Marshall here. Welcome back to the realignment. My guest today is the New York Times' labor reporter, Noam Scheiber.

He has a new book out today, Mutiny, The Rise and Revolt of the College Educated Working Class.

This episode, we explore one of the defining questions of the 2020s. What happens when the system, you were told the trust stops delivery?

The topic is the collapse of the College for All Economic Model and the consequences now

ruffling through American society.

We dive into why downwardly mobile college graduates are becoming a powerful political force,

the authenticity gap between what students were promised

and what they got, how universities, especially mid-tier and for-profit institutions,

created a debt-fueled mismatch between degrees and jobs, the rise of left-filling populism

among educated young workers, and why student debt relief failed politically, and what a better

approach might look like.

This conversation is a window into one of the most important and under appreciated shifts in American life,

the growing disillusionment of the very people who were supposed to win in the modern economy,

and why their frustration may define the politics of 2028 and beyond.

I hope you all enjoy the conversation.

Noam Shiber.

Welcome to The Realignment.

Great to be here.

Thanks for having me.

So I'm going to start with a very insensitive question.

If I were to come up with a list of categories of person in this country who in the sort of post-2016 narrative sense probably get the least amount of sympathy, I would put college graduates whose expectations are not meeting what they actually came into the system with,

as towards like the top of the, this is not compelling. By contrast, think of like the rust belt

...