How College Education Divided America

August 13, 2026:

Shortly after pandemic-era travel restrictions eased, I flew to Washington, D.C., for a meeting with leaders from left-leaning foundations. The topic was close to my heart: combating inequality and constructing a new narrative about reversing huge and widening income disparities. I expected the focus to be on the jarring increase in earnings inequality over the last four decades, led by the declining wages of workers, and especially men, without college degrees.

To my surprise, nobody seemed to comment on the stagnation and decline in the wages of non-college workers. Nor was there any discussion of how inequality between residents of small cities and large metropolitan areas had surged. Instead, commentator after commentator talked about gender inequality, racial inequality, and inequality affecting sexual minorities. These are all important topics, of course, but if our aim was to understand the surge in inequality at the aggregate level, much of the story was about jobs and opportunities for Americans without college education.

As I was traveling back to Boston, another event crystallized my unease about American political trends. Seeing that my flight was delayed by an hour, I decided to get a drink. At the bar by my gate, the only opening was next to a burly gentleman around my age. As I ordered a beer, he asked me whether my flight was also delayed. I nodded ruefully and said it wasn’t too bad. He proceeded to talk about football, a topic I know little about. But I welcomed the distraction, and over the next hour, we broached several other topics: the annoyances of air travel, beer, the challenges of the small business he was running, politics, and basketball, about which I knew a little more than football.

It was only later that I realized how rare such an event had become, where I spoke to somebody with a very different education profile, occupation, and interests from mine. This made me consider what would have happened if, on my other side at the bar, there had been somebody with a Ph.D. and an occupation similar to mine (academic, financier, consultant, lawyer, etc.). Whom would I have chosen to initiate a conversation with? Whom would the participants in the workshop I attended have chosen? The answer seemed almost too obvious, and not completely unrelated to why the plight of manual workers was less than top of mind for many college-educated policymakers, activists, and civil servants.

I later embellished the choice a little and offered it to several friends and participants at various conferences: If stranded at an airport, with a professional with a Ph.D. from a faraway land (China, India, Brazil, Nigeria) on one side and an American high school graduate on the other, to whom would you look forward to talking for the next hour? Many took the question to be rhetorical, because the answer was, again, too obvious.

There is nothing natural about the educational segregation that has emerged in the United States. But it has become a reality, with far-reaching consequences for postindustrial politics. It is emblematic of weakening ties within communities—and within the nation. It may explain how, as they became more politically influential and assertive, the well-educated became less understanding of the woes of those with lower levels of education. It is a big part of the story of how left-leaning, well-educated liberal elites started deviating from the premises of liberalism that had generated its past success.

The political rise of the college educated is related to the phenomenal growth in the number of people with college degrees. But even more important, it is a consequence of the rising status of the college educated, which is itself rooted in their meteoric economic climb—while automation, offshoring, globalization, and related sectoral trends have reduced the availability of good jobs for non-college workers. As the college educated have become politically more powerful, they have also diverged further from the less educated in their geographic locations and their social lives, reducing their ability to empathize with the latter’s problems and creating a major cultural rift between the two groups. In the process, a coalition between different segments of the college-educated and the tech sector has formed. I would argue this coalition has completely turned its back on the economic priorities of the less educated and has come to focus on cultural and global issues.

Cultural politics, promoted from both left and right, has further alienated the working class.

Excerpted with permission from What Happened to Liberal Democracy: Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2026 by Daron Acemoglu.

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