If Republicans really want to help their voters, they should boost HE

Donald Trump’s recent return to the White House highlighted more than ever the growing “diploma divide” within US politics. College-educated higher-income voters broke for Kamala Harris by 13 points. But those lacking an advanced education, including minority voters, shifted towards Trump across all states, provoking handwringing among Democrats about the party’s inability to connect with the latter and avert Trump’s authoritarian peril.

The disappearance of the broad “middle” of decent-paying mid-skill jobs in the US is well documented. Moreover, even low-skilled service jobs are becoming less common, even as high-skilled professional jobs continue to grow in management and STEM – and, to a lesser extent, in education and healthcare.

But it is not enough for Democrats to bemoan the disappearance of well-paying, low-skill jobs – and this phenomenon’s effect at the ballot box, as the working class votes its frustrations. Rather, Democrats need to roll up their sleeves and redouble efforts to equip more Americans – young and old alike – with the skills that will vault them from the class of the anxious and angry to that of the optimistic and politically restrained.

The US built great public universities purposefully to advance commerce, agriculture and industry. We created the community college system to equip a new working population with the technical skills for a host of occupations necessary to run a growing industrial country. We paid for higher education for returning veterans with the GI bill. The result was that for several post-war decades, the US had the best educated population on Earth.

It’s no coincidence that it also had the most creative and dynamic economy. Higher education drives economic growth and affords people the skills to create opportunity for themselves, not have to rely on someone else to give them a job or take care of them. Massive public investment in basic and applied research also attracted the best and brightest minds from around the world, leading to innovations from the internet to GPS to new miracle drugs.

Why, then, are so many Americans today feeling at sea in the labor market? Sadly, we’ve slashed the national and state investments that made US higher education high-quality and almost free, in the grip of a tax cut mania that has possessed both parties since Reagan introduced his “starve the beast” approach to government spending – now massively ramped up by Trump and Elon Musk. During our economic heyday of the 1950s and 60s, the highest marginal tax rate was 91 per cent. Today we can’t even agree to raise taxes on the 800-plus billionaires who control more wealth than half of America.

This has led to spiking tuition fees, massive student debt and increased non-completion rates. And while independent analysis continues to suggest that higher education leads to greater lifetime income and better careers (not to mention healthier lives,  greater job satisfaction and increased civic participation), many of those who hold the purse strings are questioning the investment.

Universities are also attacked in the culture wars as bastions of woke ideological indoctrination. State public universities and their regional affiliates are among the most vulnerable as state elected officials move to cut funding as well as dictate the content to be taught. Some states are currently cutting whole programme areas that leaders doubt will lead to high-paying in-state jobs, as in West Virginia. Other Midwest states such as Wisconsin, Michigan Illinois and Ohio have seen decades-long defunding of their university systems, amid doubts about whether they should even continue to exist.

Some of the reputational wounds have been self-inflicted. Universities and their leaders have often been hostage to their own political correctness and tone-deaf in talking to a public encouraged to think of them as out-of-touch elites. Trimming the absurd excesses in promoting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and curbing the seeming institutional compulsion to weigh in on every contentious social issue would doubtless repair some of the damage.

Of course, it wouldn’t stop Trump and his acolytes raging against the alleged “woke elites” running US higher education. Nor, more importantly, will any of that raging help the millions of Americans who lack the post-secondary credentials that remain tickets to decent, family-sustaining jobs.

You might well suggest that Trump has no motive to lift his supporters out of anger and despair, even as he claims to have their backs. We at the Brookings Institution have been tracking the strong correlation between education attainment, economic condition and voting patterns in the US Midwest since 2016, and they keep getting stronger. A president who declared in 2016 that he “loves the uneducated” and who is loved back by them seems unlikely to want to diminish their number.

But there are recent examples of Republican states that take their duty of care to voters more seriously. A Republican governor in Tennessee, for instance, has put in place the Tennessee Reconnect program to help adult workers pursue higher education.

Michigan, meanwhile, has the business community-led Kalamazoo Promise program, which guarantees free post-secondary education in any format to graduates of schools in the city of Kalamazoo. This revived Kalamazoo and is now being replicated in communities across the country. Michigan also showed years ago with its No Worker Left Behind programme that if you toss all the bureaucratic mumbo jumbo and offer laid-off workers funding to get the credentials they need to find another good-paying job, they go for it – and benefit immensely.

Most Americans still want the same thing for their kids as they always have – a shot at the American Dream. And nine out of 10 still want their own kid to go to college. It may make MAGA Republicans feel good to blame over-educated “elites” for what ails America; And it might make highly educated, progressive Democrats feel good to manifest empathy for the lesser-educated and embattled working class. But it won’t help anyone find economic security.

Only more higher education will deliver that. Always has. Always will.

John Austin is former president of the Michigan State Board of Education, senior fellow with the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College and non-resident senior fellow with the Brookings Institution.