loan repayments, as chronicled in works such as Ryann Liebenthal’s Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis. The workplace-organizing campaigns that Scheiber traces are particularly notable because, for generations, college-educated Americans did not tend to throw in their lot with unions. These efforts and their successes, he suggests, not only illuminate the changing fortunes of the college-educated; they also might open a new front to the labor movement.

Chaya Barrett, one of Scheiber’s central characters, has a story typical of her generation. Barrett, the daughter of two college graduates, grew up in Baltimore and attended Towson University. An Apple superfan since her tweens, in 2015 she began to work at the Apple store near her college. Like many people who enter the low-wage service industry in high school and college, she did not necessarily expect to stay in the sector forever. But Apple was slightly different from most retail jobs, in that it preached lofty ideals and hired workers for positions that didn’t require hard sales skills. When she asked if there would be sales goals and commissions, a manager replied the only goal was to make the customer feel “heard.”

It was almost as if Apple stores were made to absorb the precariously employed college graduates with few other options, offering them just enough prestige and high-minded ideals glazed with humanities-tinted language to distract from the reality that they were working in a mall. In a video advertising the opening of the first Apple store in Virginia in 2001, Steve Jobs brags that “literally half” the store was not devoted to sales but to learning. This was in the form of the Apple “Creatives,” who for the early period of the stores would teach one-on-one classes with customers about how to use their Apple products to make movies, produce music, and generally be creative. There were also the Apple Geniuses, who labored under images of Pablo Picasso and Amelia Earhart. Yes, they were simply tech support, but the company called them “Geniuses.” The motto, repeated in group meetings was, “We are here to enrich lives / To help dreamers become doers / To help passion expand human potential.”

“When Apple had first hired her in college, Chaya felt like she was joining a secret society and she couldn’t believe she was admitted,” Scheiber writes. And as she rose through the ranks, she was insulated from sales and worked as a “Creative” for many years, teaching classes. Even as she still had $50,000 in college debt and was living at home with mother, two sisters, and baby niece in Baltimore County, “Chaya hadn’t worried too much about take-home pay as long as her work felt elevated.”

But Apple was already in the process of de-elevating that work. Since Steve Jobs died in 2011 and Tim Cook ascended to the throne, Cook had been looking for ways to trim expenditures. He fixated on a “lean” manufacturing process that both cut inventory to a bare minimum and outsourced much of the work to contractors, so that the actual head count of Apple was as small as possible. While the number of people working in Apple’s supply chain was possibly millions across the world (one count has it at 1.5 million), the company only fully employed a measly 80,300 in 2013. Employees of Apple stores saw this change directly as the company began to increase the number of temporary employees working at the store, something that was once discouraged by management for the way it lowered the quality of the sales experience for customers. The head count at Barrett’s Towson store fell from as high as 140 in the late 2010s to just 80 employees in 2023.

The company also reduced its famously extensive training to the least it could get away with. In the early 2010s, Apple store workers would train in person in hotel conference rooms before ever getting to the floor and then be dramatically presented with their store uniform when they passed training. After a shake-up in the stores, that process was replaced with a “self-guided format in which employees clicked through a succession of screens,” effectively shrinking from a three-week process to one week. The effects of cutbacks became apparent in the rollout in 2024 of Apple’s virtual-reality product the Vision Pro, which turned into a debacle for employees. Apple wanted workers to memorize and follow a lengthy, complicated script for guiding customers through the process of putting on the augmented reality goggles, but gave workers scant time to figure it out. The company flew a handful of employees to Cupertino to learn and then expected those workers to train everyone else. The script was quickly abandoned, sales of the Vision Pro were anemic, and workers like Barrett were left feeling adrift from a company they once loved.

All this disillusionment provided reasons to form a union. Workers like Barrett fought for union recognition in 2022 at the Towson store, while Apple store workers in Kansas City, Missouri, St. Louis, and Tulsa also petitioned for a union vote. The movement for unions at Apple stores—as well as at Starbucks, Chipotle, and Trader Joe’s—crested amid widespread disenchantment with in-person work during the pandemic. After the peak of the crisis, bosses quickly abandoned virus-related safety protocols and required employees to return to normal. For Apple store workers, the jobs no longer had the “elevated” appeal that might have helped them ignore management’s blatant disregard for safety when management quickly disassembled the screens at the front of store that kept workers safe and separated from customers during the pandemic. Barrett and her co-workers won their union election and moved to bargaining a contract, a process that would drag on fruitlessly for years.

So why are unions now appealing to the college-educated? One possible reason emerges from the between-the-lines of Scheiber’s story. Many college grads assumed they would work in jobs that harnessed their passions and made the world a better place, as Apple often stressed it would. But when it became clear that the humanistic ideals were little more than window dressing, where would they turn for meaning in life? They found it at work, not as devotees to the company line but as union members. The union, for one of the over-credentialed Starbucks workers that Scheiber profiles, offers purpose and community in the process of organizing.

Another appeal of unions for the college-educated is the crumbling of the narrative that pushed people into universities: Upon close inspection, the story about college being an unimpeded good begins to look more like a fairy tale than a reality. Some people who go to college find stronger headwinds against the destination of upper-middle-class bliss. For Black people born in the 1980s, the lifetime value of a degree was “statistically indistinguishable from zero,” according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in 2019. People who go to nonselective schools tend to do less well than those who make it into selective schools (which are also more expensive). And degree seekers who major in the humanities, rather than science or engineering, do a lot less well. A 2018 study found the chances of paying off a STEM degree with future earnings were about 90 percent, compared to 50 percent for a degree in the humanities.

This decline in prospects might explain why it is jarring when pundits from left to right portray college graduates as some over-entitled, pampered mass. People often talk about how, say, the Democratic Party has been warped to fulfill the needs of college degree holders. But it’s very likely that we are talking not about humanities majors, or graduates of massive state schools and for-profit colleges, or most nonwhite graduates like Chaya Barrett, who struggled to pay her bills while working at Apple after college. Instead, we’re using “college graduates” to mean the small minority of graduates of elite schools, or those with highly valuable engineering or business degrees. One of the useful things that Scheiber’s book does is correct this record. College graduates still have some advantage in economic life over those without a degree, but they, too, are facing extreme economic challenges.

Scheiber spends a lot of time in the present tense, analyzing the surface textures of these union campaigns themselves. The book serves up generous portions of the play-by-play of organizing and contract negotiations of workers at Apple, Starbucks, and even the resurgent United Auto Workers under the crusading president Shawn Fain. In one bargaining session with Apple workers, for example, we get the scoop on a plan to have the most placid union member sigh heavily and look upset at a bargaining session, with the hopes that the ruffling of this implacable member will strike a chord across the bargaining table with Apple’s management and lawyers. The negotiations and tactics are interesting, but they are similar to many organizing campaigns with or without the involvement of college-educated people: The company lawyers stonewall, as they do; the workers walk out and picket for a fair contract, as they do. The details don’t reveal much about the college-educated working class; the book could have easily been about the surprising rise and revolt of a new wave of service workers, because, in effect, that is what a lot of the book covers as it devotes most of the pages to the stories of Starbucks and Apple store employees.

What is missing is a robust historical analysis of how we got to where we are, which means the book often raises more questions than it answers. Questions like, why did college-educated workers not form unions in the past? How were they convinced that they did not have much in common with the rest of the working class? What exactly happened to those good-paying jobs? And, most importantly, who’s to blame?

In 1977, Barbara and John Ehrenreich attempted to explain why the college-educated saw themselves apart from the struggle of other workers. In their epochal paper on “The Professional-Managerial Class,” they theorized about an entirely new class that stood awkwardly between people who labored and the people who owned their labor. The professional-managerial class, or PMC, was composed of doctors, lawyers, nurses, scientists, middle managers, HR administrators, professors, and the like. As professionals, they entered careers that often required not only a college education but also licenses to practice. This licensing requirement (involving, for example, a bar exam or medical license) limited the number of people who could do the jobs, kept wages high, and protected a certain aura of above-the-fray expert status. Managers, the other half of the class, also tended to be college- and business school–educated.

As the Ehrenreichs theorized in the 1970s, the growing corporate state needed a class of people to manage not only the workplace but the rise of consumption, as the country weaned itself off an economy dependent on pure production. The experts of the PMC would administer this new world. New pathologies, unearthed by scientists and researchers, would need new products and services to soothe them, and those in turn needed to be expertly sold. The PMC, the Ehrenreichs wrote, “designed the division of labor and the machines that controlled workers’ minute by minute existence on the factory floor, manipulated their desire for commodities and their opinions, socialized their children, and even mediated their relationship with their own bodies.” Some of this, no doubt, fed into the relentless campaign to encourage people to consume a college degree.

In this comfortable position, as the PMC evolved during the 1960s and 1970s, many of these experts felt comfortable pushing back against the corporate demands for profit. College students protested the Vietnam War; social workers aimed to “end poverty” through radical work within and beyond the welfare system; crusading lawyers took on public-interest campaigns; and many professionals demanded that opportunities for marginalized people be opened in their fields. This gave rise to the perception of a slightly pampered activist liberal overclass that to this day is accused of running our college campuses, corporate boardrooms, and myriad nonprofits.

And yet, during this period, college degree holders were convinced—through the carrot of high wages and special Übermensch status of their jobs—that even though they, like the working class, relied on a wage or salary, they had little in common with the rabble. They did not need unions, and they generally did not organize in solidarity with those below them. With the realignment of the Democratic Party in the 1980s away from the New Deal core of the working class and toward the highly educated middle class, the professional-managerial class, the rise to power was complete. As Scheiber notes, approval of unions by college-educated people in the 1980s was uniquely low.

But then the same forces that had diminished working-class life throughout the twentieth century by outsourcing jobs, crushing unions, speeding up work, and holding down wages came for the professionals. Once-comfortable tenure-track professorial jobs were replaced with status-less adjuncts; once-independent medical practices and law firms were gobbled up by large corporate chains.

By the mid-2000s, things really fell apart. The cost of college education, a requirement for membership in the professional-managerial class, exploded, rising by 498 percent since 1986 (for comparison, consumer prices increased by 115 percent). Reliable, high-paying jobs for the highly educated elite disappeared, as law firms either automated research and review work or sent it overseas, and hospitals outsourced tasks such as “reading X-rays, MRIs and echocardiograms” to providers in India. In 2025, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that “demand for workers with college degrees has declined since 2010.” That trend continued in the last decade: “In 2010, there were 1.2 postings requiring a college degree for every 1 posting that did not require a college degree. By 2020, it was 0.6 postings requiring a college degree for every 1 that did not.”

In 2013, the Ehrenreichs followed up on the fortunes of the PMC in their essay “Death of a Yuppie Dream.” “Those of us who have college and higher degrees have proved to be no more indispensable, as a group, to the American capitalist enterprise than those who honed their skills on assembly lines or in warehouses or foundries,” they wrote. “The old PMC dream of a society ruled by impartial ‘experts,’” they wrote elsewhere, “gave way to the reality of inescapable corporate domination.”

The result is a wave of organizing that includes people who once may have been members of the professional-managerial class but are no longer able to attain its sweet, lofty fruits. These people are the characters in Scheiber’s book, degree holders whose CVs boast rarefied fellowships, but who are nonetheless working at Starbucks and Apple. It would not be fair to say they are leading the charge, but it is notable that college-educated people are actively engaged in labor struggles as workers themselves, and their participation signals that the mass of people who are sympathetic to a more egalitarian and democratic system is growing.

The fate of the college-educated working class is probably worse than most people assume. In one darkly hilarious detail from Scheiber’s book, he notes in a chapter about “salts” (people who intentionally go to work at a company in order to promote unionization) that one of these college-educated salts at Starbucks is actually making his highest wage ever there. When Starbucks is the best-paying job you’ve ever had with a college degree, something is truly wrong.

It’s likely that the job market for college-educated people is only going to get worse. Firms can now use the threat or actual implementation of AI tools to eliminate jobs and heap more work on fewer people. Whereas 20 years ago law firms outsourced document review, now companies are automating the computer engineering and coding jobs that for a brief moment held out a promise of good, highly paid work. There was a prevalent narrative going for a while that “future-proofing” yourself with STEM skills would lower the risk of job loss, but that is clearly not the case. When you combine the Ehrenreichs’ analysis with Scheiber’s reporting and recent AI-induced job losses, the message is clear: If it is unrestrained, corporate greed will come for us all, eventually.