Neoliberalism, Inequality, and Reclaiming Education for Democracy

I have been a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls (UWRF) since 2005, and I have taught at the college level for over 25 years. About 10 years ago, I was serving on a couple of committees at UWRF charged with addressing significant budget cuts and changes in tenure imposed by Wisconsin’s governor at the time, Scott Walker, and the Republican legislature. State Republicans removed tenure for University of Wisconsin faculty members from state statute and created a new administrative policy that effectively allows administrators to terminate tenured faculty for any reason, including the elimination of programs.

As our campus committees carried out our work, the politics of education began to confuse me. Educational institutions possess something that ostensibly everyone needs—education itself. According to conventional wisdom, we live in a knowledge economy, and K–12 and higher education provide knowledge. Education is widely believed to be the key to alleviating poverty and providing economic opportunity for all.

And as a political scientist, I know that in politics, if any individual or organization has something that everyone needs, then that individual or organization has political power. Everyday examples of this dynamic include wealthy campaign contributors or large corporations. In both cases, policymakers will necessarily take the views of these actors into account, often going so far as to solicit their input into the creation of specific policies. Frequently, contributors and corporations even have veto power in the policymaking process. The political process works very well for these privileged actors.

But despite having something that society constantly reminds the public that everyone needs, neither K–12 nor higher education has anything close to political power. On the contrary, policymakers can cut education budgets, erode tenure, jettison liberal arts fields, go after DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives, and—as AFT members know well—attack teachers’ unions, and they likely will not lose votes. Depending on the context, they may actually gain votes by engaging in these attacks against education.

To be sure, K–12 education has seen some rebound in political standing since the low point of the 1980s and ’90s in the aftermath of the 1983 Reagan administration report, A Nation at Risk. But today, even in states with budget surpluses and growing populations, such as Minnesota and Wisconsin, cuts are being made in K–12 and higher education. And despite decades of budget cuts and, as a result, increasing costs for students, public higher education systems have to fight for and defend receiving any public support from their respective state governments. Finally, both the higher education press and major media remind us frequently that the “public has lost confidence in higher education,”¹ in a pervasive campaign brazenly similar to the corporate campaign of the 1980s and ’90s claiming that the K–12 public schools were failing.

If everyone needs education to succeed, why is education always under fire politically? Why are we always on defense?

To try to better understand the seemingly contradictory politics of education, I began to examine primary data on the labor market, historic and current educational attainment rates, and scholarly literature on these topics. I researched the recent history of business and public policy. I started paying close attention to how the most powerful actors and institutions in our society talked about the purposes—and purported flaws—of education. I carefully read education-related reports that were widely cited in the media. I engaged in basic scholarship by looking up the references in these reports and examining many of the organizations producing this seemingly endless blizzard of literature and, to the extent that they are publicly disclosed, their funders.

In sum, I discovered that the decades of claims that public schools and colleges are failing are at odds with official data on the education system and economy and with much scholarly research. By all standard measures, the American public is better educated today than ever before. That didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was discovering that decades of claims about our so-called knowledge economy are also false. There is not now, nor has there ever been, an abundance of high-wage, high-skilled jobs in the United States.

Rather, I discovered what we all see and experience every day: that the real economy is dominated by low-skill, low-wage service sector jobs. Moreover, decades-old conventional wisdom about a shortage of skilled workers—or a shortage of any kind of workers—is not supported by any reasonable assessment of objective evidence. Simply put, we do not live in a society that offers equal opportunity to succeed in a knowledge economy; we live in a highly unequal society with an abundance of well-educated people and an economy dominated by low-education, low-wage jobs.

This is why, in a nutshell, both K–12 and higher education are always on defense: since at least the 1980s, corporate America has engaged in a nonstop political campaign to deflect all attention away from its role in catalyzing inequality and onto the education system. Corporate America blames schools and colleges for the economic insecurity, stagnant wages, and poverty it creates. This campaign has been so ubiquitous, and so seemingly in good faith, that many individuals and organizations of all ideological persuasions continue to focus on the education system in the larger discussion of the population’s economic well-being. Even though tales of college graduates who are severely underemployed and unable to find jobs that match their preparation and credentials are becoming more and more common, we still accept the false notion that there are good jobs waiting to be filled—if only well-educated candidates would appear.

I decided to call the extremely deceptive conventional wisdom about the education system and the economy the fantasy economy.² As compared to the real economy, which has an abundance of low-skill, low-wage jobs, the fantasy economy is the charade of the knowledge economy that has been promoted by corporations and the wealthy for their own economic self-interests. It is the mythical version of the economy that has driven the corporate education reform movement—and the concomitant underfunding of public schools and colleges—over the past several decades.

As a political campaign, the fantasy economy has two major tenets: the education system is always failing, and the workforce is always inadequate. Claims about a failing education system and inadequate workforce are repeated endlessly and reinforce one another. We are constantly reminded that our purportedly failing K–12 and higher education systems have produced an inferior workforce, and that our allegedly inadequate workforce necessitates major reforms in K–12 and higher education. This rhetorical loop is beyond conventional wisdom, akin to saying that the sky is blue. But it is not supported by any reasonable assessment of the best available evidence.

Inequality, Education, and the Real Economy

The last 40 or so years have been economically challenging for most Americans. The country has experienced exploding economic inequality, as wages for most workers have remained flat while those for a small minority have skyrocketed.

But the problem is not a lack of jobs. Far from it. There are nearly 170 million jobs in the United States today, and, except during recessionary periods, the total number of jobs is always increasing.³ The labor market, however, remains dominated by low-education, low-skill, low-wage jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), roughly 60 percent of all jobs today typically require only a high school education or less.⁴ Despite the conventional wisdom that we live in a knowledge economy, the educational requirements of the labor market have changed little over the last several decades, as low-education, low-wage jobs continue to substantially outnumber high-skill, high-wage jobs.

At the same time, educational attainment rates in the United States have reached all-time highs. Recent Census data regarding educational attainment levels show that over 90 percent of Americans 25 and over have a high school degree or GED, 15 percent have some college but no degree, 10 percent have an associate’s degree, 23 percent have a bachelor’s degree, and 14 percent have an advanced degree.⁵

Educational attainment levels for labor force participants 25 and over are even more impressive. Recent data from the BLS also illustrate that over 11 percent of those in the labor force have an associate’s degree, over 27 percent have a bachelor’s degree, and over 17 percent have an advanced degree.⁶ Compared to educational attainment rates several decades ago, the country’s high level of formal education today is truly astounding.

The big takeaway is that we have a labor force in which 69 percent of individuals have formal education beyond high school—and an economy in which only 40 percent of jobs typically require any education beyond high school.

Because the population is substantially overeducated for existing jobs, large numbers of people are consistently underemployed—working in jobs that typically require less formal education than they have received. As the New York branch of the Federal Reserve has shown, for at least the last 35 years, at any one point in time, roughly one-third of all individuals with at least a bachelor’s degree are underemployed, with roughly 40 percent of recent college graduates underemployed.⁷

But it is not simply a matter of the disconnect between the country’s education levels vis-à-vis available jobs. Across attainment levels, many jobs that formerly paid solid middle-class wages have, over time, been downgraded to working-class wages, while jobs that paid working-class wages—such as meatpackers—now offer poverty wages.⁸ The loss of manufacturing jobs, growth of low-wage service sector jobs, and decades-long corporate attack on labor unions are all direct causes of these long-term trends.

Further, jobs in the public sector, once a paragon of middle-class stability, have increasingly become economically insecure positions.⁹ We see this dynamic playing out now like never before, as the second Trump administration has prioritized attacking public sector workers. And as educators know, wages for teachers and professors have not kept up with inflation,¹⁰ as evidenced by the hundreds of teachers’ strikes across the country in recent years. Teachers routinely work second jobs just to make ends meet. And roughly 44 percent of all faculty in higher education are part-time.¹¹

Also contrary to conventional wisdom, STEM (science, technology, education, and math) jobs occupy a very small segment of the total labor market. According to the BLS, only 6.4 percent of all jobs are in STEM fields, a category that includes roughly 100 specific occupations.¹² More strikingly, the share of the total labor market consisting of STEM jobs has changed very little over the years and is projected to change little in the future.

An extensive body of research going back decades has plainly illustrated the oversupply of STEM workers for available jobs, resulting in large numbers of STEM workers underemployed or working in non-STEM fields.¹³ The oversupply of STEM workers is also confirmed today by the routine corporate layoffs of technology workers. Yet because business continually argues that it cannot find enough workers in STEM fields, K–12 schools and higher education are constantly adding STEM programs, which ultimately end up replacing programs in other fields.

But wait—why do corporations claim there are not enough STEM workers or enough well-educated workers? The oversupply creates competition for jobs, depresses wages, and places immense pressure on the education establishment. And it ultimately hurts our students and democracy as non-STEM fields are scaled back or jettisoned entirely, all because of persistent myths promulgated by self-interested corporations and industry groups.

Massive and growing economic inequality within the context of the best-educated population in American history appears to be a contradiction. But once we examine how our economy has changed over the last several decades, this apparent contradiction disappears, and the politics of education come into sharp focus.

Neoliberalism: Capitalism on Steroids

The economy that business interests and President Ronald Reagan imposed on the nation in the 1980s—and that we are still enduring today—is best captured by the term neoliberalism. Basically, neoliberalism—a word that was confined to academic discussions until quite recently—is capitalism on steroids. It is a version of capitalism built solely and explicitly in the economic self-interests of owners and shareholders.

Neoliberalism differs substantially from how capitalism operated earlier in the 20th century. Political scientists have labeled the era from the 1930s, beginning with President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, through the 1970s the mixed economy.¹⁴ Unlike neoliberalism, the mixed economy had a substantial role for government. Organized labor was a major force, as roughly one-third of all workers in the 1950s were in unions. Business operated on a long-term time horizon, and employers were committed to investing and remaining in countless cities and towns across the United States. The fate of all workers was connected, and a rising tide lifted at least most boats.

The story of General Electric (GE) and former CEO Jack Welch exemplifies how large corporations behaved in the mixed economy. A 1953 annual report from GE described how the corporation worked “in the balanced best interests of all.”¹⁵ The report “trumpeted how much the company had paid in taxes, the virtues of paying its suppliers well, and how critical it was to take care of its employees.”¹⁶ GE bragged that it had the biggest workforce in the company’s history and proudly affirmed that it devoted 37 percent of its revenue from sales to pay and benefits for its workers, while devoting a mere 3.9 percent of that sales revenue to shareholders. In 1962, GE’s head of employee benefits stated: “Maximizing employment security is a prime company goal.… The employee who can plan his economic future with reasonable certainty is an employer’s most productive asset.”¹⁷

In addition to a business culture that valued long-term employees, the mixed economy saw the adoption of numerous major public policies that provided greater economic security for the citizenry. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, public assistance, civil rights, voting rights, and a host of other social welfare and regulatory policies addressed routine market failures and provided increased security and opportunity for the citizenry. The right to collective bargaining was a key part of the mixed economy, which led to increasing rates of unionization throughout the 1940s and ’50s. Significantly, education was viewed as merely one of many public services or policies aimed at improving people’s economic well-being. An educated population was valued more for helping maintain democracy than for increasing individuals’ wages.¹⁸

Of course, economic and educational opportunities were not open to all equally. Women and racial minorities were often intentionally excluded from opportunities afforded to white men. Yet through major court cases and public policies, including but not limited to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the country began to dismantle the structural racism and sexism impeding opportunities for so many and gradually move toward a real, multiracial democracy.

The political turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s brought major advances—advances that the business community saw as threats. Many powerful elements within the business community had never accepted the expanded role of government and organized labor ushered in by the New Deal during the mixed economy.¹⁹ And given the increasingly public political activities involving the education system, such as the pro–civil rights and anti-war movements on college campuses, many business interests came to believe that American capitalism itself was under threat.

Even before these developments, however, economists had provided the theoretical foundation for corporate America’s exclusive focus on education’s role in providing economic opportunity and, in turn, obfuscation of business leaders’ and policymakers’ roles in determining jobs and wage levels. In the 1950s, the field of economics invented human capital theory,²⁰ and the new theory was used to directly link variation in individual income levels with differences in formal education and training.

Promulgated mainly by economists at the University of Chicago, human capital theory eventually gained broad ideological appeal. By the middle 1960s, human capital theory was extremely influential among leaders in both political parties.²¹ Education became understood by many elites as the path to escaping poverty, even as the country was witnessing President Lyndon Johnson’s many groundbreaking social welfare and civil rights policies successfully addressing inequality.

Human capital theory promised that economic opportunity would be open to all through formal education and training. But it also let corporate America off the hook entirely in the larger discussion of economic opportunity, and so the business community embraced it enthusiastically. By the late 1960s, corporate America began to increasingly talk about education in terms of its purported economic benefits, which was a striking departure from the widely shared vision of education for democracy.

Also, in the 1970s, the anti-tax movement emerged, best exemplified by California’s Proposition 13, which capped property taxes and then starved public schools of funding. As the anti-tax movement spread, public schools across the country came under constant budgetary pressure. Former California Governor Ronald Reagan capitalized on the moment, pronouncing in his 1980 campaign for president that government was responsible for all the economic ills of the 1970s. Reagan repeatedly argued that unleashing private market forces and getting government out of the way would allow all Americans to prosper. The constellation of free market, anti-government policies at the heart of neoliberalism was Reagan’s entire worldview and platform—and during Reagan’s eight years in the White House, an economy built solely for owners and shareholders took hold.

Advocacy for privatization of public services became the default positions of business interests because of neoliberalism’s proud contempt for the public sector, simplistic worship of free markets, and opposition to taxation and regulation. Minimizing the cost of labor to maximize shareholders’ profits—a foundational belief of neoliberalism—led to the constant corporate attack on organized labor that continues to the present day. Business also began to routinely fight against attempts to increase the minimum wage.

Reagan’s shareholder agenda also led to increasing monopolization of all major economic sectors, as large corporations merged with other large corporations in a constant drift toward the consolidation of economic power. As taxes were cut, social welfare benefits were reduced. And in a continuous desire to cut costs (again, for the sake of shareholders’ profits), neoliberalism also demanded moving manufacturing jobs to cheaper locations overseas, offshoring many service sector jobs, replacing corporate pensions with 401(k) retirement plans, and increasingly using independent contractors and noncompete agreements by employers.

Neoliberalism’s policy agenda also led to the gradual, systematic privatization of public higher education, increasingly placing the cost of public higher education on the backs of students and their families. During the mixed economy, public higher education was substantially funded by the states, resulting in very inexpensive tuition and fees. Over time, however, it has become disproportionately funded by student tuition, leading to escalating costs and a student debt crisis.

Significantly, the Democratic Party largely went along with this corporate agenda,²² and the Clinton administration in the 1990s embraced a softened version of Reagan’s neoliberalism. Clinton declared himself a “New Democrat” to distinguish himself from Democrats like Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt, both of whom—ironically—were indispensable in making the Democratic Party a majority force for much of the 20th century. The unquestioned dominance of human capital theory fundamentally changed how the nation thought about the purpose of education and was critical in allowing neoliberalism to take hold.

Mythical Education and Workforce Crises

Neoliberalism’s overarching purpose of building an economy exclusively in the interests of major shareholders and business owners—who constituted a very small percentage of the population—was bound to be unpopular. Thus, supercharging capitalism to actively hurt the economic interests of a substantial majority of the people in the United States while enriching the few would not be an easy political task. Human capital theory, however, allowed corporate America to make its public campaign for the anti-government, anti-labor, pro–free market economy of neoliberalism solely about education while simultaneously making it solely against the existing education system.

In an act of pure economic self-interest, corporate America decided to shift the discussion of economic opportunity entirely away from its own actions and political agenda and to focus squarely on the education system. And this overarching political campaign I call the fantasy economy was aggressively carried out by the Reagan administration.

The Reagan administration’s 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, was a key part of this campaign. Despite flaws that led to its debunking by numerous scholars,²³ it successfully established the conventional wisdom that the K–12 school system was failing. But getting the public to focus solely on the education system when discussing economic opportunity would require much more than the simple yet powerful assumption of failing schools. The public still had to be convinced of the so-called skills gap—that the skills of the American workforce were inadequate for the labor market.

This skills gap campaign has two major components: one is the notion that jobs that historically required little formal education and skill now required much higher education and skill levels. The other is the idea that traditionally high-education, high-skill jobs are increasing as a share of the total labor market at a rapid rate. The Reagan administration funded an abundance of ideologically driven research at major universities and think tanks to convince the public of these two specific claims.

During his first term, President Reagan’s handpicked appointees at the National Institute of Education awarded Columbia University’s Teachers College a $4 million grant (equivalent to over $12 million in 2025) to “study the relationship of education to employment, economic growth, and productivity” as one of 10 universities receiving similar grants.²⁴ Columbia’s new center, officially founded in 1986 as the Institute on Education and the Economy (IEE), received extensive funding from numerous foundations, corporations, and both the Reagan and the George H. W. Bush administrations. And by the 1990s, the IEE’s work was found throughout major media, education, and the state and national public policy ecosystems.

In 1992, the IEE published The Double Helix of Education and the Economy.²⁵ The report’s executive summary offered three “fundamental recommendations,” the first of which was to “change the mission of K–12 schools to take educational responsibility for the economic futures of all students.”²⁶ It is impossible to overemphasize the significance of this statement, which is at the heart of the fantasy economy. In promulgating a misleading description of a rapidly emerging, higher-skill labor market and an inadequate education system, the IEE helped to streamline corporate America’s overarching goal of blaming the education system for the growing economic inequality wrought by neoliberalism’s pursuit of maximizing profits.

In 1987, just one year after the founding of the IEE, the Hudson Institute published what is arguably the single most influential publicly available document on neoliberalism and the politics of education in contemporary American history, Workforce 2000: Work and Workers for the 21st Century.²⁷ Also funded by the Reagan administration, Workforce 2000 firmly established the skills gap as conventional wisdom. The report was widely distributed and reported in media across the country.

Despite also having its major claims thoroughly debunked within four years of its publication,²⁸ Workforce 2000 was remarkably successful in convincing both elites and the public that the United States was at the dawn of a high-education, high-skill, high-wage labor market—and that the nation’s workforce was not prepared. Twenty-five years later, we’re still waiting for this version of the labor market to arrive.

The corporate campaign to convince the country of the onset of a mythical, high-skill labor market went into overdrive during the administration of President George H. W. Bush. On September 25, 1989, the New York Times ran a 1,600-word story at the top of page 1 titled “Impending U.S. Jobs ‘Disaster’: Work Force Unqualified to Work.”²⁹ The piece had numerous quotations from CEOs claiming that they could not find enough qualified workers, along with quotations and data from IEE and Workforce 2000 authors.

By the 1990s, the message of a purportedly failing education system, inadequate workforce, and pending high-skill labor market was everywhere in the media and in the education system itself. Ultimately, charter schools, vouchers, and the test-based accountability of No Child Left Behind were all built on these misleading claims that Reagan- and corporate-funded researchers worked so hard to create in the public mind. The fantasy economy was born.

The Great Recession: The Fantasy Economy Goes to College

In the early years of the 21st century, the business and public policy agenda of neoliberalism continued unabated. But as the Great Recession hit in 2007, the population’s economic precarity became a major subject of discussion. The economic promise of college was increasingly called into question. Thus, corporations and foundations launched phase two of their aggressive campaign to make the public believe in a mythical high-education, high-wage labor market and an inadequate education system.

In 2008, Anthony Carnevale (who spent many years as a vice president at the Educational Testing Service) published an article in Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning in which he directly challenged the Bureau of Labor Statistics data on the educational requirements of the labor market.³⁰ Carnevale argued that “if used without proper adjustments, the BLS methodology can lead to a gross underestimate of both current and future postsecondary-education requirements in the labor market.”³¹ Shortly thereafter, he founded the Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW) at Georgetown University, as a “unique collaboration” between the Lumina Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.³²

In 2010, citing the “poor quality” of official data,³³ the CEW published its assessment of the educational requirements of the labor market. The CEW claimed that roughly 59 percent of current jobs were “available for workers with postsecondary education” and projected that by 2018, “about two-thirds of all employment will require some college education or better,”³⁴ putting its data at substantial odds with that of the BLS. Even as millions of highly educated Americans were underemployed or in low-wage jobs requiring college degrees, misleading claims of a skills gap were used to place pressure on higher education for its purported failures to provide economic opportunity and social mobility for the population.

With the backing of powerful private funders, the CEW’s claim that “about two-thirds of all employment will require some college education or better” was even noted by the Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2020, the Chronicle observed that “anyone who’s been to a higher ed conference or read a book on the topic in the past decade has no doubt heard some version of that prediction—some of us to the point of numbness.”³⁵ Official data on the education system and labor market, which still showed a predominately low-education, low-wage economy and large numbers of highly educated workers underemployed, was almost invisible in mainstream discussion.

By the 2010s, uncritical acceptance of a high-education labor market and under-educated labor force—the skills gap—had become entrenched. And the logical, albeit false, conclusion was that higher education must be failing. Corporate America championed this conclusion because it opens the door to cut funding for public colleges and universities—and that makes it easier to cut corporate taxes. Just as tens of millions of highly educated Americans are experiencing underemployment, low wages (even in many jobs requiring college degrees), and high student debt, austerity has become the default policy in education budgeting decisions. And, in turn, a politically weakened higher education sector became much more vulnerable to the imposition of corporate America’s entire education agenda, including narrowing of curriculum under the auspices of “workforce development,” imposing online education on a grand scale (with claims that remote expert educators and artificial intelligence will be superior to classroom educators), and buying seemingly every new technology-related product and service, even as faculty and staff positions are eliminated.

In fact, because of the complete corporate capture of both K–12 and higher education, in nearly all mainstream discussions, virtually every issue in education today is defined as a technology issue with a technology solution. The information ecosystem of educational administrators, school board members, and university governing boards is dominated by technology interests. Far too many reports, conferences, news sources, journals, podcasts, and public discussions targeting educational administrators today begin and end with how technology is the key for all of our students.

For corporate America today, make no mistake: online education is the holy grail. But because it has always had limited market appeal, the sellers of online education are frequently changing marketing strategies and have created a never-ending list of monikers, including digital, distance, e-, remote, curated, individualized, and customized education, to name only a handful.³⁶ But if the pandemic taught us anything, it’s what all educators, students, parents, and caregivers know well: education is about human relationships. One can never replicate on a screen the magic that happens in classrooms. Therefore, the only way to get online education adopted on a grand scale is by imposing it via austerity.³⁷

Online education tops the agenda* because it kills a long and growing list of corporate birds, including the standardization of content; further narrowing of curriculum; reduction of the teaching staff; weakening tenure and increasing the use of part-time, low-paid faculty; closing schools and colleges; enriching the ed-tech sector; creating seemingly unlimited quantitative metrics upon which to evaluate faculty; and increasing the privatization of public education that began decades ago.³⁸

But once online education is imposed on a large scale, it will come to be seen as “just what education is” for the substantial segments of the population whose only access to education will be on a screen. And that will be that. If educators, students, parents, and concerned citizens don’t actively defend face-to-face instruction, it will go away for many of our students, especially for disadvantaged students about whom foundation funders regularly express such concern.

The great historian of education and activist Diane Ravitch has said, “Parents and educators know that this bizarre concept of ‘personalized learning’ is a hoax because its stony heart is defined by an interaction between a student and a machine, not between humans.... Parents want their children to have a human teacher who sees them, listens to them, knows them, and cares about them. The students will remember the teachers who inspired them for the rest of their lives; they will not remember their Chromebook and iPads.”³⁹

These degradations of our public schools and colleges are a political choice, a product of neoliberalism and the result of taxing and spending decisions made annually by elected and appointed officials running our K–12 and higher education systems. The public is continually told about the “limited resources” available to education, as if we all must participate in some sort of shared sacrifice during an economic downturn. This is utterly false. The country is richer than it has ever been. We don’t suffer from a lack of resources; we suffer from a lack of sharing.

Against Authoritarianism and For Democracy: Reclaiming Our Power

As educators, we need to look very critically at all the wealthy individuals and business interests who talk incessantly about the purpose of education as providing economic opportunity and social mobility. It is in their interests to talk about education this way, because they then do not have to answer for creating an economy that works well for the few while the majority struggle.

All students deserve outstanding public education that is tuition-free from early childhood through higher education. All students deserve face-to-face instruction and access to smaller classes at every level of schooling. All middle and high school students deserve a well-rounded education, preparing them to participate in our democracy as responsible citizens, to engage in the liberal arts for their development as individuals and community members, and to experience apprenticeships that help them find and embark on careers that they find fulfilling. All college students deserve a wide range of programs to select from, as well as tuition-free public higher education options, as our great public university systems were intentionally built to provide. All students on career tracks after high school deserve access to flexible, well-integrated vocational and higher education pathways (such as the Swiss system described here). And all educational faculty and staff deserve access to a labor union and to be treated and paid as the critical professionals they are.

The wealthiest country in the world can afford everything our students, educators, and staff deserve—we just have to choose the people over corporate interests.

Corporate America and Ronald Reagan stole education from democracy to cloak us in the fantasy economy and impose the dreadfully unpopular and unequal economic system known as neoliberalism. The extreme and growing inequality ushered in by neoliberalism has led to significant instability in our democracy.⁴⁰ There’s a straight line from Reagan and Workforce 2000 to the authoritarianism of billionaires Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

It’s time for educators and concerned citizens to reclaim the economy and democracy and make education about the creation of well-rounded, informed, fulfilled, democratic citizens. In the process, it is time to jettison the capitalism-on-steroids known as neoliberalism and construct an economy that works for all.

As educators, our power is limited. But as educators, union members, parents, neighbors, community members, and political activists, our power is multiplied. As we stand shoulder to shoulder, we can ensure everyone in our spheres understands what President Trump’s love of billionaires and authoritarians means for democracy and inequality. Alone, we can’t change the labor market, but once we awaken the vast majority of people suffering under neoliberalism, together we can make demands that will result in real opportunities and dignity for working families.

Alone, we cannot give employees raises or increase manufacturing jobs in the United States, but together, by teaching our neighbors how to form unions in their workplaces and electing leaders who will pass laws that support working families, we can. We can stop the decades-long corporate assault on organized labor, reversing declines in union membership that directly contribute to stagnating wages. We can raise the minimum wage. We can stop employers from using noncompete agreements and independent contractors, both of which depress employees’ wages. We can break up huge monopolistic corporations that suppress workers’ wages, give consumers fewer choices, and wreak havoc on local communities and the environment. We can replace 401(k) plans with employer-provided pensions. We can change the taxing and spending decisions of the federal government, state legislatures, and school districts, making excellent public schools and colleges free.

The road ahead is long. We have to rewrite the narrative on public education and our economy. We have to show the public the truth about corporate America and how neoliberalism has created massive inequalities. We have to demand a return to a mixed economy in which corporations value their workers and in which public schools and colleges are well-funded because they are recognized as a public good.

Americans know that something is wrong with the economy. The 2024 election shows us that they are grasping for change. But they’ve been misled and betrayed by corporations and the rich. As educators, we are perfectly positioned to teach our neighbors how to achieve our shared goals of increased opportunity, dignity, respect, and a better life for all.

Neil Kraus is a professor of political science and pre-law advisor at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls who specializes in American politics and public policy. He also serves as president of AFT Local 6504, United Falcons of UW–River Falls, and as AFT-Wisconsin’s northern regional vice president. His most recent book, The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement, received Honorable Mention for the 2024 Michael Harrington Book Award from the Critical Political Science Section of the American Political Science Association. It provides an in-depth analysis of the ideas presented in this article.

*The debate about online education is primarily affecting students from working-class and lower-income families. More privileged schools and universities are largely exempt from this discussion. These institutions, well-funded and attended by economically advantaged students, would never accept technology as a substitute for in-person interaction with faculty, staff, and each other. (return to article)

Endnotes

1. L. Burke, “Half of Graduates End Up Underemployed—What Does That Mean for Colleges?,” Higher Ed Dive, March 25, 2024, highereddive.com/news/half-of-graduates-end-up-underemployed-what-does-that-mean-for-colleges/710836; and A. Sarat, “Harvard’s New Policy on the ‘Institutional Voice in the University’ Gets It Right,” Verdict, May 31, 2024, verdict.justia.com/2024/05/31/harvards-new-policy-on-the-institutional-voice-in-the-university-gets-it-right.

2. N. Kraus, The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2023).

3. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Projections: Table 5.2 Employment, Wages, and Projected Change in Employment by Typical Entry-Level Education,” US Department of Labor, bls.gov/emp/tables/education-summary.htm.

4. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Projections: Table 5.2.”

5. US Census Bureau, “Census Bureau Releases New Educational Attainment Data,” US Department of Commerce, February 16, 2023, census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023/educational-attainment-data.html.

6. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey: 7. Employment Status of the Civilian Noninstitutional Population 25 Years and Over by Educational Attainment, Sex, Race, and Hispanic or Latino Ethnicity,” US Department of Labor, January 29, 2025, bls.gov/cps/cpsaat07.htm.

7. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, “The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates,” February 20, 2025, newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:underemployment.

8. Kraus, The Fantasy Economy.

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10. S. Allegretto, Teacher Pay Penalty Still Looms Large: Trends in Teacher Wages and Compensation Through 2022 (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, September 29, 2023), epi.org/publication/teacher-pay-in-2022; and J. Edelman, “Real Faculty Wages Decline for Third Straight Year,” Diverse, June 15, 2023, diverseeducation.com/reports-data/article/15540699/real-faculty-wages-decline-for-third-straight-year.

11. National Center for Education Statistics, “Characteristics of Postsecondary Faculty,” US Department of Education, May 2024, nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/csc/postsecondary-faculty.

12. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Projections: Employment in STEM Occupations: Table 1.11 Employment in STEM Occupations, 2023 and Projected 2033,” US Department of Labor, August 29, 2024, bls.gov/emp/tables/stem-employment.htm.

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14. J. Hacker and P. Pierson, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016).

15. D. Gelles, The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America―and How to Undo His Legacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2022), 23.

16. Gelles, The Man Who Broke Capitalism, 23.

17. Gelles, The Man Who Broke Capitalism, 23.

18. J. Dewey, Democracy and Education, ed. N. Tampio (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024), cup.columbia.edu/book/democracy-and-education/9780231210119.

19. N. Oreskes and E. Conway, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (New York: Bloomsbury, 2023).

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22. Shelton, The Education Myth.

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30. A. Carnevale, “College for All?,” Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning 40, no. 1 (2008): 22–31.

31. Carnevale, “College for All?,” 27.

32. Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, “Mission Statement,” June 13, 2009, web.archive.org/web/20090613023059/http://cew.georgetown.edu/mission.html.

33. A. Carnevale, N. Smith, and J. Strohl, Help Wanted: Projections of Jobs and Education Requirements Through 2018 (Washington, DC: Center on Education and the Workforce, Georgetown University, 2010), cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/fullreport.pdf, 1.

34. Carnevale, Smith, and Strohl, Help Wanted, 14.

35. G. Blumenstyk, “By 2020, They Said, 2 Out of 3 Jobs Would Need More Than a High-School Diploma. Were They Right?,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 22, 2020.

36. Kraus, The Fantasy Economy.

37. N. Kraus, “Online Education Is a Key Part of the UW System’s Austerity Agenda,” Tone Madison, June 19, 2024, tonemadison.com/articles/online-education-is-a-key-part-of-the-uw-systems-austerity-agenda.

38. Kraus, The Fantasy Economy.

39. D. Ravitch, Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools (New York: Knopf, 2020), 270.

40. E. Rau and S. Stokes, “Income Inequality and the Erosion of Democracy in the Twenty-First Century,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122, no. 1 (2025): e2422543121, pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2422543121.

[Illustrations by Alex Nabaum]