Allowing our political discourse to be swallowed up by the internet and spit back out as chewed-up, attention-grabbing “content” has obviously not been good for the American psyche. Unfortunately, in the wake of the 2024 election, the Democratic Party seems to have decided that there’s no path forward except plunging headfirst into the online cesspool.

The DNC recently poured millions into a project called Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan, billed as an effort to “study the syntax, language, and content that gains attention and virality” in male-dominated online spaces. Meanwhile, a startlingly annoying crop of Democratic influencers emerged, teenage boys with resistance-lib politics who mimic online MAGA aesthetics to produce truly terrible videos like “Clueless MAGA Bro Gets SHUT DOWN During Debate.”

Politicians, too, are getting in on the fun. California Governor Gavin Newsom—apparently convinced that the key to being a successful governor is to fill the “liberal Joe Rogan” void—launched a podcast. His debut episode featured the late Charlie Kirk and was so obsequious that Kirk criticized him for being “overly effusive.” Later, after an amicable debate with Steve Bannon, Newsom switched to mocking Donald Trump in posts that mimic the president’s disjointed, braggadocious style. 

As demeaning and debasing as all this is, maybe it’s also part of a necessary correction. The left’s approach in recent election cycles—engaging in digital shaming pile-ons and strong-arming social media companies into moderating speech on their platforms—mostly backfired by convincing millions of Americans that liberals were censorious scolds. But if that strategy proved counterproductive, this frantic attempt to match the online MAGA world’s tactics in an attentional race to the bottom might be just as doomed to fail. 

I’d like to suggest a different approach, one that is already gathering adherents among liberal strategists, grassroots activists, and legal scholars. Instead of accepting the existing digital political battlefield as inevitable, Democrats should challenge it as the root cause of our dysfunctional politics, and vow to be the party that cleans it up.

The core of the issue is that we have a digital economy built on a business model of trapping people in the virtual world for as long as possible. D. Graham Burnett, a historian of science at Princeton University, calls it “human fracking,” where instead of oil, companies are extracting our attention. Should we really be surprised, then, that at the same time the internet is subsuming the real world, what’s emerging around the globe is a convulsive, reactionary politics? Addressing this crisis—rather than fueling it—should be central to the Democrats’ strategy in the digital age. 

There are abundant signs that people want something different. For example, a 2020 Pew survey found that about two-thirds of American adults believe social media is negatively affecting the country’s direction; only one in 10 think it’s helping. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of social media users’ simmering discontent comes from a study conducted by economists at the University of Chicago. Participants were asked how much money they would need to be paid to quit social media. The average answer was around $50. But the participants’ attitudes changed dramatically if asked to imagine that everyone else had already quit. In that case, they would not only give up their accounts—they’d be willing to pay to do so. That exodus may slowly be under way—time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has slightly fallen since, with young people representing the largest decrease.

Thankfully, there are more options in the playbook than to surrender to the internet or simply log off. As the political speech scholar Susan Benesch put it to me, the question Democrats need to answer is this: “Do you want to ape the game the other side is already playing in an environment that is bad for people, or do you want to change the game?” Democrats don’t need to abandon the digital sphere to challenge its terms; in fact, a few of its younger rising stars have shown that liberal messages can gain purchase. But to answer that hunger for reform, while also creating a level playing field for sane, fact-based discourse, Democrats must make a serious political commitment to reforming these technologies that govern our lives and yet remain subject to no meaningful democratic oversight. 

The movement to make online life healthier is already well underway. Currently leading the charge is a growing coalition of parents, scholars, and activists focused on protecting children from the most harmful aspects of the digital world. This movement has also launched a state-by-state campaign to claw back some modicum of digital privacy, with state legislators finally taking steps to curb the relentless surveillance and manipulation of individuals by tech platforms. 

Nearly every expert I spoke with agreed that these crusades offer Democrats a clear strategic opportunity: embrace these efforts, raise the profile of their issues, and campaign on federal legislation that embraces these movements. If the goal is a more dramatic restructuring of digital life, though, these measures must be seen as just the opening moves. The harms that have galvanized these reform movements are symptoms of the broader underlying sickness plaguing the online world.

Right now, MAGA channels much of the anger toward modern life by offering a fantasy of a lost, mythic past. But if Democrats were willing to engage with this dissatisfaction honestly, they could expose the central lie of the movement: Despite all its posturing, MAGA wants nothing more than for you to live your life on a screen. 

Unlike the current race toward the most optimized attentional capture possible—which is also disastrous for our politics by favoring the loudest, most outrageous voices—the lane of reform belongs to Democrats alone. With the right’s online dominance, the political conversions of platform owners like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, and Republican leaders like Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, pathologically online, the GOP is an unlikely reformer. Rather than join the stampede of human frackers, Democrats could be the one force fighting to protect your mind from being mined.

The most obvious place where the online world has impoverished the real one is childhood. Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation documents the teen mental health epidemic that began in the early 2010s, arguing that the “great rewiring of childhood”—the shift from a play-based to a phone-based upbringing—fueled the crisis. Haidt outlines multiple causal pathways linking social media use to mental health harms: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. To safeguard future generations, he proposes four societal norms: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16, phone-free schools, and a renewed emphasis on real-world independence and play. 

The book has achieved remarkable success, generating widespread media attention and sparking an eponymous movement attempting to enshrine Haidt’s norms into law. The most effective policy efforts to date have centered on making schools phone-free, with 26 states enacting legislation or executive orders to restrict or ban student cell phone use during the school day. Beyond that, some states have adopted more aggressive measures, banning social media entirely for children under 14 or implementing age verification laws that require parental consent for minors. Other states have taken aim at platform design itself, passing “Kids Codes” that turn on the highest privacy settings as the default for children or prohibiting personalized, algorithmically driven content feeds. Nearly all of these laws have faced legal challenges from NetChoice, the leading tech industry group, which has succeeded in securing injunctions in many cases as the court battles continue. 

Using the judicial system cuts both ways, though. Over the past couple of years, state attorneys general across the country have launched waves of litigation against social media platforms. The immediate outcome of these lawsuits is the exposure of troubling internal communications that reveal how these companies disregard the harms their platforms cause. For example, Kentucky’s lawsuit against TikTok alleges that the company deliberately concealed the app’s addictive design. Internal documents revealed that TikTok identified the habit-forming threshold—260 videos, or about 35 minutes—and linked compulsive use to negative mental health effects. Despite this, it took no meaningful action. A parental control feature, promoted as a safeguard with 60-minute time limits for kids, reduced usage by only 1.5 minutes on average. “Our goal is not to reduce time spent,” one project manager candidly admitted. 

In addition to revealing the true motivations behind platform decisions, these lawsuits could drive real accountability if legislation stalls. Perhaps most significant in this regard is the nearly nationwide lawsuit against Meta for knowingly harming children’s mental health and thus violating consumer protection laws, building on the documents leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021. “Nobody thought there could be a 44-state lawsuit against social media,” Haugen told me. “And now we have a lawsuit comparable to the tobacco lawsuit.” (The lawsuit involved 41 states and Washington, D.C.)

The other reform effort that has gained real traction is the fight for digital privacy. In recent years, data privacy advocates have slowly begun to restrict the surveillance and profiling rampant in the online world. Today, social media platforms and other tech giants engage in nearly limitless online surveillance in order to create a vast informational asymmetry between the internet platforms and their users. If corporations know everything about you—your communications, preferences, habits—it is much easier for them to manipulate you into acting in their best interest. Last year, U.S. internet users had their information shared 107 trillion times—an average of 747 exposures per person, per day.

California is headquarters to most of the companies who pioneered this business model, which is why it was the first state to wise up and pass a comprehensive consumer data privacy law in 2018. To this day, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) remains the nation’s strongest privacy regulation. The CCPA was built around the concept of “data minimization,” which means that companies should only collect and use personal information if it is for a purpose that consumers would reasonably expect. For example, a person using a ride-share app would expect the app to use their location to allow the driver to pick them up and drop them off. The user would not reasonably expect that the app continuously tracks their location well after the ride, learns that they visited a pawn shop, and then sells that information to Google, which in turn might start showing that individual ads for predatory loans.

The effort caught Silicon Valley by surprise and came as a blow to the online platforms who have no interest in scaling back their immense data collection practices. Since then, industry lobbyists and privacy advocates have clashed in state legislatures over how to shape privacy laws. Unlike California’s approach, industry-backed bills typically allow companies to collect personal data without meaningful limits, so long as they disclose it somewhere in a privacy policy. Consumers who want their data must submit individual requests to every entity that holds it (this is in the hundreds or thousands). These laws also deny individuals the right to take companies to court. The tech industry has brought enormous resources to the fight: In 2021 and 2022 alone, 445 lobbyists and firms representing tech giants were active in the 31 states considering privacy legislation. Of the 19 states that have passed privacy laws, the vast majority have adopted industry-backed models. 

But in one of the most high-profile privacy battles to date, the tech industry suffered its first major defeat since California. Maryland state Senator Sara Love, who introduced the privacy bill in 2024 while still in the House of Delegates, said she had never experienced anything like it. “It was exhausting. I have never seen that level of lobbying. Nor had a lot of other legislators,” said Love, who has served in Maryland’s state government since 2019. “The first year lobbyists were telling legislators, ‘You’re not going to get your Starbucks points anymore,’ ” she recalled with a chuckle. “The biggest bunch of malarkey. But they [other state legislators] didn’t understand the technicalities of the bill.” 

This time around Love succeeded in passing the strongest privacy regulation since the CCPA, and now a handful of other states are working on similar laws modeled after California’s or Maryland’s approach. The biggest challenge is in convincing lawmakers that defying Big Tech’s warnings won’t bring the sky crashing down. “Knowing that it can be done helps,” Love reasoned. “The more of us that get these good strong bills, the more that will follow.” 

In The Sirens’ Call, Chris Hayes compares the development of today’s attention economy to the Industrial Revolution. “Attention now exists as a commodity,” he writes, “in the same way labor did in the early years of industrial capitalism … a social system had been erected to coercively extract something from people that had previously, in a deep sense, been theirs.” In fact, Hayes thinks the digital revolution may be even more disruptive because, “unlike land, coal, or capital, which exist outside of us, the chief resource of this age is embedded in our psyches. Extracting it requires cracking into our minds.” 

Much like in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, people today face a collective action problem: Those whose data is being mined have few institutions capable of pushing back against systemic abuse. Just as labor unions and worker protections emerged to confront the excesses of industrial capitalism, we now need digital equivalents to defend users in the age of surveillance capitalism. Rights like the ability to delete your data, to move it between platforms, and to hold companies accountable for their abuse of it should be the starting point. 

One promising step in this direction is the Digital Choices Act (DCA), a law passed in Utah this year. Doug Fiefia, the sponsor of the legislation, was inspired to act after growing disillusioned with the data practices he witnessed during his time at Google Ads. After joining Utah’s state legislature, he proposed a simple idea: Make it possible for users to take their data from one platform to another or delete it from any platform they choose. This kind of data portability could eventually allow users to organize and demand better treatment, backed by the leverage to deprive tech platforms of the data they so desperately need. “What we’re doing is taking back what we never should have given to this industry in the first place: control of our data,” Fiefia explained. “That should always have been ours.” Since Utah passed the DCA, the first legislation of its kind, six other states have reached out to Fiefia to explore introducing similar bills. 

Meanwhile, a group of legal scholars has been pushing for a promising reform called “friction-in-design” regulation. These reformers argue that the tech industry’s obsession with seamless efficiency has stripped users of meaningful choice and enabled what they call the “technosocial engineering of humans.” They propose deliberately designing pauses—like speed bumps in neighborhoods or warning labels on products—to help users reflect, exercise autonomy, and protect their well-being online. Previous attempts to regulate social media have often floundered because they focused on specific types of speech or particular actors, inviting partisan backlash. Friction-in-design offers a politically neutral alternative, one that addresses the underlying dynamics of online harm without censoring content or favoring one viewpoint over another. Just as speed bumps make roads safer without restricting where people can drive, digital friction can reduce harmful online behavior without infringing on free speech. 

There are a vast array of friction-in-design regulations that could curb harmful platform dynamics. Addictive features like infinite scroll (which continuously loads new content so users never reach a natural stopping point) and autoplay (which automatically plays the next video without user input) could be banned outright. Platforms could be forced into imposing automatic time-outs after extended continuous use of the platform. They could also be required to add a short delay after a user posts, likes, or replies to someone else. Content that begins to go viral could be deliberately slowed as it passes certain thresholds. High-reach accounts could be regulated like broadcasters, with posts that reach a certain audience threshold treated as public broadcasts. In the realm of privacy, courts could refuse to enforce automatic contracts and instead require evidence of actual deliberation by consumers. 

When tech platforms have voluntarily adopted some of these measures, they’ve worked. After a wave of gruesome lynchings in India in 2017 and 2018 that were sparked by viral false rumors of child kidnappings, WhatsApp restricted the forwarding of messages that had already been shared five or more times, allowing them to be sent to only one user or group at a time. That minor tweak resulted in the spread of “highly forwarded” messages declining by 70 percent. Of course, platforms are unlikely to adopt these measures on their own, which is why government action is necessary. 

The situation requires many more reforms than the ones that have been outlined here. Aggressive antitrust enforcement to break up the monopolization of the digital economy is crucial. Today’s internet giants have achieved a level of vertical and horizontal integration with few parallels in American history, in large part because previous generations of lawmakers worked hard to prevent it. Even at the height of its power, Ma Bell couldn’t listen to your telephone conversations, learn that you were thinking of buying a house, and then sell that information to banks, which could then cold-call you at dinner with loan offers. Government today could largely eliminate this “surveillance” business model by enforcing existing law—breaking up tech companies’ control of competing social media platforms (like Meta’s ownership of both Facebook and Instagram) and requiring that they follow the same “common carrier” rules that governed previous communications technologies. This would curb a great deal, though not all, of their most exploitative behavior. 

Modifying Section 230, which allows platforms to hide behind total legal immunity even as they algorithmically make editorial decisions, is also important. Beyond that, greater transparency around how algorithms function, and stronger oversight to ensure that they serve the public interest rather than manipulate it, will be key to creating a healthier digital ecosystem. Most major platforms’ algorithms promote the content that gets the most user engagement, which gives undue weight to outrage and misinformation. But those incentives don’t have to be written in stone. Scholars and some smaller platforms are testing out different algorithmic systems, such as “bridging-based ranking,” which sorts internet content using metrics that promote constructive disagreement—such as whether users with opposing views engage with it positively. Documents from Haugen, the Facebook whistle-blower, reveal that the company tested bridging-based ranking in its comments sections, and found that it promoted posts that were “much less likely” to be reported for bullying, hate speech, or violence. But they decided not to implement it widely.

Of course, none of this means Democrats can’t or shouldn’t engage with social media. Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani have shown that it’s possible to use social media platforms effectively in service of progressive causes. But they are the exception. The structure of the current internet ecosystem overwhelmingly favors reactionary, conspiratorial content. Democratic engagement should be grounded not in mimicking that logic, but in naming the alienation the internet produces and offering a more humane alternative. 

The way we live online is not good for us. The average American now checks their phone 205 times a day, or once every five waking minutes. The average young person today spends 5.5 hours staring at screens, putting them on pace to spend 25 years of their life online. Rates of depression, anxiety, and behavioral addictions have soared; rates of friendship and romantic relationships have plummeted. 

Meanwhile, those in the tech industry want to double down on all of it. Marc Andreessen, cofounder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is often called Silicon Valley’s “philosopher-king.” He argues that the goal of improving material conditions on Earth is misguided, the folly of those who cannot see past their own “reality privilege”:

A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substances, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date … Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege—their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world … Reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build—and we are building—online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.

It’s hard to imagine a more noxious ideology—or less likable messengers—to run against. To think that the answers to our most existential problems could be found by building ever more seductive online worlds to disappear into is essentially a surrender of faith in the human project. No wonder figures like Peter Thiel hesitate when asked if humanity should even survive. Let MAGA have this bleak vision. And let them own the horror that is our online world. 

Democrats, meanwhile, should start listening to other voices. Zadie Smith, more than a decade ago, wrote that the technology shaping our lives is unworthy of us. We are more interesting than it. We deserve better. It’s time to build something different.

The post Draining the Online Swamp appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Like many incoming freshmen, Audrey arrived at Middlebury College without a clear plan for her future. “I knew pretty much nothing about finance,” she admitted. “I watched Succession.” But she was certain about one thing: securing a successful, well-paying career during college was nonnegotiable. After attending a high school with an “extreme amount of wealth” and now navigating a similarly privileged environment at Middlebury as a student on financial aid, she felt constantly reminded, “Shit, I need to make money.” 

Although she had previously explored opportunities in public law—volunteering at a free legal center where she simplified legal documents to make them accessible for young people and interning at a court—at college it was hard to resist the pull of the finance recruiting machine. Jokingly dubbed the “Middlebury Mafia,” the school’s finance network is vast and the on-campus recruiting is intensive: newsletters, information sessions, networking breakfasts, and even curated trips to New York City, where students meet Middlebury finance alumni and get a taste of their world (parties included). “I signed up for all the career center materials, but finance was the only thing I saw,” Audrey told me. 

As we sat at the campus café—the go-to spot for finance “coffee chats,” a thinly veiled audition where younger students feign interest in older ones, hoping for a future referral—Audrey explained that she had barely settled into Middlebury before feeling pressured to pick a path. Banks push for the earliest access to top talent, creating “an expectation that you go into your first semester and know exactly what you want to do.” And finance tells a compelling story: land an internship, perform well, and you’re set with a high-paying job and unmatched exit opportunities. So, with all her friends also getting involved, she decided to give it a shot, joining a student-run investment club, where she learned how to analyze a discounted cash flow and structure a leveraged buyout. Fast-forward a year, and Audrey’s now in the thick of recruiting season, hoping to land a coveted “bulge bracket” investment banking internship. (Because she doesn’t want to burn bridges with the big banks, she asked me not to use her real name.)

We at the Monthly have long raised alarms about the college-to-finance pipeline. Ezra Klein reported on the problem in 2012, and Amy Binder, the Johns Hopkins sociologist who has pioneered the study of career “funneling” into finance, warned in our pages in 2014 that corporate recruiters were making off with Harvard’s talent. Yet read those articles today and they feel almost quaint. Roughly one-fifth of students at highly selective universities now go into finance. The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2023 that the industry is beginning to recruit summer interns 18 months before they’re expected to start, in the first semester of sophomore year. Meanwhile Goldman Sachs announced that applications for its internships have increased sixfold over the past decade, with the bank only accepting .80 percent of those applicants—and a mere .33 percent of full-time job candidates. Students today are expected to join finance-related extracurriculars, build networks of hundreds of people, learn financial modeling, practice case studies, and prep for a series of technical and behavioral interviews. “It takes up more time than school,” Audrey confided. “It feels like if I’m doing schoolwork then I’m wasting time which should be recruiting focused.”

Some of this modern frenzy can be traced to student demand. The skyrocketing cost of elite college has forced many students to meticulously calculate the financial returns of their degrees. Housing prices in major cities are near all-time highs, pushing those who dream of living in glamorized metropolises toward the high-paying careers that make it possible. Finance, perceived as the most desirable and stable sector among 18-to-25-year-olds, has naturally become a focal point for competition. Beyond material pressures, there’s a deeper generational shift in how young people value money. The annual American Freshman Survey shows that a significant surge in students aspiring to become “very well off financially” occurred between the 1970s and ’80s. That trend has culminated, according to another survey, with Gen Z claiming they need nearly $600,000 to feel “successful”—about half a million more than older generations.

And yet, according to Binder, who has studied the finance pipeline at Harvard, the dominance of finance recruitment at elite universities isn’t just driven by economic or cultural factors. Instead, she identifies a phenomenon she calls “career funneling” as the real driving force. According to Binder, “student career aspirations are not simply the result of individual preferences but are heavily influenced by organizations and the actors inhabiting them.” Binder argues that finance firms leverage their clout with elite universities to create high-stakes “status tournaments,” where students—most of whom already spent their high school years fiercely competing to earn a spot at an elite university—come to see finance as the inevitable next rung on the overachievement ladder they’ve been climbing since childhood. Career funneling has long been a feature of elite universities, though the favored industries change over time. In the 1950s and ’60s, for instance, the most sought-after careers on elite campuses were at the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency—non-remunerative fields that complicate the functionalist narrative between top wages and job seekers. To Binder, the real allure isn’t the work or even the lucrative salaries but the “halo effect” of having beaten out the competition, a continuation of the hypercompetitive ethos that defines elite institutions. Audrey agreed: “I’m a competitive person. This kind of seemed like the next big competition.” 

The effect of this recruiting system is to channel students into a field for which they have little genuine interest or aptitude. A 2008 survey by The Harvard Crimson revealed that half of the university’s students planning to go into finance or management consulting—an industry with a nearly parallel trajectory—would choose a different career if financial concerns weren’t a factor. 

While it may be hard to muster sympathy for these students—after all, a privileged yet unfulfilling life is hardly the worst fate—the broader societal implications are far more concerning. Leave aside the fact that the modern finance industry is a force that exacerbates inequality, stifles corporate innovation, and inflates systemic risk. The bottom line is that it is also among the best paths to accumulate wealth, and today entry to this exceedingly remunerative career is largely saved for students who already come from the wealthiest backgrounds. Brilliant and equally qualified students at less selective colleges are not cut in on the riches. That in itself is an outrage. 

But the loss to society is greater still. When a disproportionate share of the wealthiest and most academically credentialed graduates flock to finance, other vital professions are left starved of the talent and prestige they desperately need. For instance, at Harvard, more students in 2020 entered finance than academia, the health industry, public service, or government combined—some of which face looming worker shortages.

Thanks to the financial recruiting funnel, a whole generation of America’s most competitive and expensively educated students are missing out on a vast range of personally fulfilling, societally useful, and reasonably remunerative jobs. Instead of becoming junior analysts at Goldman Sachs, students could be getting in on the ground floor of microchip companies that are building new plants under the 2022 CHIPS Act. They could address the climate crisis by working on the cutting edge of battery storage, geothermal, and distributed energy—or by becoming federal energy regulators and helping to pave the way for electric transmission lines for solar and wind. They could protect the environment at the Nature Conservancy or defend women’s rights at EMILYs List. They could join start-up firms trying to commercialize lab-grown meat. They could do their bit to help solve the housing crisis by finding employment at real estate firms that are turning empty downtown office buildings into residences and constructing apartments on commercial strips in the suburbs. They could seek jobs at one of the many for-profit and nonprofit health care organizations trying to transform primary care for the better. They could go to work for blue-state attorneys general who are bringing lawsuits against the Trump administration’s unconstitutional actions. 

Instead, they are being herded like sheep into jobs that are likely to put money in their pockets but suck their souls dry.

Historically, those seeking to get rich didn’t gravitate toward finance. For many young people today, this seems surprising—the modern finance industry exudes an almost mythic inevitability, the sense that an industry centered around money would naturally generate vast wealth. But for much of American history, finance was a stable but ordinary middle-class profession, with finance workers only slightly better educated and paid than their peers. However, starting in the 1970s, fundamental changes in the economy—spiraling inequality, legal innovations granting financial firms greater control over corporate management, and lax government policy—paved the way for the industry’s meteoric rise. Today, finance is synonymous with the economic elite, producing 20 percent of all billionaires and employing 40 percent of Americans with assets exceeding $30 million.

As compensation on Wall Street exploded, the industry reorganized its internal corporate structure to better attract top students from brand-name universities. Kevin Roose, in his book Young Money, explains how banks ended their traditional recruitment practices in favor of a “two-and-out” program in which college seniors are hired for two-year stints as analysts before moving on, usually to find work at a hedge fund or private equity firm. The model proved enormously successful, attracting a wave of young talent eager to collect a hefty check and another résumé-boosting gold star, even if they didn’t aspire to lifelong careers in banking. 

At Harvard, for instance, the percentage of men entering finance and consulting doubled between 1970 and 1990, peaking in 2007, when 58 percent of men pursued careers in those two fields. Today, as Matt Kuchar, Middlebury’s finance career adviser, told me, many students view finance like “grad school—you’re deferring any big career decisions until two years after graduation. And for a lot of students, that’s very comfortable.”

While students eventually adopt this mind-set, few enter college with it already in place. For example, Binder’s “career funneling” study found that only two out of 56 interviewees had even a basic understanding of finance, let alone plans to enter the field after college—and both of these students came from families with Wall Street connections. To bridge this gap, the industry employs a recruitment strategy described by Roose as “reminiscent of very polite stalking … These firms behave less like faceless corporate entities than like insecure middle schoolers.” While Roose focuses on the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business—arguably the premier recruiting hub for financial firms—finance holds an outsized role across most elite institutions. At Middlebury, for example, finance and consulting compose nearly 20 percent of all events sponsored by the career center and 49 percent of information sessions. And formal events only scratch the surface. Walk through the library on any given afternoon and you’ll spot clusters of students in ill-fitting suits, hunched over laptops, anxiously preparing for coffee chats with finance alumni—hoping to make an internship-granting impression. With the industry seemingly omnipresent, students have (probably correctly) internalized the importance of constant contact. As Audrey put it, “If you don’t have a network, you’re not going to get a job. If you don’t have people within the bank advocating for you, there’s not even a point in submitting the application.” A recent email from Middlebury’s career center highlights the demands of finance recruiting, reminding interested students that “hopefully you’re well into your conversations with alumni and networking contacts at these firms” and shared feedback from alumni coffee chats, noting that “across the board, our alumni have reported that most Midd students have work to do.” Still, the email reassured them that more can still be done, as “it’s [only] preseason.”

The industry also understands the importance of capturing students’ attention early, bombarding them with advertising and manufacturing a sense of urgency that overshadows alternative career paths. A typical career center email invites “first-years or sophomores interested in learning more about careers in finance” to “join Midd Alumni for an Investment Banking 101 presentation and networking session.” When I spoke with Kuchar, he explained that the accelerated timeline “is probably the biggest challenge that our students have, and it’s the area where this industry is most susceptible to critique. It is insanely early to be recruiting people in January of their sophomore years.” In addition to a crowding-out effect, this practice also fails to ensure that Wall Street draws from a truly richer talent pool. Students from lower-income backgrounds are particularly disadvantaged, as they often lack early exposure to the industry and may only learn about the process when it’s already too late to catch up. This dynamic may help explain a finding from Opportunity Insights, a Harvard-affiliated research group, which shows that among Ivy League students, the higher their parents’ income, the more likely they are to enter finance, consulting, or tech—and the less likely they are to pursue nonprofit or public-sector work.

Another clever approach financial firms have taken is to restructure recruitment to resemble the college admissions process. Like applying to top universities, students vie for positions at a handful of elite firms through a highly competitive and formalized application process, complete with rigorous interviews, networking requirements, and carefully timed recruitment seasons that dominate the academic calendar. This sense of structure particularly appeals to a type of student who has spent their whole life anxiously striving toward the next goal without always knowing why. For many, college—especially at an elite institution—is the final destination, the achievement that promises a secure future. Yet as Binder observed in her interviews, this confidence often gives way to an “almost existential angst” when students face the uncertainty of life after graduation. It’s a striking irony that despite Wall Street’s reputation for risk-taking, its ranks have swelled most by appealing to students who are often the most risk averse and career confused. 

Hovering over much of this is the fact that, at many universities—though not Middlebury—the recruiting process operates on a pay-to-play model, where access is determined by financial contributions from employers. In a separate study from her career funneling research, Binder documented the rise of “corporate partnership programs,” which grant companies direct access to students for an annual fee. Looking at members of the Association of American Universities—a group of elite schools with members like Duke, Yale, and MIT—she found that roughly 55 percent of schools had such programs. She writes that CPPs subvert the traditional career center missions of providing counseling and job search skills to students and instead “attempt to directly deliver students to a small portfolio of companies willing to pay rents to the career center.” Even schools without formal partnerships offer perks like “platinum partnerships,” which grant firms access to interview rooms, premium slots at career firms, sponsored recruitment campaigns, and other special privileges. Some schools simply charge employers directly. Harvard’s career services offices, for instance, charge $800 for for-profit employers to participate in career fairs, $50 for each 60-day job posting on its “Crimson Careers” platform, $100 for each on-campus job posting, $150 per interview room, $300 for conference room usage, and an additional $300 fee minimum for use before or after scheduled interviews. The result, Binder writes, is that “a very small group of extremely well-resourced companies … gain outsized influence on the cognitive landscape of elite college students.”

Some young people are beginning to push back against the status quo. Ryan Cieslikowski, a former Stanford student with a background in community organizing, is one such example. As a freshman, he was “sold by this vision of taking a bunch of bright students from diverse backgrounds and trying to make the world a better place,” only to find it “naive” once on campus. He wrote an award-winning master’s thesis on career funneling and then cofounded Class Action, a grassroots organization dedicated to combating career funneling and legacy admissions.

Cieslikowski believes that the first step is addressing who steps onto elite college campuses in the first place. At the 91 most competitive colleges, 72 percent of students come from the top quarter of the income distribution and only 3 percent come from the bottom quarter. Regrettably, 38 of the most elite colleges have more students from the top 1 percent than the bottom 60 percent. As Cieslikowski put it, “When you have a campus that is so saturated with wealth, certain types of jobs become the culture, the expectation. It’s what you’ve grown up with, and it’s what the natural next step is,” a view reinforced by Opportunity Insights’ findings. Reform is unlikely to come from within, which is why the Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits proposes stripping universities of their tax-exempt status until they ensure that at least half of their students come from families in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution.

When it comes to the recruiting process, universities should reconsider their stance on institutional neutrality. Unsurprisingly, they reject the idea that they funnel students into certain industries, instead placing the onus on the students: “There’s a herding effect where students vote with their feet,” Kuchar explained. “We can run seven sessions a week for Teach for America, but we might have seven people show up. When it’s Morgan Stanley, 120 show up.” Despite this reality, most colleges maintain that they should neither favor nor oppose the vast majority of industries, because as Kuchar explained, “all industries come fraught with ethical concerns,” and reasonable people will disagree about which professions are good or bad. The prevailing belief is that universities should focus on providing students with a strong moral foundation, enabling them to act ethically regardless of their chosen career path—a principle reminiscent of the educational mantra to teach students how to think, not what to think. Consequently, universities avoid challenging the practices or narratives of certain industries. Kuchar, for instance, voiced concern that such efforts could lead to a restrictive environment where students would feel dissuaded from joining an industry that “needs people who can look at complex, ethically charged situations and build consensus.” 

Neutrality, at least as universities define it, is a flawed concept—and one they don’t even consistently uphold. In reality, their actions often resemble promotion rather than impartiality. Take Middlebury, for example, which offers students free access to a third-party informational packet that frames the “worst-case scenario” of working in finance as: “you get a bit run-down, you learn a handful of transferable skills, and maybe you get paid a little bit along the way. Regardless, this industry will open doors others can’t, so doing it for a small amount of time is better than nothing.” Of course, a genuine “worst-case scenario” resembles something more like the tragic death of Leo Lukenas III, a Green Beret turned Bank of America associate who passed away at just 35 after working more than 100 hours a week for nearly a month. Meanwhile, another packet provided by Middlebury encourages students to “show that you understand and accept (relish, even) the physical and mental demands this job entails.” 

More broadly, universities must confront the reality that their campuses have become the crucible where students with little initial interest or knowledge of finance transform into a student body where, in some cases, as many as 70 percent of seniors apply for jobs in Wall Street or consulting firms. Even if universities are truly neutral parties, the dynamics of an unfettered talent recruitment market on college campuses—where industries with significant resource disparities compete—have led to a clear market failure. Middlebury already tacitly acknowledges this reality through practices such as refraining from allocating funds to promote finance-related programming or using some of the career center’s budget to bring alumni from lesser-known industries to campus. But these measures, while helpful, are insufficient.

An easy next step would be for universities to warn students of concerns surrounding funneling. Cieslikowski suggests that if universities were up-front with students early on—saying, “This is how career culture plays out here; prepare to be funneled”—it would empower them to navigate the process more intentionally. Beyond transparency, universities with pay-to-play recruiting models and corporate partnerships should abolish these practices entirely. Career centers should not function as auction houses, selling access to students to the highest bidder. Or, schools that continue generating revenue from recruiting visits should replace special perks with taxes on overrepresented industries, redirecting those funds to support access for less affluent sectors that cannot afford extravagant recruiting efforts. 

The success of Teach for America highlights how campus prestige and access can trump compensation for elite college graduates. In 2010, universities like Yale, Dartmouth, and Duke all reported that TFA hires more seniors than any other employer, although that number has shrunk substantially since TFA came under criticism over its high turnover rate. Creating a better-functioning talent recruitment market requires not only boosting the campus presence of less visible industries but also curbing the dominance of the most visible ones. Universities have the power to collectively prohibit the industry from recruiting freshmen and sophomores and to limit on-campus visits to no more than once or twice a year. Exposing students so early and incessantly in their college careers serves no meaningful purpose and only limits their ability to explore and develop other interests.

Beyond that, universities have been negligent in instantiating any career training into the curriculum itself. Twelve years ago, Ezra Klein wrote in the Monthly, “Universities have been looking at the problem backward … My hunch is that we have underemphasized the need to learn skills, rather than simply learn, while in college.” Seemingly little has changed today. Universities should make career planning a formal part of the curriculum, a required course equivalent with classes like English or math. While career preparation shouldn’t overshadow the broader intellectual mission of higher education, ignoring it entirely pushes students straight into Wall Street’s hands. Something as simple as a mandatory career exploration track—introducing students to a wide variety of fields, providing opportunities to shadow professionals, and featuring guest speakers—could prove helpful. Perhaps the Ivy League could take a lesson from their under-appreciated counterparts—the regional public universities. These institutions take a proactive approach to career development, like Grand Valley State University’s Laker Accelerated Talent Link—a program that provides students with $15,000 in scholarship money, a career-focused curriculum, and a paid internship with a local company. Rather than outsourcing career development to the whims of the market, programs like these offer a structured, community-oriented alternative. 

Even if universities can’t formalize career planning, universities should work to destigmatize it by fostering a culture where thinking about one’s future is seen as both healthy and expected. The pervasive attitude among students—and sometimes even professors—that pro-active career planning equates to “selling out” discourages meaningful exploration of professional goals. By promoting the idea that preparing for the future is a natural and valuable part of personal growth, schools can encourage students to pursue a range of opportunities, decoupling career planning from defaulting to finance. 

Part of the university’s culture should also involve fostering more nuanced discussions about the ethical implications of various career paths. One example is Cambridge, where the career center pushes back against the finance industry’s dominance. It sends emails telling students, “If you don’t want to become a banker, you’re not a failure,” and even hosts an event titled “But I Don’t Want to Work in the City” (referring to London’s financial district). When I asked Audrey if people ever discussed the ethical implications of a career in finance while recruiting, she laughed and said, “Nobody ever talks about the moral side of it. Nobody talks about that.” In research for Cieslikowski’s thesis, he discovered that while students acknowledged that many others are sellouts, they rationalize their own decisions by drawing personal “moral boundaries” that differentiate them from “actual” sellouts. For example, they might argue that their decision to work in finance is unique because they intend to leave after a few years, donate a portion of their earnings to charity, or use the skills they gain to eventually transition into a socially impactful career. University career centers are little help, focusing mostly on individual decisions in a way that similarly allows students to avoid weighing the wider societal consequences of their choices. Without these open and honest conversations, students either avoid critical reflection altogether or construct romanticized narratives about the nature and impact of the industries they aspire to join.

Of course, most measures would work best if implemented collectively. A lone school going rogue risks alienating these powerful industries, which can simply shift their recruitment efforts to more compliant institutions. Fortunately, there are signs of a growing movement. Class Action recently held its inaugural conference at Brown University, a three-day event in which attendees and organizers from eighteen different institutions—most of which heavily feed into Wall Street pipelines—met to discuss strategy and build connections. While activists have led the charge to end legacy admissions—ranging from student governments passing anti-legacy resolutions to lobbying and testifying for legislative bans, culminating in California’s successful prohibition last year—there is also growing momentum to push back against the dominance of corporate career funneling. For instance, Mason Quintero, another Class Action board member, played a key role in a 2022 Amherst initiative that secured a $400,000 annual investment for alternative career programming. This funding enabled Amherst’s first Social Impact Career Fair and broadened the Trek Program, which provides students with multiday trips to gain behind-the-scenes insights into specific industries. Thanks to these efforts, the program now features compelling alternatives to the traditional Wall Street and Silicon Valley tracks, including a sustainability-focused trip to Boston and a “government and nonprofits” trip to Washington, D.C. 

Cieslikowski hopes to build on that success, by “bringing the Amherst model to other schools.” Currently, Class Action is working with the Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute—an academic forum dedicated to strengthening global democracy—on developing a white paper analyzing career funneling and outlining concrete reforms. “Universities profess neutrality, but if they just conceive of their purpose as being an intermediatory in the supply and demand of careers, that’s not a conception of neutrality that’s helpful for students,” Cieslikowski argues. “Because then you’re going to wind up with a narrow band of wealthy and resourced firms recruiting all your students.” Instead, he wants universities to recommit to their mission statements—helping students define their own paths and preparing the next generation of leaders. 

Of course, it’s pretty difficult to monetize learning to live more freely and fully as yourself. At a time when 58 percent of college students cite work outcomes as their primary motivation for attending college, many argue that elite education’s value proposition should shift away from humanistic ideals toward a more pragmatic approach. Phrases like “acquire human capital,” “preserve optionality,” and “optimize for future earnings” dominate campus discourse. Or, as Audrey put it more bluntly, “If people want to make money, people want to make money, and I don’t think that’s so bad.” It’s understandable that students may internalize that message, but universities shouldn’t. In a society where nearly everything is up for sale, elite universities should stand apart—one of the few institutions that don’t have to operate like profit-maximizing firms kneeling before the logic of the market. Education should cultivate curiosity, critical thinking, and public service, not simply serve as pipelines to the highest-paying jobs. In order to do that, one thing is clear: It’s time to end Wall Street’s hostile takeover.

The post The Corporate Raid on Campus appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It’s hard to say exactly what prompted me to start betting on the National Football League last year, when I was a sophomore in college. Maybe I wanted to justify the countless hours spent watching the RedZone channel each Sunday by turning it into some profitable side hustle. Maybe it was the deluded arrogance that my intro to stats class had equipped me with the tools to build a winning predictive model, a belief that somehow I could find an edge. Or maybe—and I think I knew this at the start—I was just avoiding the rapidly impending need to choose a career, and the trade-off between making a living and following one’s passion that comes with it. 

I judiciously created a series of rules for my betting: I would only gamble a set amount of money, only at certain times, and only when I had some angle that made the bet worthwhile—and I would bank half my winnings each week. The season started off great; I turned $500 into $5,000 in under five weeks. Confident that I’d cracked the code, I convinced a friend to join in, pitching it as a smart way to put his idle cash to work. (“Do you think rich people just let their money sit around?”) Then, predictably, I broke every single rule and lost nearly all of our money. I started chasing my losses, upping my bets after bad weeks to try to claw our money back. When the season mercifully ended, I had nothing to show for it except the unsettling realization that I desperately wanted to continue gambling. 

I wasn’t alone. Last year, 73.5 million Americans legally bet on the NFL—a staggering 58 percent increase from the year before. Since the 2018 Supreme Court ruling in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association overturned a federal ban on sports betting, the U.S. has undergone the most rapid expansion of legal gambling in its history. A 2022 New York Times investigation into the legalization of the industry, which examined thousands of documents and conducted extensive interviews, revealed a systematic state-by-state effort to lavish legislators with financial favors in exchange for regulatory regimes light on oversight and heavy on tax breaks. 

In just six years, sports betting has spread to 38 states, with revenues soaring 25-fold. Last year alone, Americans legally wagered nearly $120 billion. Universities, media companies, and the major sports leagues—longtime gambling opponents—have all signed lucrative contracts to evangelize for various sports betting platforms. Sports have become so parasitically suffused with grating gambling propaganda that the comedian Conan O’Brien quipped in 2022, “I haven’t seen an online sports betting ad in almost seven minutes. Am I dead?” Industry analysts predict a continued rosy outlook, projecting $45 billion in annual revenue as the market matures. 

The danger in all of this is that the house only wins when you lose. Unlike most other industries that purport to offer a win-win transaction, in which both the consumer and the producer are better off than before, the gambling industry wants you to lose the most amount of money in the shortest amount of time. Three new studies, employing various methodologies and examining different aspects of the betting industry, all come to the obvious conclusion: Sports betting’s meteoric rise has occurred at the direct expense of consumers’ financial health. 

One study conducted by researchers at Southern Methodist University, Emory University, and the University of California at San Diego examined consumer spending on sports betting and found that a staggering 43 percent of bettors exceeded responsible gambling guidelines—defined as betting no more than 1 percent of monthly income—during the average gambling month. The effects of legalization were particularly acute among low-income individuals; the post-legalization increase in bottom-tercile earners spending 10 percent of their income on gambling was five times greater than that of top-tercile earners. 

A second study, coming from Northwestern University, the University of Kansas, and Brigham Young University, tracked the effects of sports betting on broader economic activity. Contrary to industry claims that legalization would simply redirect spending from illicit gambling or other forms of luxury spending, the study found that “legalization reduces net investment by nearly 14 percent … $1 of betting reduces net investment by just over $2.” (Net investments refers to equity investments.) Again, low-income customers fared worse, cutting net investment by a much higher 41 percent. 

The final study, conducted by researchers from the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, quantified legalization’s effects on statewide financial health indicators. States with legalized sports betting experienced a small but significant decrease in the average credit score, with credit scores three times worse in states that allow online betting. Even more alarming, states with online access to betting saw a 28 percent increase in the likelihood of bankruptcy. As Brett Hollenbeck, the lead author, told me, “We didn’t expect to find large effects for the average person because most people are not gambling at all … the fact that we could find any effects suggests that the impacts are quite severe for those who are affected.” 

Charles Fain Lehman recently argued in The Atlantic that this new wave of studies justifies banning sports betting altogether. “Unlike regulation—which is complex, hard to get right, and challenged by near-certain industry capture of regulatory bodies—prohibition cuts the problem off at the root.” However, there are three major challenges with this argument. First, after the Murphy decision, a national ban is practically impossible, meaning prohibition would have to happen on a state-by-state basis—a highly unlikely prospect given the recent legalization efforts and the gambling industry’s ability to influence state lawmakers. Second, sports betting bans are theoretically deeply unpopular: Nine in 10 Americans view it as an acceptable form of entertainment, and 75 percent support legal sports betting in their home state. Lastly, people will gamble whether it is legal or not. While legalization certainly increases the number of people who participate, Americans already spend more money on gambling every year than on concerts, plays, movie theaters, sporting events, and all forms of recorded music, combined. Before Murphy opened the door to legal sports betting, offshore operators dominated the market, and they still account for two-thirds of total bets, according to the gambling analysis firm Yield Sec. Criminalizing sports betting would only push the industry further underground, creating a dangerous illicit market that preys on the most vulnerable. Before I turned 21, many of my friends and I used offshore operators; the scope of options was endless (my friend liked to bet on Japanese baseball), and it’s not unheard of for sites to extend six-figure lines of credit to people who can’t possibly afford to pay it back. 

Legalization’s failure isn’t necessarily that it exists—it’s that right now, it’s even more damaging than the illegal industry. The sports betting world has developed highly advanced technology, not to safeguard its most vulnerable users, but to target them and drive them to gamble even more. Thankfully, with sufficient political will, most of the industry’s tactics and technology could be repurposed to protect consumers instead of exploiting them for profit. But without safeguards to prevent problem gambling, the industry is incentivized to pursue an addiction-for-profit business model—exactly what we’re seeing unfold today.

When I told a friend about some of the tragic stories I encountered while researching this piece, she responded, “That’s really sad. But also, like, how can you be so stupid?” Even though public opinion toward addiction has broadly liberalized, roughly half of Americans still believe that moral weakness contributes to problem gambling. The attitude benefits the gambling industry, of course—focusing on individual agency emphasizes a narrow sense of personal responsibility that shields other actors from scrutiny. 

Blaming gambling disorders on stupidity or a lack of willpower is a view emphatically rejected by the medical community. Starting in 1980, the American Psychiatric Association added “pathological gambling” to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Today, the DSM-5 classifies gambling disorder as a behavioral addiction—the only behavioral addiction the DSM currently recognizes. 

The casino industry skirted around most regulation and liability concerns by endorsing the medicalization of excessive gambling while strategically focusing the spotlight on individual pathology. As Shannon Bybee, a former casino executive and the first president of the Nevada Council on Problem Gambling, explained, “Failure to resist impulses to gamble means to me that the problem—and the solution—is found within the individual.” To that end, the industry created the National Center for Responsible Gambling, a research institute with the mission of identifying “an objective measure—a blood test, maybe a genetic marker, saying this person is predisposed to addiction.” The industry’s blinkered approach implies that gambling itself is not inherently corrupting; rather, certain individuals are born corrupted. For everyone besides those unlucky individuals, gambling products are safe to use. 

The betting industry is currently doubling down on the casino approach. DraftKings claims that “the casino … doesn’t cause problem gambling any more than a liquor store would create alcohol problems.” The Guardian recently uncovered through a freedom of information request that FanDuel objected to limits on advertising to problem gamblers by arguing that it was “analogous to a liquor store not being able to advertise to customers who ‘may be’ alcoholics.” In this telling, the industry bears no responsibility—people join their platforms either problem gamblers or not. 

The industry’s framing fosters an incomplete and misleading picture of both addiction and its own involvement in it. Lia Nower, director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University, rejects the industry’s notion that problem gamblers are a homogenous group that could be identified with something like a blood test. She developed a classification system for problem gamblers with three “pathways”: behaviorally conditioned, emotionally vulnerable, and antisocial impulsivist gamblers. Nower writes that “the behaviorally conditioned subgroup is characterized by the absence of psychopathology.” In other words, this subgroup of problem gamblers develops issues through their repeated exposure and continued participation in gambling activities, not because of any biological predisposition to addiction. Surprisingly, this subgroup is the largest of the three, accounting for 44 percent of problem gamblers and directly refuting the industry’s stance. These findings echo that of an independent federal commission in Australia, which, after assessing the nation’s legalization efforts, determined that problem gambling stems just as much from the design of the gambling technology as from any individual consumer behavior. 

Perhaps the largest consequence of legalization is that 90 percent of betting is now done online. Simply by making gambling both ubiquitous and frictionless, sports betting platforms are almost certainly exacerbating problem gambling. A 2005 gambling study found that living within 10 miles of a casino led to a 90 percent increase in the odds of becoming a pathological gambler. But even a 10-mile drive represents significantly more friction than today. When I spoke with Nower about online sports betting, she explained, “With rampant gambling on phones, 24 hours a day, there is a large proportion of people who will develop problems because they have access, and they can do this all the time.” 

By adhering to their narrow conception of gambling disorders, which claims that technology plays virtually no role, betting platforms insist that this won’t be the case. On the DraftKings website, they emphasize that only “1 percent of U.S. adults are estimated to meet the criteria for a severe gambling problem … research also indicates that most adults who choose to gamble are able to do it responsibly.” What Draft-Kings conveniently omits is that the rates of problem gambling among its customers are far worse. Recent research indicates that the rate of gambling problems among online sports bettors is at least twice as high as among gamblers in general, and, shockingly, 30 times more than the population average. 

Raymond Estefania, a psychotherapist and addiction specialist with almost 30 years of clinical experience, told me he’s never seen anything like the rise of online sports betting. “The way gambling is being done today is new. It’s automated, it’s online, you can do it right on your phone. It’s become so accessible. We’re going to end up seeing a huge spike in the number of people who end up experimenting and who end up developing a problematic relationship with gambling.” In essence, betting on a phone combines the dopamine-driven instant gratification of social media with the inherently compulsive nature of gambling to create a perfect storm for addiction. 

The problem with gambling goes well beyond its sheer ubiquity, however. Every aspect of the platform has been designed to wring the most value out of each user—by being as addictive as possible. The industry’s insidiousness is that while it claims technology has no impact on addiction, it has poured huge sums of money into optimizing for exactly that. Estefania agrees: “Sports betting platforms are absolutely part of the problem, and they do a lot of things to bait people and get them to engage in gambling. The scale of it just might shock you.” 

For most businesses, the best customers are the most knowledgeable and passionate—the tech enthusiast who buys every accessory along with the latest computer, for example. But in the gambling industry, the most valuable customers are the “whales”—those who think they know the game but don’t, consistently losing large sums of money. Although 96 percent of sports bettors lose money, more than half of the industry’s profits come from just 2.6 percent of its customer base. This dynamic creates the predatory nature of the industry; there is no avoiding the overlap between whales and problem gamblers or between industry profitability and the financial ruin of its customer base. 

These incentives drive the industry’s two-pronged strategy: First, create a platform that maximizes the chances of some users spending excessively; second, leverage detailed customer data to eliminate the winners while encouraging the losers. In the internet economy, the first goal of any enterprise is attentional capture. Sports betting platforms have been relentlessly gamified to maximize engagement. By making betting itself a game, users have the illusion of winning even when they’re losing tons of money. Point systems that track user activity, rewards for the number of bets per week, badges to commemorate win streaks, leaderboards to compete against friends and strangers, and constant push notifications alerting users to time-sensitive betting opportunities are all designed to keep users engaged and continuously betting. 

The goal of gamification is to induce a state of “flow”—a deep concentration where users become so absorbed that they lose self-awareness and track of time. In Natasha Schüll’s fantastic book Addiction by Design, she describes how slot machine players enter a “zone” of suspended animation. Unlike a positive flow state, the zone depletes one’s mental and financial resources, untethering gamblers from the reality of their time and money losses. 

Another crucial part of platform design is figuring out how to get customers to make the least profitable types of bets. The University of Nevada’s Center for Gambling Research found that while a typical sports bet offers a return of roughly 5.5 percent, same-game parlays (SGPs)—which combine multiple wagers into one—offer a return of 31 percent. For bettors to win, all individual wagers within the parlay must succeed; otherwise, they lose everything. This type of betting has only been made possible recently by algorithmic advances, as betting platforms can now simulate individual games thousands of times to quantify the correlation between different in-game bets. The industry and media aggressively promote these bets with their lottery-size returns; when a $20 parlay with odds of 29,000 to 1 hit, it was hailed as the “greatest bet of all time.” As DraftKings CEO Jason Robbins explained, “What we are trying to do is … [make] sure that we have a high parlay mix because people like that. Every quarter, the parlay as a percentage of the total bet mix goes up.” DraftKings’ then CFO Jason Park agreed: “Parlay mix is really the silver bullet.” And it’s working; parlays accounted for more than 60 percent of all sports bets placed last year in Illinois, which releases the most detailed data. Two years ago, parlays accounted for only 20 percent of sports bets in that state.

Sports betting platforms also made the introduction of “live betting”—in which users can bet on games in real time—possible. This form of betting is  “incredibly dangerous,” according to Nower. “There’s a huge amount of impulsivity because you’re in this enhanced emotional state.” Short feedback loops between stimulus and reward have also proved to be more reinforcing. “It’s not just betting on the outcome; it’s placing bets as you go on what could happen next. There’s an addictive component where you lose the last bet and then you place another bet to make up for it,” Hollenbeck warned. And yet, companies like BetMGM have made it a “core theme.” Last year, they added the ability to live-bet player props—like how many points LeBron James will have in the second quarter—which caused live betting to grow more than 160 percent year over year. 

After making betting as addictive and financially damaging as possible, the industry then seeks to identify which customers have been affected the worst. “It was originally the casino industry that pioneered this business model, observing every movement of the players and focusing on the most addicted, giving them rewards to keep them coming back,” explains Wolfie Christl, a Vienna-based data rights activist with whom I spoke to better understand the industry’s surveillance techniques. Last year Christl published a report that turned the tables on the betting industry by tracking their tracking of him. 

Christl first created an account on Britain’s largest online gambling platform, Sky Bet Gaming (SBG). After using their website 37 times, Christl monitored 2,154 unique data transmissions to 44 companies. The majority of the data flow goes to surveillance tech firms like Signal and Iovation. These firms then build a customer profile with at least 186 different attributes, including details like a player’s frequency of gambling, number of “free” bets used, favorite sport to bet on, and email open rate. SBG takes the data and runs it through algorithms that calculate variables like each customer’s lifetime value, specific products they might use, and even something called the “winback margin,” which refers to how much money SBG should spend trying to win a customer back. The reason for it all, as Christl explained, is to “personalize the marketing.” 

In a surprisingly candid moment during an earnings call in 2022, DraftKings CEO Robbins boasted, “There’s a lot of data science and customization at a player level to serve up parlays—Same Game Parlays to the customers that we think have proclivity to engage with that type of bet.” In other words—actually, in their own words—the sports betting industry is currently identifying who the most problematic gamblers are and then targeting them with tailored ads to further spend on their platforms. Christl views this as predatory: “This type of surveillance is specifically dangerous when an industry is able to destroy lives.” Not only that, but the surveillance of online gambling platforms far exceeds what traditional casinos could have dreamed of; the ability to track users through their phones grants the companies access to a continuous stream of data to optimize for further gambling. 

Anyone who still thinks it’s possible to earn money on these sports betting apps should read The Wall Street Journal’s analysis of the industry’s use of surveillance practices to identify and ban winners. Although companies do not disclose how often they exercise this power, they are transparent about the practice. Speaking at Goldman Sachs in 2022, Robbins said, “What we are trying to do is get smart at limiting the sharp action.” Or, as he noted a year earlier, “This is an entertainment activity. People who are doing this for profit are not the players we want.”

The notion that the sports betting industry bears some responsibility for problematic gambling behavior should be uncontroversial. Yet American culture often struggles to reconcile the neoliberal ideal of consumer sovereignty—the notion that consumers are the best judges of their own welfare—with the stark reality of harmful and abusive relationships developing with certain products. History shows that when harm becomes undeniable on a large enough scale, change follows, as has happened in the tobacco and opioid industries. There are now hopeful signs of change within the social media industry, as well. 

Rather than wait for a full public health crisis to unfold, the federal government should enact comprehensive legislation based on the harms documented in the handful of most recent studies. While the clearest implication of the evidence is that online sports betting is very harmful, it is safe to assume for now that the industry could muster the necessary political capital to defeat what would essentially be a return to a prohibition on sports betting. If the industry is going to remain online, then federal regulation is clearly needed. 

Although the Supreme Court won’t allow Congress to ban sports betting outright, it should uphold a law granting the federal government the authority to regulate it. In Murphy,the Court ruled that the Tenth Amendment prevents Congress from directly regulating state legislatures. But, importantly, it didn’t give sports gambling any special constitutional protection under standard federal regulation. While Congress can’t directly regulate states, it frequently regulates industries and private companies. Take, for instance, Moyle v. United States,a recent case in which the Biden administration argued that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) preempted Idaho’s abortion ban provision that omitted protections for the health of the pregnant woman. EMTALA doesn’t regulate states directly; rather, it ensures that hospitals comply with federal regulations. A similar approach should be applied to sports gambling—federal regulations imposed on corporations shouldn’t run afoul of Tenth Amendment concerns. While betting on this radically anti-regulatory Court is, well, a gamble, it’s certainly a chance worth taking. 

Congress should establish a gambling regulatory agency, analogous to what exists in nearly every European country where gambling is legal. The primary objective of that agency should be to hold the sports betting industry liable for problem gambling that occurs on their platforms. A story in the December 2016 issue of The Atlantic followed the tragic case of Scott Stevens, a compulsive gambler who took his own life. His family tried to sue the casinos for their role in fueling his addiction, but American courts have been notoriously resistant to such claims, because no such regulation exists. Other countries, however, demonstrate the benefit of a more proactive approach. In Sweden, for instance, “The general starting point of the law is that a license holder shall protect its players from excessive gambling and actively monitor and follow up in order to help players reduce their gambling when there is reason for it,” according to The International Comparative Legal Guide. Sweden has successfully used that law to sue multiple gambling companies, demonstrating the promise of robust regulation. The goal of similar legislation in the U.S. wouldn’t be to ban sports betting any more than airbags ban driving—it would simply make it safer.

Three areas in particular stand out in need of reform. 

Surveillance

The sports betting industry is carefully monitoring its users—but for profit, not protection. Instead of using data to calculate a user’s lifetime value to a company, companies should be required to use the same data to identify and address users’ risk for problem gambling. 

Researchers using machine learning have been able to successfully identify players exhibiting signs of problem gambling. “By identifying key variables that measure the intensity of gambling, such as the number of bets placed and the frequency of betting sessions, we can easily detect the group displaying problem gambling,” researchers from the Corvinus University of Budapest write. Private market solutions also exist, like the British company BetBuddy, which sends out personalized and targeted messages to potential problem gamblers helping them to understand their own behavior. 

Transparency 

The probability and expected value of betting is poorly understood by the public. To rectify that, the gambling platforms should clearly display the expected value of every bet. 

For example, imagine a user makes a bet that they feel has a 30 percent probability of occurring. The odds they see are +150, which means that in order for the bettor to profit $150, they only have to win $100. That appears good! But the expected value of that $100 bet (the probability of winning × the amount won − the probability of losing × the amount lost) nets out to −$25. For wagers like SGPs or live bets, the expected values are almost always terrible. But they appear deceptively lucrative because their associated probabilities are so small.

Previous research with food labels indicates the potential of such a reform. A meta-analysis found that labels reduced unhealthy dietary choices by 13 percent. Even more promising, labels caused the food manufacturers to create healthier products, reducing sodium content by 9 percent and trans fat content by 64 percent. 

Deposit Limits 

Users should be restricted to depositing only a certain amount of money each month. This kind of gambling regulation could effectively cap the financial damage—something that isn’t as easily achievable with other addictions. Three states already enforce monthly deposit limits: Massachusetts caps deposits at $1,000, Tennessee at $2,500, and Maryland at $5,000. These limits seem entirely reasonable; no betting platform should be extracting more than $12,000 a year from any individual user. 

The betting industry would likely argue that mandatory deposit limits are unnecessary since their platforms already offer voluntary limits. But that claim is misleading. A quick look at user experiences makes it clear just how ineffective the industry’s current “Responsible Gaming” guidelines really are. Despite the industry’s incessant marketing, you rarely hear about these limits, and users would only find them if they actively sought them out. This points to the biggest flaw of voluntary limits: Almost no one uses them until it’s too late. Recent studies show that just 2 percent to 8 percent of customers take advantage of voluntary limit setting. Moreover, these limits are easily bypassed, as many platforms allow users to change them within 24 hours, rendering them nearly useless. 

My grandfather, a journalist with the Associated Press and sports editor for The Christian Science Monitor, was one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. He lived a full life, with accomplishments such as interviewing Muhammad Ali and covering six Olympic Games, as well as raising six children. He also suffered from alcoholism and a gambling disorder. He died seven years ago, and I wish that he could have read something I published. 

I also enjoy sports betting, probably more than the average person. While writing this piece, I redownloaded a sports betting app. And even after extensively researching the industry, after reading horror story after horror story, after confronting all the statistics and research proving that sports betting is near equivalent to lighting your money on fire, I still placed a few hundred dollars in bets. Now I’m back at college in Vermont, where the app I was using isn’t legal. But I still feel the urge to download another one and start again. 

Of course, many people can gamble on sports, have fun, and easily move on with their lives. But some clearly cannot. Many others exist in a gray zone somewhere in between, in which the technology with which they interact will have a material impact. Regulations cannot solve gambling disorders; like any addiction, gambling disorders can only truly be solved at the source. But reforms can reduce the cultural saliency of sports betting, as well as the ease with which gambling companies transfer money out of users’ pockets into their own. 

Calls to gambling hotlines have increased 150 percent since 2019, the year after legalization. Raymond Estefania, the addiction specialist, told me he worries that online sports betting is becoming an epidemic among college students. And we’re still only at the tip of the iceberg, just six years into this. 

Meanwhile, the insertion of gambling into every facet of our life continues. You can now gamble on the weather, the odds of a recession, even what policies will be mentioned in an upcoming presidential debate. The pinnacle of gambling’s valorization might be Nate Silver’s latest book, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. Silver, election forecaster and avid poker player, argues that the connective tissue binding most highly successful people together—hedge fund managers, AI accelerationists, effective altruists—is their propensity to gamble. “Blackjack and slots … are fundamentally not that different from trading stock options or crypto tokens or investing in new tech startups,” he writes. Gambling, for lack of a better word, is good: “Ever since 1776, we risk-takers have been winning,” he manages with a straight face. According to Silver, human flourishing—or, at a minimum, immense financial reward—depends on breaking life down into an infinite series of expected value equations and then betting on them. If the world is dominated by gamblers, then maybe you should gamble too. 

The world of sports betting shows why you shouldn’t. Because what Silver fundamentally misunderstands is that today’s economic winners aren’t the gamblers—they’re the house. They win by turning more of us into gamblers. And right now, they’re succeeding. It’s time to change the odds.

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In high school, Jenna Duursma sometimes dreamed of leaving home. Growing up in rural Allegan, Michigan, a town she half-jokingly described as “just a bunch of cornfields,” she felt antsy. “To put it bluntly, I wanted to get the hell out of Michigan,” Jenna explained. 

But while she toyed with the idea of going to a school like the University of Alabama, paying out-of-state tuition was always out of the question. 

Instead, she opted for Grand Valley State University. The regional public institution had a sterling reputation and affordable tuition, and was only an hour drive away from her hometown. “I’m an only child, and my parents were a little bit older, and so that’s kind of the reason why I chose to stay around.” She quickly fell in love with GVSU and with living closer to the bustling city of Grand Rapids. “Getting to know people from different parts of Michigan has opened my eyes to what we have here,” Jenna told me, beaming. “I could see myself living [in Grand Rapids] for a while.” She graduated in April with a double major in finance and marketing and now has a job at Acrisure, a Grand Rapids–based financial technology and insurance company where she interned during her senior year. 

Jenna’s journey helps illuminate a pressing issue in higher education today. Colleges and universities are under enormous pressure, from demographically driven admissions declines to accusations of “wokeness” to mounting public doubts about the value of a four-year degree. Public universities like GVSU took big hits to their budgets after the Great Recession, and while overall per student funding has returned to pre-recession levels in most of the country, debates continue over whether higher education is a sound investment. Many Republican state lawmakers, especially those representing rural areas, argue that public universities contribute to “brain drain,” when students earn college degrees on the taxpayer’s dime and then move out of state to pursue their careers. Those dollars would be better spent, they say, by cutting taxes and subsidizing companies to relocate to their states. 

Are they right? The Upjohn Institute, a nonpartisan research organization focused on policy-related issues of employment, set out to answer that question. Using innovative research methods, a group of scholars led by the Upjohn senior economist Brad J. Hershbein found that students at brand-name public flagships—places like the University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin–Madison, University of Kansas, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to name a few—do tend to leave those states after graduation. But alumni of less-renowned regional public universities, like GVSU, generally stick around, as Jenna Duursma has. And the higher salaries they earn thanks to their degrees provide a significant net plus to the economies of those states and regions.

In the battle for funding, however, regional universities typically lose out. On average, they receive $1,091 (or about 10 percent) less state funding per student than do flagships, according to the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges, and the funding gap is even worse in Michigan. Regional schools also garner fewer federal research dollars and have smaller endowments. At the same time, regional public universities grant more than 40 percent of all four-year degrees in America, versus 19 percent awarded by public flagships. The average family income of students whose first-choice institution is a regional public school is approximately 24 percent less than for those whose first choice is a public flagship—a factor that helps explain why nearly 60 percent of African American students and 44 percent of Latino students are educated by regional publics. In other words, the universities that disproportionately serve low- and middle-income families, produce the most college graduates of any sector, and return the greatest economic benefits for their home states are the same institutions that have been systemically starved of funding. Nearly every state finds itself in this dilemma. How Michigan has dealt with it provides lessons for the rest of the country. 

In 2010, Republican Rick Snyder, a conservative businessman, ran for governor of Michigan promising to end a decade-long decline in state support of higher education. But after winning the election, and with GOP control of the state legislature, he slashed funding a further 15 percent, reducing state support to its lowest level this century. A University of Michigan alum, Snyder claimed that these cuts were necessary to finance a gargantuan $1.6 billion corporate tax cut, which he championed as the policy that will “make us a great state again.” 

Cuts to state higher education budgets are typically accompanied by an implicit understanding that universities will react by shifting the cost onto students. Andy Schor, the current mayor of Lansing and former state representative, explained the mind-set some legislators adopt when determining funding priorities: “When you look at higher education, they have the ability to charge tuition. So they have the ability to raise dollars, as opposed to K–12, as opposed to health care.” Left unsaid are the predictably pernicious consequences that accompany higher education’s disinvestment. In the decade following Snyder’s cuts, tuition rose 15 percent faster than inflation at Michigan public universities year over year and student debt increased by more than $7,000. Forty-five thousand fewer people attended college in 2022 than in 2011. 

Regional universities were hit hardest by the funding cuts. While the University of Michigan could easily recruit more wealthy, foreign, and out-of-state students to mitigate funding shortfalls, regional universities had far less leeway. In-state students predominantly from low- or middle-income families compose most of their student bodies. As the university saw undergraduate enrollment rise 16 percent between 2010 and 2020, enrollment rates fell at 11 of the state’s 12 other four-year public universities. Regional schools like Eastern Michigan University and Central Michigan University were hit particularly hard, losing 31 percent and 39 percent of their enrollments, respectively. 

Grand Valley State University was in a particularly challenging spot, largely due to its previous success. When the school was founded in 1963, its first-year class consisted of only 224 students. In a decade that figure grew to 6,000; at the time of the cuts, the student body was north of 24,000 students. But due to Michigan’s anachronistic funding formula, which was developed in the 1970s and only minimally updated, the legislature doesn’t take enrollment growth into account when determining state appropriations. Schools that attract more students each year are punished with less per student funding. The result was that GVSU, already significantly underfunded before Snyder’s 2011 budget, was cut to the bone. Matt McLogan, GVSU’s vice president for university relations, said after the budget was passed, “Grand Valley has essentially been privatized. It’s publicly owned, but is no longer publicly supported in any way that people would recognize.” To stave off more significant tuition hikes after Snyder’s cuts, GVSU was forced to freeze faculty salaries, the president’s included. 

I tried to uncover why the state continued to use a funding formula that almost nobody thought was a good idea. Robert Genetski, a former schoolteacher and Michigan state representative, provided one explanation: political clout. Larger universities have more money to employ highly paid lobbyists to influence state appropriations. For example, in 2011—the year that the legislators considered the 2012 budget—the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and Central Michigan University together outspent every other school combined on lobbying in Lansing. These lobbyists can have quite an impact. Genetski explained to me that while the original higher education budget for the following year, 2013, contained the largest increases in state support for high-performing regional universities like GVSU and Ferris State University, lobbyists for more influential universities successfully killed his budget. Instead, the legislature boosted overall higher education spending by a bit, but with the largest research universities receiving the overwhelming majority of the new money. Over the next few years, Snyder signed additional modest increases in higher education spending, but at levels below what they had been when he was first elected, and with the lion’s share going to the universities with the best political connections, not the highest performance. 

In 2018, Democrat Gretchen Whitmer—a veteran of Michigan’s legislature since 2001 and a fierce opponent of Snyder’s cuts—secured a 10-point gubernatorial victory, in part by promising to reinvest in higher education. While encountering constant Republican resistance, she gradually increased state appropriations. When Democrats retook control of the legislature in 2022, Whitmer was able to implement even more expansive reform. In the next year, state appropriations rose to a century high, 48 percent above their low point in 2011. Whitmer also created a generous achievement scholarship, which tripled state financial aid, and she secured free community college for all residents of Michigan. When I spoke with GVSU’s president, Philomena Mantella, about the differences between the legislative climate of today versus a decade ago, she concurred that the tides are changing. Although she pointed out that GVSU continues to operate at a structural disadvantage because of the state’s funding formula, she also agreed that the discourse around higher education had changed. “In 2010, there were lots of questions about college investment as a driver for economic prosperity,” she said. “I don’t hear that anymore.” Directly challenging the conservative consensus, Whitmer bet that investing in higher education would yield greater economic benefits than corporate tax relief. 

The new Upjohn Institute paper validates her belief. The conservative charge that states don’t benefit from subsidizing higher education since so many of its graduates end up moving to Brooklyn or San Francisco has been hard to assess because of a lack of reliable data. The Upjohn study addressed this problem by “scraping” publicly available information on the networking platform Linked-In to identify where college graduates end up residing. They then calculated how much state funding each university received, factoring in retention, graduation, and dropout rates for every university. This resulted in a more precise measurement, which correctly gives credit to higher-performing universities. Using that data, the researchers constructed a “social return” metric, consisting of three components: the level of tax revenue spent per student, the graduation rate, and net migration. 

The results were unambiguous. On a basis of return on tax dollars, regional universities outperform flagships. For every $100,000 of state funding, the researchers found, regional universities retain nearly two college graduates in the state for every one flagships keep. “From the lens of a state policymaker,” they concluded, “we show that regional public institutions tend to produce the greatest number of graduates who stay and work in-state per dollar of state funding, suggesting investments in these institutions could have particularly high local returns.” (While the best community colleges have similarly high ROI, many others don’t because their students graduate at lower rates and earn less after college.)

In Michigan, the top nine best-performing universities are regional publics, with the two best-known schools, Michigan State and the University of Michigan, ranking 10th and 13th, according to the study’s underlying data, which the researchers shared with the Washington Monthly. Coming in at number one, by a considerable amount, is GVSU, retaining almost five college graduates per $100,000 of state funds—the sixth-highest rate of return of any college in the country. To put that into perspective, consider this: According to a separate Upjohn study, governments must spend nearly $200,000 in corporate tax incentives to create just one job—and not a college-level-salary job, just an average-paying job. That’s a rate of return 10 times worse than what Michigan taxpayers get for their investments in GVSU. 

Founded in the 1960s as “the university in a cornfield,” Grand Valley State University—like many regional universities—has chronically struggled to attract the requisite attention and funding from Lansing. Until 2017, GVSU received the least per student funding of any school in the state; today it garners the third least, $2,000 less per student than Michigan’s average public university. Under these conditions, most colleges would likely underperform their peers. And yet GVSU consistently ranks first or second in overall performance, according to state performance criteria that include a host of metrics, including graduation rates, retention rates, students who are eligible for Pell Grants, and degrees awarded in critical fields. GVSU also ranks a respectable 82nd out of 372 on the Washington Monthly’s Best Bang for the Buck list of colleges in the Midwest.

But perhaps most relevant for state legislators is the university’s return on tax dollars investment, which is almost unmatched anywhere in the country. The question is, why? 

One reason is graduation rates. Colleges with higher grad rates have more alumni earning higher incomes. GVSU graduates nearly 69 percent of its students. That’s better, by far, than any other regional university in the state. Only the University of Michigan and Michigan State have higher graduation rates among publics, but they are more selective than GVSU, which admits 90 percent of its applicants. 

Another reason is that colleges located in regions with robust economies have higher returns on state investment because their alumni tend to earn higher incomes. Grand Rapids is something of a boomtown: It has been called “the most successful intensive manufacturing city in America,” and GVSU makes the best of its geographic good fortune. For instance, 75 percent of the university’s students engage in internships, apprenticeships, and other forms of experiential learning. One such experience is the Laker Accelerated Talent Link, a program that Jenna Duursma joined during her senior year, which offers a $15,000 scholarship, a business-related certificate, and a paid internship. “The whole point of the program is to retain talent in the Grand Rapids community,” Duursma explained. “That was kind of the selling point for me because a lot of these companies I’ve grown up hearing about and been interested in my whole life.” 

Connecting students with the community also offers GVSU the ability to constantly test and update the curriculum. As students learn what skills and classes were most useful to them, faculty and administrators internalize that feedback to better tailor the university’s offerings. Curriculum adaptation also unfolds on a much larger scale. After a recent study concluded that Grand Rapids needed to increase the local tech talent tenfold, Mantella created the GVSU College of Computing, with a mandate to triple the number of tech graduates the school produces by 2033. 

All of this adds up to a college experience that offers students a particularly good opportunity to graduate and start their career nearby. In a 2023 survey of GVSU graduates, 93 percent of respondents were either employed or continuing education. Eighty-six percent of those graduates live and work in Michigan, 76 percent of them in western Michigan, where Grand Rapids is located. 

Of course, there is only so much that GVSU can accomplish with such limited funding. Even as the school offers an incredible return on investment for the state, rising tuition and student debt mean the students don’t get as good a deal. GVSU readily acknowledges this reality. When I spoke with Thomas Haas, the president of the university at the time of the 2011 cuts, he explained, “Each year I was president I would go to the state and tell them that if we received funding at the median level for universities in Michigan, I could cut tuition 15 percent. The board fully supported me on that. And the legislature just kind of laughed and said okay but never ended up doing anything about it.” 

With more funding, GVSU could not only lower tuition, or at least moderate future increases; it could also produce more of the graduates that Michigan desperately requires. Tech graduates could be tripled sooner than the 2033 target. The university could reinvest in its nursing program—an occupation Michigan is experiencing a dramatic shortage in. The Talent Link, which started with 21 students and Mantella hopes to double each year, could expand by orders of magnitude if the state helped subsidize it: “Suddenly, you’ve got 5,000 students who could be activated. From a state investment perspective, programs that have employers with skin in the game and institutions with skin in the game, that’s a leveraged dollar. To me it’s like, Let’s go.” 

Rick Snyder was fond of castigating college graduates who left the state to become “just another yuppie in Chicago.” But it was primarily his decision to decimate regional university funding, which fueled the exodus of fleeing talent. Since Gretchen Whitmer restored funding, GVSU has experienced its first positive enrollment growth in six years. And other schools are beginning to turn things around; Michigan universities statewide saw a 1.8 percent enrollment increase from 2023 to 2024.

Meanwhile, similar battles over higher education funding have only intensified in other states as public confidence in universities, especially among conservative voters, has sharply declined—a function of ideological distrust, anti-elitism, and exorbitant costs all rising in tandem. Legislators assiduously frame cuts as reactions to whichever college bugaboo becomes the latest culture war fodder, so higher education has become the perennial conservative bogeyman. Mississippi, for one, continues to follow the old Snyder playbook. After the State Auditor’s Office released a report detailing high levels of brain drain for college graduates, it proposed getting rid of what the auditor, Shad White, called “useless,” “garbage” liberal arts degrees, which he said serve as “indoctrination factories.” When similar reports of brain drain surfaced in Pennsylvania, conservative legislators quickly proposed creating a constitutional amendment to cap spending and cut taxes to retain talent. Instead, Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro managed to convince the legislature to invest an additional $190.8 million in Pennsylvania’s higher education system, mostly in scholarships to attend regional universities. This decision reverses decades of disinvestment that has left the Keystone State one of the least affordable states to attend college, ranking 49th in the country for state appropriations to higher education per capita. 

Now appears an especially promising time to invest in regional universities. When the pandemic laid bare the fragility of global supply chains, policy makers responded with a frenzy of federal legislation supporting infrastructure investment, industrial policy, and reshoring production back into America. Richard Florida, an urbanist who rose to prominence for his 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, told me that more skilled workers will be necessary to make this strategy succeed. While research universities are critical for producing top-end talent, Florida explained, “the knowledge economy requires talent of all stripes. You not only need the kids in Ann Arbor doing all the coding, you also need people in Grand Valley who can make shit work.” 

Michigan learned this the hard way in 2017, when Amazon announced that it was looking for a city to be the new home of its secondary headquarters. The benefits would be immense: as many as 50,000 new full-time employees earning more than $100,000 a year in wages and benefits on average, generating $5 billion in economic activity. Few states offered incentive packages as generous as the ones Rick Snyder pushed through the legislature to lure the company to Detroit. All told, the 242-page proposal outlined roughly $4 billion in tax breaks. And yet Amazon passed on it. Detroit didn’t even crack the company’s final top 20 list. Why? Amazon’s calculation was incredibly simple: Michigan possessed an insufficient talent pool in the region.

As states scramble to compete for the top jobs and companies, tax incentives will always play some role. But politicians are fooling themselves if they think corporate subsidies can substitute for the steady support of regional universities, which, dollar for dollar, offer the best hope for broad prosperity in the 21st century
and beyond.

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