601 | Noam Scheiber: How the Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class Could Reshape America

April 7, 2026·56 min·4 clips

Noam Scheiber reveals how 84% of college grads under 30 voted for Zoran Mamdani, signaling a left-wing populist revolt.

The premise is simple and bleak. Marshall frames Scheiber's book Mutiny around people who were told college would bring security, then had to live with debt, status anxiety, and jobs that did not match the pitch. Scheiber accepts some of that frame. He still thinks a broad liberal arts education from a decent school can keep options open, even when it does not lead straight to software work at Amazon or Facebook. Graduate school gets the sharper critique. Scheiber describes a messier market where universities, under weaker public funding, rely on full-freight graduate students for revenue. Columbia is the main example. The episode treats professional programs as a workaround for university budgets, especially in business analytics, data analytics, and MBAs sold with AI concentrations. Foreign students are central to that model. Scheiber points to programs that are often 80 or 90 percent international, with many Indian and Chinese students paying fifty, sixty, or seventy thousand dollars a year. The criticism is not just about cost. It is about universities getting better at selling credentials while students carry the risk when the labor market does not cooperate. Marshall keeps pulling the discussion back to politics. He worries that educated workers who were supposed to win in the modern economy may become a larger political force than people expected. Debt relief appears in the cold open as a failed political signal, and the episode asks why it failed and what a more honest approach might sound like. That leads to the bigger trust problem. Students heard one moral and economic promise from institutions, then found an economy where degrees can work more like expensive sorting devices than reliable ladders. The closing example brings it down to earth. Marshall uses gifted-and-talented schooling to show how professional-class parents may drift from center-left assumptions when status routes stop feeling secure for their own children. Scheiber's argument works best as a diagnosis, not a slogan. The episode is strongest when it treats college disillusionment as a labor story and a realignment story at the same time, with universities, borrowers, and political coalitions all caught up in it.

As heard by us

A clear look at how the broken college bargain could unsettle class politics among educated workers.

The Realignment uses Noam Scheiber's new book, Mutiny, to ask what happens when college stops looking like the reliable bargain it was sold as.

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Why you'd press play

You want the story behind the college-for-all bargain breaking down.

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