Bunch is not the only one who thinks along these lines: You can find any number of articles in major newspapers these days that attempt to diagram our present polarization along educational lines. In the years since Trump’s election victory, liberals and conservatives alike have come to see our present political divide as a grand battle between coastal elites and heartland down-and-outs, and the narrative itself has come to assume a powerful influence over public debate even if the reality on the ground doesn’t always back it up. For every wealthy suburban wine mom who detests Trump, there’s an equally wealthy HVAC company owner who spends his spare time ranting about illegals, and there are plenty of dispossessed and at-risk young people in blue cities as well as in deep-red hamlets.
Furthermore, the focus on the division created by the Big Sort makes it difficult for Bunch to come up with any solutions. Free four-year college would be tough, because there is “little” to “suggest widespread enthusiasm for this plan”; free community college would be a “tough sell,” because of the stigma associated with two-year schools; and student loan forgiveness would be a “hard sell” as well, unless paired with a minimum-wage increase. In the end, to avoid pissing anyone off, he settles on an idea from way out of left field: a federally funded national service year that would put the nation’s teenyboppers to work repairing drainage ditches, running youth programs, etc. Such a program would repair America’s grand derangement by forcing kids from different social and political backgrounds to spend some quality time together, and would also buttress our crumbling infrastructure—most important, however, it would repair national divisions and move us closer to Bunch’s goal of summoning “a shared sense of national purpose buried deeply within our souls.”
Ridiculous as the idea of a national service program might sound, Bunch’s difficulty in solving the college problem isn’t just an ordinary case of Columnist Brain—it also points to a larger truth about the “college problem” itself. Like just about every other problem we have, the current higher education landscape in the United States is the product of numerous different policy decisions, some the result of avarice, and others of inadequate foresight. This state of affairs isn’t all that old, but over the past two decades it has become intertwined with a number of different social and historical dynamics, so that now “education” is as much an identity as it is an industry. As the coalitions that sustain the two major parties have shifted, politicians in those parties have shifted their rhetoric to match, so that Democrats now sound as if they’re talking to college graduates, and Republicans now sound as if they’re talking to people who hate college. Policy played a role in creating this state of affairs, but that doesn’t mean that individual reforms to education can unmake it.
