Frappuccino Socialists 

According to recent surveys, about 60 percent of Harvard and Princeton graduates in 2024 took high-paying jobs in finance, consulting, tech, and engineering. At Amherst College, the rate in 2022 was 43 percent, similar to the rate among graduates at UCLA, a state school to be sure, but a “public Ivy.”  

Noam Scheiber’s new book is not about these college graduates. 

It’s about Teddy, the valedictorian at his competitive suburban public high school, who studied theater at Grinnell College, won a prestigious Watson Fellowship to study the “intersection between disability activist groups and the performing arts,” and now works as a barista at a Chicago Starbucks. It’s about Chaya, a working-class African-American woman who assumed $50,000 of debt after short runs at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and a community college, before ending up with a marketing degree from Towson University. Working at an Apple store, she can barely pay her bills. And it’s about Andres, who majored in video game design at The University of Texas at Dallas, and now works long days, testing games for bugs at less than $25 an hour. 

 In Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, Scheiber—who covers labor and the workforce for The New York Times—introduces us to these three young people and many who did not graduate from elite schools or if they did, majored in subjects with limited job prospects and paychecks. He paints vivid portraits of these over-educated workers toiling for iconic, even “cool,” brands like Apple or Starbucks. Yet unlike the Harvard and Princeton grads flocking to these companies’ corporate offices, these college graduates are working retail, selling AirPods, and serving Frappuccinos. These salespeople and baristas bristle at management, low pay, and a general malaise in their lives—a sense that it wasn’t supposed to be this way.  

 In Scheiber’s telling, their savior is organized labor, and the organizing he describes does notch Teddy, Chaya, and the rest modest financial gains, and most of all, a sense of purpose. But while Mutiny is primarily a story about corporate America, the return of unions, and the economic futures of a growing class of workers, it is ultimately an education book. While a college degree still delivers enormous value to graduates over their working lives, his vignettes reveal a messier, more disappointing reality for a subset of graduates. Higher education, as an industry, has become too expensive, too mercenary, and too irrelevant for far too many. 

While a college degree still delivers enormous value to graduates over their working lives, Scheiber’s vignettes point to a reality that is messier and more disappointing for a subset of graduates.

 For decades, Scheiber argues, the truism was that workers with a college degree—any college degree—earned more than those without one. Especially with the loss of manufacturing jobs at the turn of the 21st century, it made sense to send more kids to college so they could fill good-paying, white-collar jobs. As Scheiber writes, this was the generation where “‘college for all’ became a national obsession,” with more students taking AP exams than ever before and everyone from principals to presidents stressing that all high schoolers should go to college. 

 But “after the Great Recession, many college grads began to suspect that, like stocks and bonds, different degrees could offer wildly different rates of return,” explains Scheiber. He cites a 2018 study that found that the chances of a college degree increasing your lifetime wealth above the cost were about 90 percent for a typical STEM or business major, compared to about 50 percent for an arts or humanities major.  

 “The bottom line was that if you went to a prestigious school and majored in a subject that was in high demand,” writes Scheiber, “college remained a solid investment despite rising costs.” But for those who did not, “there was a large and growing chance that college would be a financial mistake.” 

 A lot of it was basic math.  

 Between 1995 and 2015, the inflation-adjusted cost of an undergraduate degree at an in-state public university more than doubled. At a private, non-profit university, it soared by 68 percent (though it has flattened in the last decade). Unsurprisingly, from the time the young people in Mutiny were in elementary school in the mid-1990s until they graduated from college, the average debt load nearly doubled to $30,000. 

 Consider Sydney Mitchel, another character in Mutiny, who was advised in high school to chase her dreams to be a writer by attending New York University’s prestigious screenwriting program. After four years, she left New York for Hollywood with $100,000 of debt, just as streaming services were upending the economics of the profession.  

 In search of tuition dollars, colleges also began creating degree programs to lure more students. The best example of this, explains Scheiber, is the proliferation of degrees in video game design. The University of Texas at Dallas advertised that this credential would “typically” lead to employment in a gaming studio. Yet UTD and other schools were churning out way more graduates than there were jobs. In fact, after a decade, graduates at UTD who pursued this degree typically made $21,000 less annually than the average UTD graduate and less than half of what a UTD Computer Science graduate made. As one video game design major told Scheiber, this mismatch is the “jaded kind of exploit-y feeling part.” 

The panic about the declining value of the college degree is nothing new. As Nate Weisberg pointed out in the Monthly in September, Scheiber’s own New York Times ran a front-page story in 1975 that said, “In the brief span of about five years, the college job market has gone from a major boom to a major bust.”  

Yes, there have been recent spikes in the college graduate unemployment rate, but it is still significantly lower than that of non-graduates. And while history and English majors may start off tending bars or slinging cappuccinos, they tend to catch up to STEM-degree holders in earnings over time. Even the class of 2010, who graduated during the Great Recession, made up the earnings gap to non-graduates, albeit at a slower rate.  

Yet, as data from UTD video game design graduates demonstrate, different majors can lead to different earnings. For those without the backstop of valuable social capital or actual capital, this can turn a poor choice of degree or a taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt into a serious barrier to the expected white-collar salary and lifestyle. 

Beyond economics, Mutiny raises another question that Scheiber does not directly address: What exactly are colleges teaching students to prepare them for the world of work? 

Perhaps it is their youth or the power of marketing, but Scheiber’s characters have a naïve belief that these seemingly liberal businesses—Apple and Starbucks, in particular—were somehow different than, say, General Motors and Walmart.  

In their defense, Howard Schultz, the coffee chain’s legendary CEO, preached how the company was a good corporate citizen trying to “balance profitability with a social conscience,” and Apple made it clear that those selling iPads in retail outlets were “creatives,” not salespeople. To those who worked in its stores, “Apple felt different from ordinary retail,” writes Scheiber. 

 Yet it wasn’t. In fact, in its negotiations with the Towson Apple store union, the company stressed that it paid workers there one-third more than typical retail workers in the Baltimore area. The union argued that their workers were not in retail, but in IT sales and repair, which paid significantly more.  

 The disconnect between what the Apple workers thought they were and what they actually were is not surprising if you understand the basics of modern capitalism: public companies have a fiduciary obligation to maximize shareholder value. It should come as no surprise, then, that Apple, Starbucks, and the like set aggressive sales goals, are parsimonious with raises, and oppose unionization. You can fault their hypocrisy, but you are naïve to be surprised (or not as cynical as this middle-aged reviewer). 

Many of the college-educated working-class brought to the workplace the idea that any organization with which they were associated, including their employer, must take stands on the great issues of the day, and those must comport with what these junior employees believed.

 On the job, these workers brought with them their Gen Z biases, undoubtedly reinforced on campus.  

 Scheiber, for instance, describes an episode of heightening tensions between unionized Starbucks baristas and management. Driving it was a mundane dispute where a manager declined to leave a meeting with his supervisor to help the busy baristas. Upon being told “no,” one barista burst into tears because, in the words of the worker, “his [the supervisor’s] tone became very aggressive, and I began to feel unsafe.” Other complaints included managers forgetting to use the right pronouns for baristas. While obnoxious, this was a long way from The Jungle.  

 Many of the college-educated working-class, like their more fortunate classmates, also brought to the workplace the idea that any organization with which they were associated, including their employer, must take stands on the great issues of the day, and those must comport with what these junior employees believed. Unsurprisingly, the college-educated working class, according to Scheiber, questioned power, embraced socialism, was skeptical of law enforcement, opposed foreign military interventions, and cared about climate change and racism. “In some sense,” he writes, “theirs was the politics of the underdogs.” 

 It is also the politics of the activist left. In Mutiny’s later chapters, Scheiber describes how the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023 roiled Starbucks employees, and how the cultural and political divides between the white, college-educated employees and those who were neither impeded the Amazon union from gaining traction after an initial victory in New York.  

Some may see this activism by young workers at these corporations as a sign of a resurgent left. In a chapter that could be its own book, Scheiber describes how graduate students who organized into United Auto Workers locals teamed up with a reformer to take over the union, pushing it toward a more confrontational stance with the auto industry and cultural causes that rank-and-file workers on a Ford or GM assembly line most likely do not support. 

While Mutiny celebrates these young firebrands for taking on these massively wealthy companies, Scheiber is too keen an observer of American political life not to caution that this may not be the revolution that Bernie Sanders and AOC have advertised. 

“As the college-educated working class grows and becomes more politically powerful, its liberal cultural views may divide it from the rest of the working class,” concludes Scheiber.  

 Indeed, the political divide within the working class, Scheiber cautiously predicts, is already here. In 2024, 18-to-25-year-olds without a college degree supported Donald Trump, 55 percent to 43 percent. For those with a college degree, it was the opposite; they backed Kamala Harris 56 percent to 43 percent. And overall, Harris won this age cohort by about 4 percentage points, albeit a significant drop from Joe Biden’s 25-point advantage four years earlier.  

While the rise of the college-educated working class may not remake politics, Mutiny should be a wake-up call to fundamentally reform higher education. At the very least, costs need to come down, and expectations of the value for money need to be made crystal clear. In the age of AI, thinking critically, questioning constructively, and writing well will be the human advantage. Curricula should be rejuvenated to maximize all three, including tackling grade inflation and fostering liberal debate.  

For the postwar generation, college was the great equalizer, serving as a ladder into the middle class. If we allow college to perpetuate divides between the fortunate few and everyone else, it will undermine not just the promise of American higher education but the foundations of American society.  

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