When Semafor reported this month that Lina Khan was helping New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani identify overlooked legal tools to make daily life cheaper, the example that caused the most controversy was almost comically trivial: beer prices at Yankee Stadium. In her new role as co-chair of Mamdani’s transition team, the former FTC chair, who spent the Biden years cracking down on junk fees and captive-market exploitation, has been studying the statutory authority the city possesses, for example, an “unconscionable pricing” rule, new transparency requirements for algorithmic pricing, and levers embedded in stadium leases and concession contracts. Khan aims to see whether the city can use its powers to lower prices in areas where New Yorkers face monopolistic markups—stadium concessions among them. The $21 ballgame beer was only one of Khan’s illustrative examples.  

Still, the prospect of using existing law to lower beer prices was enough to provoke, shall we say, a pissy response from prominent economic commentators. Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers Chair Jason Furman warned about externalities like excessive drunkenness. “What happens to prices when demand changes and supply is inelastic?” Furman asked. Matt Yglesias insisted price caps would create shortages unless paired with rationing. He argued that cheaper beer would inevitably raise the “profit-maximizing” ticket price, because concessions and admission are complementary goods. Others chimed in with familiar Econ-101 cautions about deadweight loss and market distortions. 

The vehemence of the response revealed something more profound than a disagreement over beer. No critics acknowledged the actual market structure they were describing. Their objections rested on the false assumption that stadiums behave like ordinary competitive environments—places with multiple sellers, substitution options, and price signals that discipline both sides. Stadiums and their vendors resemble almost none of that. 

Professional sports teams operate as publicly subsidized functional monopolies. In Major League Baseball’s case, they enjoy a literal federal antitrust exemption. Every major stadium in New York is either built on public land, financed with public support, or governed through city-negotiated leases. Concessionaires operate under exclusive contracts. Once inside, fans face a single seller with no substitutes and no exit short of abandoning the entire experience. Of course, there may be multiple vendors and brands within a stadium, but concession prices are almost always set from the top.  

These monopolies do not arise naturally: New York has poured hundreds of millions of public dollars into the infrastructure for Yankee Stadium, Citi Field, Madison Square Garden, and the Barclays Center. Critics defending market discipline are talking about a market that exists only because the public built and maintains it. 

This is why applying competitive-market logic is a category mistake. Yglesias’s complementarity argument only makes sense in a textbook world where teams set a single profit-maximizing “bundle” price and every dollar shaved off beer must be added to tickets to break even. In reality, fans vary in whether they buy concessions at all, many don’t remember or anticipate how much they’ll spend, and modern ticket prices are driven by dynamic pricing and a volatile secondary market—so clean, dollar-for-dollar pass-through is unlikely. Teams are already pricing tickets right up to the point where higher prices would scare off enough customers to reduce revenue, which is why they routinely leave seats empty rather than cut prices. His second point—that cheaper concessions might make games more enjoyable and thus raise ticket demand—is probably valid, but that’s a good thing. The goal is fuller stadiums and better experiences, and a fair front-end ticket price for a more fun event is a perfectly reasonable trade. Only on a chalkboard does making the game more enjoyable become a policy problem. 

Empirical evidence supports this. When Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium moved to “fan-friendly pricing”—$2 hot dogs, $3 refillable drinks, $5 beers—food sales increased. Ticket prices did not rise. Shortages did not appear. Attendance improved. Far from distorting a competitive equilibrium, lower prices expanded volume in a setting where cost wasn’t the constraint on consumption, but monopoly markup. 

A policy intervention will have different second-order effects than a team willingly reducing its margins, but that’s an argument for more price regulation, rather than less. If venues jack up ticket prices in response to having concessions tied to their street value, ticket price increases should be scrutinized by regulators, too. The goal is to fill more seats and stop subjecting people to rip-offs.  

Stadiums fit neatly into what Brian Shearer at Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator calls captive-customer environments—markets where consumers cannot “reasonably avoid” a purchase and where firms can extract “island prices” unrelated to wholesale costs or scarcity. Airports, hospital emergency departments, and prison phone systems all exhibit similar patterns. Regulators commonly impose caps or oversight in those settings because competition cannot do its disciplining work. Stadium pricing is analytically the same. 

This isn’t just about $21 beers. As The Nation reported, the Mamdani transition team is cataloguing an array of dormant or underused legal tools to lower prices across a range of markets. Section 349 of the state’s consumer-protection law prohibits “unconscionable” or “deceptive” acts in any business operating in New York, a definition courts have applied in captive environments. New algorithmic-pricing transparency rules could force rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft, as well as stadium vendors, to disclose how they set prices. 

What Mamdani and Khan are exploring, then, is not some socialist fantasy about micromanaging beer prices. It is the application of existing law to a market whose structure the public has already shaped, and whose monopoly behavior the public has every right to restrict. They are standard legal powers that New York has chosen not to use until now. 

The strangest part of the debate was the sense of alarm, almost a moral panic, that a city might want to make a night out at the ballgame slightly more fun for the people who paid for it. It was especially odd coming from public intellectuals who pride themselves on advising democratic candidates on issues, yet failed to see the value of ‘lower beer prices at ballgames.’ To hear the reaction, one would think a cheaper Bud Light threatened the delicate machinery of American capitalism. But fans shouldn’t have to endure monopoly markups just because economists prefer the purity of their models to the messiness of reality. 

The post The Freakout Over Cheaper Beer at Yankee Stadium appeared first on Washington Monthly.

A year ago, I was in my childhood bedroom, firing off job applications and experiencing what I would later write about for the Washington Monthly: that new graduates don’t launch into the labor market; they seep in slowly, usually with dread, even more so during economic downturns like the self-made one America is living through. However, I wrote, the truth is that college graduates are far better positioned than those without a degree. It’s frustrating when you’re the one sending out résumés. Still, it’s precisely the kind of nuanced story the Monthly exists to tell—resistant to the louder, simpler narratives that dominate the news cycle, but essential for policymakers to understand.  

Donate to the Washington Monthly today. 

A year later, I’m still in my childhood bedroom. But thankfully, as the data would predict, I landed a job. And now I’m somehow writing stories, commissioning writers, and helping shape a legendary 56-year-old magazine. 

I’m learning a lot, Monthly-style. My phone often rings, and it’s Paul Glastris, the editor-in-chief, who gives editing notes by phone, usually unannounced. (“You got a second?” means: buckle up.) When I interviewed with him, he asked who I read. I said Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias, assuming it was a safe response for a center-left publication like the Washington Monthly. (It had the added virtue of being true.) Klein is a former Monthly intern after all, touted on our application page. Paul nodded. A few weeks later, when he called and asked me to critique Klein’s “abundance” theory of what ails the country and liberalism, I don’t think he remembered that conversation. 

The piece I wound up co-authoring with Paul in March was the first comprehensive response to the arguments made by abundance liberals like Klein and Yglesias—about housing, energy, and the role of the state. Some 50 stories in other outlets have rehashed our points. 

But that’s how it works when you write for a magazine that’s ahead of the curve. We were the first to dedicate an entire issue responding to the abundance movement, and since then, we’ve continued to strengthen our case with additional reporting and investigations. Other publications are always playing catch-up. 

We don’t just catch ideas early, we catch people, too. My favorite piece I’ve written is a profile of Batya Ungar-Sargon, a pundit many people hadn’t heard of, who has evolved from a left-leaning academic to a social-justice liberal to a MAGA cheerleader. (Matt Cooper, the executive editor, worked at the Monthly when he was my age, suggested the idea, and edited the piece.) She wouldn’t talk to me, but her friend Steve Bannon did. I called her “the first new media star of the second Trump presidency.” To my surprise, Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic and Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC shared the piece, a testament to our small magazine’s reach. Batya is now a CNN contributor and has her own eponymous show on NewsNation.

Donate now to the Washington Monthly. 

What I’ve learned at the Washington Monthly is simple: look where others aren’t. Ask the complex question. Build the case. And then write the hell out of it. Start over and do it again.  

That approach has taken me everywhere. I wrote a piece on New York Democrats’ Election Day wipeout, focusing on candidates like Representative Pat Ryan, who’d figured out how to outperform. I interviewed a lawyer from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau about the gutting of his agency from within. I spoke with Democratic and Republican operatives in Kansas about the parallels between Trump’s second-term policies and Sam Brownback’s disastrous supply-side experiment for a piece that turned out to be prescient. And I’ve managed to insert myself into the debate about the future of the Democratic Party, American liberalism, and MAGA. 

After ten months here, I’m still pinching myself. None of it would’ve happened without this magazine and the chances it takes on young writers, as well as the mentoring it provides them. 

This magazine wouldn’t exist without readers like you. 

If you’ve ever read something in the Monthly and thought, “I haven’t seen that anywhere else,” that’s not an accident. That’s what happens when a magazine with a skeleton staff and a shoestring budget gives young people like me a shot. And when it hits, it hits hard. 

A $50 gift gets you a subscription. A larger one allows us to publish stories that other outlets wouldn’t touch—and means a new crop of writers, restless and eager to prove themselves. 

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The post My Washington Monthly Education  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

No U.S. president has ever laid siege to America’s colleges and universities as has Donald Trump in the first ten months of his second term. The success of his efforts to bend higher education to his will, however, is mixed. On the one hand, thanks to a submissive Republican Congress, he’s managed to cut billions in previously appropriated federal research dollars to universities. On the other, his attempts to force colleges to adopt conservative priorities in hiring and curricula have so far mostly failed. While a few institutions, like Columbia University, initially bowed to political pressure, the vast majority have resisted—bolstered by court rulings that his retributive funding cuts unconstitutionally violated the First Amendment, separation of powers, and various federal statutes. Still, Trump has three-plus more years in office to experiment with ways to dominate higher ed and it’s not clear how long universities can continue to resist. 

If Trump’s actions have no precedent​ at​ the federal level, they do at the state​. Over the course of two terms as Florida governor, Ron DeSantis has taken on that state’s public higher education system in ways that presaged Trump’s moves. Looking at the results of DeSantis’ experiment might provide clues to where Trump’s is headed. 

As Chris Mullin wrote recently in the Washington Monthly, DeSantis exploited Florida’s unusually centralized system of higher-education governance to insert political control directly into the classroom—stacking boards, replacing presidents, and rewriting curricula. His boldest gamble has been a complete takeover and ideological makeover of ​​New College of Florida, a small public liberal-arts college on Sarasota Bay known for its experimental pedagogy and progressive-left campus culture. Charging poor performance and ideological bias, DeSantis announced plans in early 2023 to transform the school into a “Hillsdale of the South”—a reference to the small, selective, conservative-leaning Michigan college that eschews government funds and focuses on teaching the classics. The governor appointed six new conservative trustees to New College, including activist Christopher Rufo, ​who then ​fired its President, Patricia Okker, and replaced her with former Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran ​at more than double Okker’s salary​. Within months, the new board abolished the gender​ studies program, dismissed faculty and administrators, created athletic teams, and secured tens of millions in state funding.

Two years later, the picture looks grim. New College’s four-year graduation rate has plummeted from 58.3 to 47.4 percent. The school’s U.S. News & World Report college ranking has fallen by nearly 60 spots, from 76th among national liberal-arts colleges in 2022 to 135th this year. Faculty and staff have fled, and students have followed them out the door. “It’s kind of like a Ponzi scheme,” one professor told Inside Higher Ed. “Students keep leaving, so they have to recruit bigger and bigger cohorts.” Spending​ at the college​, meanwhile, has exploded. ​In Tallahassee, there is now open talk of either privatizing New College or shutting it down completely. 

DeSantis’s justification for the takeover was that New College was an educational disaster—a failed experiment in left-wing academic culture. Though the school ​had its problems (it struggled​​, for instance,​​ to reach its enrollment goals, as do many small, less-selective colleges around the country) and ​was indeed ​​left leaning, it was far from a disaster. In fact, by most objective measures, it was a model of what a small public liberal-arts institution could achieve. As Aalia Thomas reported in the Washington Monthly in 2023, New College consistently ranked near the top of the magazine’s l​ist of l​iberal​ ​arts ​colleges ​​for upward mobility, research, and service. ​​Its graduates earned PhDs at rates higher than many of the nation’s most prestigious private liberal arts colleges. Its curriculum mixed ​​postcolonial theory with Aristotle and Voltaire. The college charged about $7,000 a year for low-to-medium-income students—a bargain compared to most similar liberal arts colleges. It enrolled a high share of Pell​ ​​Grant recipients and produced civically engaged graduates—​​92.6 percent of its students were registered to vote in 2020. Far from failing, New College embodied many of the qualities conservatives say they prize in public higher education: affordability, rigor, civic virtue, and upward mobility. 

​​The governor’s appointees arrived convinced they were rescuing a failing school. ​​They replaced New College’s narrative-evaluation system with traditional grades. They bragged about making the college more “selective” (instead, the percentage of new students with a 4.0 or above high school grade point average decreased from 55.1 percent in 2022 to 42.1 percent in 2024)​.​ They recruited athletes and ​​self-described “normal” students to reshape the culture, ​​many of whom quickly transferred out. ​The campus began to change in telling ways: the reopened campus café, operated by a vendor tied to Corcoran, now serves coffee in cups printed with Bible verses, and the college has commissioned a statue of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk to stand on campus in honor of “free speech​.​​​” ​All this change has been financed by ​​an ​​eye-watering ​​boost​​ in ​​spending​​. The college’s budget has grown from​​ ​$53,232,164​​​​ ​​​​the year before the overhaul ​​​​to​​​​ ​​​​$93,043,119​​​​ ​​​​today​​​​—a​​​​ 75 percent​​​​ increase​​​​.​​​​ ​

​​​​​​​​Even DeSantis allies are turning on the project. “There can be no question anymore about what the numbers really are,” said Eric Silagy, a​​ DeSantis-appointed​​ member of the state Board of Governors. Nathan Allen, ​​who served as ​​​​vice president of strategy​​ for New College ​​during the conservative takeover but has since resigned​​, ​suggested where the blame for those numbers should be placed​: “​​New College is not a House or Senate project … It’s a Ron DeSantis project.”​​ ​​​Corcoran himself has said, ​​if New College doesn’t produce something different, “then we should be closed down.”  

“There is certainly room for improvement at New College,” the Washington Monthly reported in 2023. “But there is a lot more room to make the college worse, and plenty of reason to think that’s what the DeSantis administration will accomplish.”  

Those words proved prophetic and might well apply to Trump’s national crusade to remake universities. Just as DeSantis’s Florida experiment has collapsed under its own contradictions, so might Trump’s. Politics can seize a campus, but it can’t run one. 

The post Where Might Trump’s Attacks on Universities Lead? Just Look at Florida appeared first on Washington Monthly.

“The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.” The line is apocryphally attributed to Josef Stalin. Still, its fundamental truth persists, and it’s been making the rounds in Minneapolis, where today, the city could elect a mayor that most voters didn’t pick. 

On paper, the two-term incumbent Jacob Frey should be cruising to victory. A pragmatic liberal with movie star good looks and a Minnesota “nice” demeanor, Frey has led the city through the most tumultuous years since the 1960s, after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 set off racial and political unrest and triggered a police exodus. In the months that followed, violent crime surged: homicides doubled, carjackings tripled, and emergency response times grew. Frey faced fury from progressives demanding the abolition of the police and residents pleading for order. Five years later, Frey’s still standing, with a record most mayors would envy. Violent crime has fallen for three straight years since peaking in 2021—homicides down 20 percent, gun violence down almost 50 percent. As Paul Glastris and I reported earlier this year, his administration passed one of the nation’s most ambitious and effective housing reforms, removing height limits for apartments near transit corridors. Minneapolis rents remain roughly 15 percent below the national average, even as its population grows. Things are finally improving in a city that’s been through hell, and Frey’s policies are part of the reason. Not surprisingly, he leads every poll, has a considerable edge in fundraising, and his campaign is projecting confidence in the press.  

And yet there’s a decent chance Frey will lose. 

The reason is ranked-choice voting and how Frey’s opponents can game it. Under this system, which the city adopted in 2006, voters rank up to three candidates in order of preference. If no candidate gets 50 percent, the last-place candidate is knocked out, and voters who ranked that candidate first have their vote counted for their next choice. That keeps happening until somebody crawls over 50, or until only one candidate remains.  

This year, three of Frey’s rivals—state senator Omar Fateh, a democratic socialist; Jazz Hampton, a lawyer and tech entrepreneur; and DeWayne Davis, a pastor—have quietly joined forces: don’t attack one another, appear together when possible, and urge voters not to rank Frey. In 2021, this coordinated attack propelled a Democratic Socialist City Council candidate from third place in the first round to victory. It can happen again; this time for mayor. Neither the Frey nor Fateh campaigns responded to my questions about whether they are preparing potential legal challenges to the outcome. 

Fifteen candidates are technically running, but everyone knows it’s three against one. “We’ve seen two-person alliances before,” Jeanne Massey, executive director of FairVote Minnesota, which helped champion ranked-choice, told The Minnesota Star Tribune. “What’s new this year is an explicit slate of three.”  

The alliance is more mathematical than philosophical. “They want you to think that Fateh, a socialist and Davis, a pro-business liberal, and Hampton, kind of between the two, are all interchangeable,” wrote Carol Becker, editor of the Minneapolis Times and former Minneapolis Board of Estimate and Taxation member, referring to the progressive group backing Frey’s challengers. A recent email from the group, Minneapolis for the Many, blared, “Fateh, Davis, and Hampton Extend Lead Over Frey!” The fine print: their own polling had Frey at 34 percent of first-choice votes, Fateh at 29, Davis at 10, and Hampton at 5. Only by adding the three challengers together do they get to “we’re winning.” 

A City Still Living in the Aftermath 

The conditions for this alliance were set five years ago, when Floyd’s murder and the spike in violent crime that followed upended the city’s political order. At a protest in June 2020, protesters yelled, “Go home, Jacob, go home!” and “Shame! Shame!” when the mayor would not, on the spot, commit to abolishing the police department. Days later, most of the City Council stood on a park stage and pledged to “defund the police.” Voters joined the mayor in rejecting that vision at the ballot in 2021, and most councilmembers who pledged to defund lost their seats. But the hangover remains: every race in this blue city is still, on some level, about whether Minneapolis wants to return to 2020 or keep moving forward. 

Frey, 44, who ran from the left in 2017, checked the worst impulses of the city council. He wanted to reform the police department, not abolish it. He cleared homeless encampments. He repeatedly said that the city needed more cops, not fewer. The city of half a million residents has slowly rebuilt its depleted police ranks while diversifying its force. Minneapolis still has one of the lowest police staffing per capita in the country, roughly 600 officers. Chicago has 12,000 officers, and its population is not 20 times that of Minneapolis.  

Frey’s critics on the left argue he’s too close to developers and too quick to clear homeless encampments. But his allies say he’s done what progressive mayors often fail to do—cap crime and housing costs. 

The ‘Mamdani of Minneapolis’ 

Omar Fateh, 35, a democratic socialist first elected to the state senate in 2020, invites comparison to New York City’s Zohran Mamdani. Both Muslim statehouse members are Democratic Socialists of America acolytes running social media-geared campaigns in majority-Democratic cities. 

Fateh, like Mamdani, once ran on dismantling the police department, but has softened his tone, calling instead for “real violence prevention” and shifting some 911 calls to mental health responders. The Somali American is the only major candidate to support rent control and “safe outdoor spaces” that would legalize homeless encampments.  

Fateh has Mamdani’s platform, but not his polish. “Andrew Cuomo is gonna say a lot of things tomorrow night on the debate stage,” Mamdani quipped recently on Fox News ahead of his final debate, “and frankly, I wish it was more like NASCAR so New Yorkers could see the billionaires sponsoring him right on his suit jacket.” That’s a brilliant Mamdani line, pointed and instantly shareable. Fateh never has ripostes like that. 

At one debate, Fateh said Minneapolis police should arrest ICE officers and federal agents carrying out Trump’s deportation orders. Frey asked how local cops would go after feds with “bigger guns.” Pressed to clarify, Fateh stumbled through a line about Frey not being willing to do as much because the same people “[bankrolling] Donald Trump’s campaign have been bankrolling [Frey’s] campaign as well.” The mayor snapped back with the sternness of a dad catching a fib: “That’s not answering the question.” The moment epitomized the contrast between the two men: Frey sharp and quick on his feet, Fateh earnest but improvising—and willing to propose something that, if taken seriously, would trigger a dangerous standoff between local and federal law enforcement. 

Fateh also has baggage. In 2022, his brother-in-law and campaign volunteer pleaded guilty to submitting fraudulent absentee-ballot requests. Fateh denied knowing him to colleagues and the press, then admitted the close connection. Although a federal probe spared Fateh, the episode cost him credibility even among progressives. Another Minnesota Reformer report raised questions about Fateh introducing legislation to award a $500,000 state grant to Somali TV of Minnesota, an online news outlet, after it aired ads in 2020 that encouraged viewers to vote for him. None of this has stopped Fateh from collecting endorsements from nationally known progressives, such as U.S. Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, and others who draw their party’s ire. 

Policy differences between Frey and Fateh and the latter’s ethical lapses would typically dominate the race. Instead, under ranked-choice voting, they’ve been overshadowed. Each of the three candidates challenging Frey avoids disagreements that might alienate the others’ supporters. Debates blur into parallel stump speeches.  

Democracy, I guess 

Hampton, a lawyer and tech entrepreneur, is arguably closest to Frey on policing, much more so than Fateh—he jokes that “we both run the West Coast offense; I’d just implement it better.” Davis, a pastor and former congressional staffer, wants a “comprehensive approach” modeled on Baltimore’s community-violence prevention programs. What any of these positions mean is really anyone’s guess. 

The current dynamic demonstrates how ranked-choice voting can be manipulated: three candidates with conflicting positions and some with ethics problems effectively running on a ticket against a mayor who, by any conventional measure, has a successful record and remains the most popular candidate. 

If Frey wins, it will be a triumph for pragmatic liberal governance in a city still haunted by its George Floyd-era crime spike. But if ranked-choice voting pushes a second- or third-place candidate into first, Minneapolis could wake up Wednesday with a mayor-elect supported by a minority of voters. That wouldn’t be fraud. But it would prove that even well-intentioned reforms can distort democracy—by blurring the differences voters need to see. Minneapolitans may wish for a simpler ballot and a sharper argument about their city’s future. Other cities may, too. 

The post The Minneapolis Mayoral Race Is the One to Watch. Really  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For a half century, the most recession-proof story in mainstream journalism has been declaring that college degrees aren’t recession-proof. Every economic downturn produces headlines warning that diplomas have lost—or are losing—their value. “Two things about these stories have remained constant,” Kevin Carey, who currently directs the education policy program at New America, wrote in The New Republic in 2011. “They always feature an over-educated bartender, and they are always wrong.”  

The genre dates back at least to the 1970s, when the Harvard labor economist Richard Freeman warned in his book The Overeducated American that too many people were earning degrees and that their long-term wages would suffer. The New York Times splashed the argument across its front page in 1975: “After generations during which going to college was assumed to be a sure route to the better life, college-educated Americans are losing their economic advantage.” But within the decade, the opposite happened: The wage premium for graduates soared, and it has only gone up more ever since.  

Census Bureau data shows that households headed by a bachelor’s-degree holder earn a median income of $132,700, more than double the $58,410 for those led by someone with only a high school diploma. Over the past two decades, degree-holding households saw real incomes rise by 13 percent, while high school-only households saw virtually no rise. As Carey wrote again in The Atlantic in 2023, that hasn’t stopped the cycle of headlines and sad profiles every time the economic cycle slows down.  

Which brings us to this fall’s entrant. On September 15, The New York Times published a story with the headline “The Newest Face of Long-Term Unemployment? The College Educated.” As of August 2025, there were about 1.9 million Americans classified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as “long-term unemployed”—roughly 26 percent of all jobless workers. (The BLS defines long-term unemployed as people who are jobless for 27 weeks or more.) A decade ago, only one in five of those classified as long-term unemployed had a college degree. The Times reports that today, it’s closer to one in three, or more than half a million people. Their stories are as affecting as ever: Sean Wittmeyer, profiled in the Times piece, has two master’s degrees, and said he can’t even get hired at his local board game store. “Anyone with a free subscription to Claude, ChatGPT, could do a decent amount of what I could do before,” he lamented.  

AI certainly can’t be what is preventing Wittmeyer from getting a retail job, but something real is happening. Job openings have fallen from 12.1 million in March 2022 to 7.2 million in July 2025. Despite recent cuts, interest rates remain high. Tariffs are sporadic and unpredictable. Federal agencies are being gutted. At the same time, employers are leaning into generative AI tools that automate exactly the kind of entry-level work that young people have historically used to get a foothold: research, drafting, data entry, analysis. OpenAI researchers have documented how ChatGPT can now perform more than 50 percent of tasks across 19 percent of all occupations. It’s the worst-case convergence—short-term economic chaos colliding with long-term technological change.  

The Burning Glass Institute, a nonprofit labor market analytics firm, warns that the bottom rung of the career ladder is eroding. Its July 2025 report found that one year after graduation, 52 percent of the class of 2023 were working in jobs that didn’t require a degree. The report describes a “flipped pyramid”: steady demand for experienced workers paired with shrinking opportunities for new graduates. SignalFire, a venture capital firm, similarly found that between 2019 and 2024, there was a 50 percent decline in new roles for people with less than one year of experience at top tech firms. In sales, design, HR, engineering, and legal departments, the old footholds are vanishing. Add to that a brutal job search process. “Tinderized,” as Annie Lowrey ​​described it in The Atlantic—résumés screened by AI without human input, cookie-cutter cover letters written by AI, and hundreds of applications are disappearing into the ether. It’s no wonder that the Sean Wittmeyers of the world are discouraged.  

So the Times is not wrong to notice the strain. But the narrow focus on college grads risks obscuring the bigger story. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates (4.8 percent in June) is trending upward, but it’s still lower than that of all workers ages 22 to 27 (7.4 percent). In reality, the broader economy is wobbling: August’s 4.3 percent unemployment rate was the highest since 2021. BLS revisions shaved nearly a million jobs off the books between March 2024 and March 2025, ending a 53-month growth streak. Immigrant labor supply has fallen by 1.5 million workers in six months, further contributing to slowdowns in manufacturing and construction, which then reverberate to fields like real estate and architecture. Federal workforce cuts are on pace to eliminate 300,000 jobs by year’s end. In sum: The labor market is cooling for everyone. The present numbers, while sobering, do not tell the story of a collapse in the value of a college degree.  

Demographically, the long-term unemployed still skew less educated, nonwhite, and disabled. The roughly half-million long-term unemployed degree holders constitute less than half a percent of the U.S. labor force. And while college grads do make up a bigger slice of that pool than before, their overall unemployment rate remains far lower than that of workers without a degree. New grads as a group always take a certain amount of time to gain traction. “We graduate a new class of degree holders every year, who typically take seven to nine months to find a job that aligns with their skills,” says Courtney Brown of the Lumina Foundation. In a job market with nearly half as many openings as there were less than three years ago, that ramp-up is simply taking longer, Brown told me.  

History backs this up. The class of 2010 entered the workforce amid the wreckage of the Great Recession, with unemployment above 9 percent and 45 percent of the unemployed classified as long-term unemployed. At the time, they were branded a “lost generation.” Yet within a decade, their cohort’s wage premium over nongraduates had climbed back up even above normal levels, approaching an all-time high. Underemployment spikes for cohorts graduating into weak economies; then it falls as they move into better jobs.  

“The [career] ladder isn’t broken—it’s just being replaced with something that looks a lot flatter,” ​​Heather Doshay, formerly of the venture capital firm SignalFire, told CNBC. Today’s first job might be more technical or specialized—but it’s not inaccessible. “When the internet and email came on the scene as common corporate required skills,” Doshay noted, “new grads were well positioned to become experts by using them in school, and the same absolutely applies here with how accessible AI is.” The key, she said, “will be in how new grads harness their capabilities to become experts so they are seen as desirable tech-savvy workers who are at the forefront of AI’s advances.”  

Wages tend to follow productivity, and the workers best positioned to harness new technologies like AI in today’s economy are, by and large, college graduates. That is one reason degrees continue to command a premium. When the Great Recession hit, millions of Americans lost their jobs, but college graduates were the most likely to be employed at the outset and least likely to be unemployed as the crisis went on.

Economists also caution against declaring AI a job killer just yet. Anders Humlum, an economist at the University of Chicago, points out that predictions about AI’s long-term labor market impact are still highly speculative. “We now have two and a half years of experience with generative AI chatbots diffusing widely throughout the economy,” Humlum told CNBC, and “these tools have not made a significant difference for employment or earnings in any occupation thus far.”  

Universities are responding too—purchasing premium and university-specific services from companies ​​like OpenAI and Anthropic, offering hands-on AI courses, and transforming campuses into training grounds for a more digitally fluent workforce.  

So the education-to-employment conveyor belt might be noisier and slower than in the past, but it’s still moving. AI is reshaping the early stages of careers, not eliminating them entirely. A twenty-year-old can use AI to polish a cover letter, build a pitch deck, or practice job interviews. A designer can generate prototypes, a welder can simulate repairs. Many skills that used to require formal apprenticeship or classroom time are now teachable by machine. As Bruno V. Manno argued recently in the Monthly, AI raises the bar for demonstrated expertise—but it lowers the barrier to acquiring it.  

And if the short-term picture is cloudy, the long-term fundamentals point in the opposite direction. A new Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce report, Falling Behind, projects that by 2032 the U.S. will be short 5.25 million workers with postsecondary credentials, including 4.5 million with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Managers, teachers, nurses, engineers, accountants, and physicians are all on the shortage list. The culprits: Baby Boomer retirements, declining college enrollment and completion, and restrictive immigration policy. Far from being oversupplied with college graduates, the nation is on track for a severe shortage.  

Jobs demanding higher-order human skills—problem solving, communication, leadership—are likely to keep expanding, even in an AI-saturated economy. Those skills are exactly what college educations develop, and what AI cannot replace. That’s consistent with what we already see in the labor market. Even during today’s slowdown, degree holders earn far more, face lower unemployment, and enjoy better long-term prospects than their peers without diplomas. They live longer, are healthier, and are more likely to own homes.  

Why does the myth endure? Not because the reporting is false—the Times is right that more graduates are showing up among the long-term unemployed, and their stories deserve attention. What’s misleading is the leap from moment to meaning: the implication that the degree itself is losing value in the labor market. As Carey wrote almost 15 years ago, “People naturally tend to project current trends into the future, missing the up-and-down nature of the business cycle.” Today’s pain reflects two overlapping shocks: the economic whiplash of Trump’s second term, and AI tools that are rapidly automating the lowest rungs of white-collar work. Those forces make it harder for new graduates to get started—but history and data both show that the long-term premium on higher education is rising, not collapsing. 

Misreading cyclical pain as structural collapse has consequences. It erodes public confidence in higher education. In 2015, 57 percent of Americans said they had “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence” in higher ed. By 2024, that had fallen to 36 percent, while the share expressing little or no confidence more than tripled, to 32 percent. When students absorb the message that college isn’t worth it, whether because of rising costs, wokeness, or the rise of AI, they’re more likely to forgo it. That fuels a cycle that benefits no one: not the student’s long-term health and wages, not the economy that needs more educated workers, and not colleges that depend on enrollment. 

None of this diminishes the difficulty of Sean Wittmeyer’s job search. But it’s worth noting, as the Times buried at the end of its story, that he is now using his design skills to develop and sell board games. The college degree has endured for a reason. What we need isn’t fewer of them, but better-aligned ones: programs tailored to workforce demand, policies that boost affordability and completion, and institutions that help students translate education into opportunity. The bartender with a doctorate will always be good copy. But the degree remains the surest, sturdiest path to prosperity.  

The post No, College Degrees Aren’t Losing Their Value   appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Almost twelve months after their drubbing in the 2024 election, Democrats are still having a tired argument about the party’s future. Should it move left, reclaim the center, or lurch right to win back the working class?  

The New York Times editorial board offered its answer in October, with an article titled “The Partisans Are Wrong: Moving to the Center Is the Way to Win.” The story profiled a group of mostly Democratic elected officials characterized as moderates: Marcy Kaptur in Ohio, Pat Ryan in New York, Jared Golden in Maine, Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, Ruben Gallego in Arizona, Jacky Rosen in Nevada, and Vicente Gonzalez in Texas. Citing a post-election analysis, it found that these “moderate” Democrats outperformed Kamala Harris by 2.8 points. At the same time, progressives—including Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—lagged behind her. Of the 17 Democrats (13 House, four Senate) who won in places Trump carried in 2024, “moderation dominated their campaign messages,” the Times found. 

Buried in the essay, though, is one line that really crystallizes what is going on:  

The moderation that has worked best in recent years is not a sober, 20th-century centrism that promises to protect the status quo. It is more combative and populist. [Emphasis added]  

You don’t say.  

The Democrats who succeeded best in 2024—especially in purple and red territory—weren’t economically moderate in any recognizable Beltway sense. They were populists who focused relentlessly on prices, jobs, and manufacturing. On economic policy, these politicians are well to the left of the “moderate” consensus that has long dominated Washington think tanks and the columns of liberal-centrist luminaries like Jonathan Chait, Matthew Yglesias, Derek Thompson, and Ezra Klein. These writers generally support industrial policy in principle but shy away from its populist edge—from talk of greedflation, strategic tariffs, corporate power, or monopolies—even as they celebrate the candidates whose victories were built on those themes.  

In January, Chait, for example, argued in The Atlantic that the party’s Biden-era turn against free-trade orthodoxy—toward labor, antitrust, and industrial policy—was a bust. “The theory that populist economic policies can win back the working class for Democrats has been tried, and it has failed,” he wrote. Chait endorsed Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s “abundance agenda,” also co-signed by Yglesias, which promises faster growth in housing and energy through deregulation and preemption of local control. The “abundance” advocates mainly treat populist economics as a left-wing indulgence rather than the beating heart of today’s political center. “[Former Pennsylvania Senator] Bob Casey did more than any other frontline Democrat to make opposition to greedflation and price gouging the core of his campaign message,” Yglesias wrote in June, “It didn’t work.”  

But that misreads what voters rewarded, and what they punished. The problem in 2024 wasn’t Biden’s focus on jobs and manufacturing or antitrust. It was essentially inflation plus his border policy, and Bob Casey never tried to distance himself from the latter. Democrats who survived in swing and red-leaning districts separated themselves from the administration’s immigration approach even as they embraced its populist economic policies. They championed the factories and infrastructure Biden helped deliver, not the chaos at the border that dominated national headlines. For example, Marcy Kaptur won her 22nd term in a Toledo, Ohio-based district that Trump carried by seven points. The 79-year-old, often a GOP target, ran on reviving American manufacturing and “what America makes and grows,” backing tariffs on Chinese steel and steering federal dollars toward Midwest battery plants. She argued in a campaign ad last year, “America has gotten off course,” citing “the far left ignoring millions illegally crossing the border and trying to defund the police” and “the far right taking away women’s rights and protecting greedy corporations at every turn.”  

Recent polling shows just how potent that kind of populism remains. Voters overwhelmingly support policies that take on corporate pricing power—preferring crackdowns on price gouging to the “abundance” liberal prescriptions of cutting red tape by a two-to-one margin. According to a Third Way post-mortem, voters in battleground states trusted Trump over Harris on border security by a staggering 21-point margin, far larger than the gap on economic issues. In short, border chaos and inflation, not populist economic policies, were 2024’s albatross for Democrats.  

The very winners the Times lists as evidence of the broad appeal of “centrism” ran on anti-monopoly populism and place-based industrial policy. Culturally, they’re not movement activists but coalition builders—Democrats who speak to their districts, not just their base. They reject the punitive cruelty of the right and the moral absolutism that the left sometimes exudes, projecting a kind of moral seriousness without moral superiority. It’s a nuance that the centrist pundits recognize, and that many progressives dismiss as irrelevant. This, plus the working-class roots many of them have, gives them a better connection with voters. “If they went to a P.T.A. meeting at their school, they wouldn’t be viewed as a snooty middle-class parent,” observed Jared Abbott, director of the Center for Working-Class Politics, on Ezra Klein’s podcast. “Then you have somebody like an Elizabeth Warren, who has all this great stuff but doesn’t have that kind of effect.” 

Consider the roster the Times celebrates: Jared Golden, a Marine veteran from Maine’s 2nd District, who is facing a stiff primary challenge, rejects the left-right dichotomy altogether. “The political spectrum does not exist in nature,” he says. His shorthand: “progressive economics, cultural conservatism”: “Tax the rich to cut the deficit: pro-business and pro-antitrust. Corporate welfare is bad; direct payments to families are good. Financialization of the economy is sometimes bad, protective tariffs are sometimes good.” Golden frustrates many Democrats because of his penchant to break ranks, as he did recently when he supported a Republican bill to keep the government open that lacked the Democratic Party’s demands. But such rogue moments are probably necessary for Golden to survive in a district Trump won handily. More importantly, on economic philosophy, it sounds to me like Golden has been reading the Washington Monthly or The American Prospect, not the well-funded new “abundance”-coded magazine, The Argument. 

Meanwhile, Pat Ryan outperformed Kamala Harris by double digits in New York’s Hudson Valley and flipped a swing seat by hammering corporate price-gouging and monopolies. Ryan, an Iraq War veteran and the son of a small business owner and public school teacher, co-founded the Monopoly Busters Caucus, which is pushing the Federal Trade Commission to revive the 1936 Robinson-Patman Act to fight against predatory pricing for small businesses. (Yglesias has criticized the enforcement of the law and defends various forms of price discrimination. ) Ryan’s “patriotic populism,” he told New York magazine, targets “greedy and corrupt elites”—oil executives and tax-dodging tech moguls—while casting “scrappy, hungry innovators” as the heroes. At the anti-monopoly conference sponsored by the American Economic Liberties Project in Washington, D.C., last month, Ryan and Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego gave rousing speeches about their fights against concentrated economic power, and for reshoring supply chains and manufacturing.  

“Anything that empowers the consumer, the everyday person, is going to be a very popular message,” Gallego declared at the conference. “It can be an antitrust, anti-monopoly, anti-big-business message, but it has to be centered on the person and making their life better and easier … Anything that we can do to make that person have a little more at the end of the month will make a huge difference,” he said. “If we do that, that’s a winning message. It can win in any cycle, in almost any state, or environment.”  

When Gallego, an Iraq War vet who worked at a meatpacking plant as a teenager, talks about industry consolidation, he makes it very concrete. “It’s not a theoretical antitrust situation,” he said. “This is about how people are living now.” He pointed to grocery mergers, independent pharmacy closures, and algorithmic price-fixing that have made everyday life more expensive. And he skewered Silicon Valley’s sanitized self-image: “The old robber barons wore top hats and twirled their mustaches,” he said. “Today it’s the guy drinking matcha tea in a gray sweatshirt, going to yoga class. Those people are just as bad for consumers.”  

Gallego certainly isn’t allergic to all the so-called “abundance” agenda. Like most pragmatic Democrats, he supports faster housing and energy infrastructure construction to bring down costs—areas where populists and “abundance” liberals overlap. But neither permitting reform nor growth is the core of his message. 

Moving north to Wisconsin, Senator Tammy Baldwin fought for Buy America rules in the 2024 defense bill while her colleague, Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin, campaigned on reshoring semiconductors and EV supply chains through the CHIPS Act. In Texas, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, and in Nevada, Senator Jacky Rosen, both took tough stances on illegal immigration in their campaigns—criticizing their own party’s tolerance of a broken border—even as they also spoke against corporate greed. Both slammed oil companies for price gouging, and Rosen urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate and crack down on Big Oil mergers that “greatly reduce competition and drive up gas prices at the pump.” And in Washington state, freshman Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez crafted a rural Democrat brand by focusing on issues like right-to-repair for farm equipment, antitrust enforcement on Big Ag and Big Tech, and other pro-small-business populist ideas. Even Rep. Seth Moulton, whom Matt Yglesias has championed as a challenger to the 79-year-old Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, is a cofounder of the Congressional Antitrust Caucus and has been a leader in the House on combating algorithmic rent hikes.  

These are not “centrist Democrats” in the Kyrsten Sinema mold. They don’t sell moderation as a virtue in itself. Their populism defends production over speculation, competition over consolidation, and work over finance. None of them trumpet the supposed advantages of monopolies in ushering in new technological wonders—the way Yglesias, Thompson, Klein, and other “abundance” pundits do. The politicians who actually win in hard districts aren’t making paeans to the efficiency of big businesses; they’re fighting to keep power diffuse and local. In fact, it’s hard to think of a worse message than: “We’ll build data centers and solar farms in your rural community without your input.” That’s not moderation. Voters, especially rural ones with whom Democrats desperately need to become competitive again, call that insane.  

Stanford Political Scientist Adam Bonica, who has challenged the statistical basis of the Times story, nevertheless agrees that winning moderate candidates are those “who can channel voter fury at a broken system into a concrete agenda for change.” The successful Democratic politicians don’t sound moderate because they’ve sanded off their edges. They sound moderate because they’ve rebuilt a moral vocabulary around work and place. At a moment when every argument is nationalized, they talk about the price of milk, the closing factory, and the bridge that finally got fixed. They are impatient with faculty lounge language, suspicious of elites, and generally allergic to bullshit. Call it whatever you want—populism, moderation, common sense. The country seems ready to reward it.  

The post The Rise of the Populist Moderates  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For a half century, the most recession-proof story in mainstream journalism has been declaring that college degrees aren’t recession-proof. Every economic downturn produces headlines warning that diplomas have lost—or are losing—their value. “Two things about these stories have remained constant,” Kevin Carey, who currently directs the education policy program at New America, wrote in The New Republic in 2011. “They always feature an over-educated bartender, and they are always wrong.”  

The genre dates back at least to the 1970s, when the Harvard labor economist Richard Freeman warned in his book The Overeducated American that too many people were earning degrees and that their long-term wages would suffer. The New York Times splashed the argument across its front page in 1975: “After generations during which going to college was assumed to be a sure route to the better life, college-educated Americans are losing their economic advantage.” But within the decade, the opposite happened: The wage premium for graduates soared, and it has only gone up more ever since.  

Census Bureau data shows that households headed by a bachelor’s-degree holder earn a median income of $132,700, more than double the $58,410 for those led by someone with only a high school diploma. Over the past two decades, degree-holding households saw real incomes rise by 13 percent, while high school-only households saw virtually no rise. As Carey wrote again in The Atlantic in 2023, that hasn’t stopped the cycle of headlines and sad profiles every time the economic cycle slows down.  

Which brings us to this fall’s entrant. On September 15, The New York Times published a story with the headline “The Newest Face of Long-Term Unemployment? The College Educated.” As of August 2025, there were about 1.9 million Americans classified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as “long-term unemployed”—roughly 26 percent of all jobless workers. (The BLS defines long-term unemployed as people who are jobless for 27 weeks or more.) A decade ago, only one in five of those classified as long-term unemployed had a college degree. The Times reports that today, it’s closer to one in three, or more than half a million people. Their stories are as affecting as ever: Sean Wittmeyer, profiled in the Times piece, has two master’s degrees, and said he can’t even get hired at his local board game store. “Anyone with a free subscription to Claude, ChatGPT, could do a decent amount of what I could do before,” he lamented.  

AI certainly can’t be what is preventing Wittmeyer from getting a retail job, but something real is happening. Job openings have fallen from 12.1 million in March 2022 to 7.2 million in July 2025. Despite recent cuts, interest rates remain high. Tariffs are sporadic and unpredictable. Federal agencies are being gutted. At the same time, employers are leaning into generative AI tools that automate exactly the kind of entry-level work that young people have historically used to get a foothold: research, drafting, data entry, analysis. OpenAI researchers have documented how ChatGPT can now perform more than 50 percent of tasks across 19 percent of all occupations. It’s the worst-case convergence—short-term economic chaos colliding with long-term technological change.  

The Burning Glass Institute, a nonprofit labor market analytics firm, warns that the bottom rung of the career ladder is eroding. Its July 2025 report found that one year after graduation, 52 percent of the class of 2023 were working in jobs that didn’t require a degree. The report describes a “flipped pyramid”: steady demand for experienced workers paired with shrinking opportunities for new graduates. SignalFire, a venture capital firm, similarly found that between 2019 and 2024, there was a 50 percent decline in new roles for people with less than one year of experience at top tech firms. In sales, design, HR, engineering, and legal departments, the old footholds are vanishing. Add to that a brutal job search process. “Tinderized,” as Annie Lowrey ​​described it in The Atlantic—résumés screened by AI without human input, cookie-cutter cover letters written by AI, and hundreds of applications are disappearing into the ether. It’s no wonder that the Sean Wittmeyers of the world are discouraged.  

So the Times is not wrong to notice the strain. But the narrow focus on college grads risks obscuring the bigger story. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates (4.8 percent in June) is trending upward, but it’s still lower than that of all workers ages 22 to 27 (7.4 percent). In reality, the broader economy is wobbling: August’s 4.3 percent unemployment rate was the highest since 2021. BLS revisions shaved nearly a million jobs off the books between March 2024 and March 2025, ending a 53-month growth streak. Immigrant labor supply has fallen by 1.5 million workers in six months, further contributing to slowdowns in manufacturing and construction, which then reverberate to fields like real estate and architecture. Federal workforce cuts are on pace to eliminate 300,000 jobs by year’s end. In sum: The labor market is cooling for everyone. The present numbers, while sobering, do not tell the story of a collapse in the value of a college degree.  

Demographically, the long-term unemployed still skew less educated, nonwhite, and disabled. The roughly half-million long-term unemployed degree holders constitute less than half a percent of the U.S. labor force. And while college grads do make up a bigger slice of that pool than before, their overall unemployment rate remains far lower than that of workers without a degree. New grads as a group always take a certain amount of time to gain traction. “We graduate a new class of degree holders every year, who typically take seven to nine months to find a job that aligns with their skills,” says Courtney Brown of the Lumina Foundation. In a job market with nearly half as many openings as there were less than three years ago, that ramp-up is simply taking longer, Brown told me.  

History backs this up. The class of 2010 entered the workforce amid the wreckage of the Great Recession, with unemployment above 9 percent and 45 percent of the unemployed classified as long-term unemployed. At the time, they were branded a “lost generation.” Yet within a decade, their cohort’s wage premium over nongraduates had climbed back up even above normal levels, approaching an all-time high. Underemployment spikes for cohorts graduating into weak economies; then it falls as they move into better jobs.  

“The [career] ladder isn’t broken—it’s just being replaced with something that looks a lot flatter,” ​​Heather Doshay, formerly of the venture capital firm SignalFire, told CNBC. Today’s first job might be more technical or specialized—but it’s not inaccessible. “When the internet and email came on the scene as common corporate required skills,” Doshay noted, “new grads were well positioned to become experts by using them in school, and the same absolutely applies here with how accessible AI is.” The key, she said, “will be in how new grads harness their capabilities to become experts so they are seen as desirable tech-savvy workers who are at the forefront of AI’s advances.”  

Wages tend to follow productivity, and the workers best positioned to harness new technologies like AI in today’s economy are, by and large, college graduates. That is one reason degrees continue to command a premium. When the Great Recession hit, millions of Americans lost their jobs, but college graduates were the most likely to be employed at the outset and least likely to be unemployed as the crisis went on.

Economists also caution against declaring AI a job killer just yet. Anders Humlum, an economist at the University of Chicago, points out that predictions about AI’s long-term labor market impact are still highly speculative. “We now have two and a half years of experience with generative AI chatbots diffusing widely throughout the economy,” Humlum told CNBC, and “these tools have not made a significant difference for employment or earnings in any occupation thus far.”  

Universities are responding too—purchasing premium and university-specific services from companies ​​like OpenAI and Anthropic, offering hands-on AI courses, and transforming campuses into training grounds for a more digitally fluent workforce.  

So the education-to-employment conveyor belt might be noisier and slower than in the past, but it’s still moving. AI is reshaping the early stages of careers, not eliminating them entirely. A twenty-year-old can use AI to polish a cover letter, build a pitch deck, or practice job interviews. A designer can generate prototypes, a welder can simulate repairs. Many skills that used to require formal apprenticeship or classroom time are now teachable by machine. As Bruno V. Manno argued recently in the Monthly, AI raises the bar for demonstrated expertise—but it lowers the barrier to acquiring it.  

And if the short-term picture is cloudy, the long-term fundamentals point in the opposite direction. A new Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce report, Falling Behind, projects that by 2032 the U.S. will be short 5.25 million workers with postsecondary credentials, including 4.5 million with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Managers, teachers, nurses, engineers, accountants, and physicians are all on the shortage list. The culprits: Baby Boomer retirements, declining college enrollment and completion, and restrictive immigration policy. Far from being oversupplied with college graduates, the nation is on track for a severe shortage.  

Jobs demanding higher-order human skills—problem solving, communication, leadership—are likely to keep expanding, even in an AI-saturated economy. Those skills are exactly what college educations develop, and what AI cannot replace. That’s consistent with what we already see in the labor market. Even during today’s slowdown, degree holders earn far more, face lower unemployment, and enjoy better long-term prospects than their peers without diplomas. They live longer, are healthier, and are more likely to own homes.  

Why does the myth endure? Not because the reporting is false—the Times is right that more graduates are showing up among the long-term unemployed, and their stories deserve attention. What’s misleading is the leap from moment to meaning: the implication that the degree itself is losing value in the labor market. As Carey wrote almost 15 years ago, “People naturally tend to project current trends into the future, missing the up-and-down nature of the business cycle.” Today’s pain reflects two overlapping shocks: the economic whiplash of Trump’s second term, and AI tools that are rapidly automating the lowest rungs of white-collar work. Those forces make it harder for new graduates to get started—but history and data both show that the long-term premium on higher education is rising, not collapsing. 

Misreading cyclical pain as structural collapse has consequences. It erodes public confidence in higher education. In 2015, 57 percent of Americans said they had “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence” in higher ed. By 2024, that had fallen to 36 percent, while the share expressing little or no confidence more than tripled, to 32 percent. When students absorb the message that college isn’t worth it, whether because of rising costs, wokeness, or the rise of AI, they’re more likely to forgo it. That fuels a cycle that benefits no one: not the student’s long-term health and wages, not the economy that needs more educated workers, and not colleges that depend on enrollment. 

None of this diminishes the difficulty of Sean Wittmeyer’s job search. But it’s worth noting, as the Times buried at the end of its story, that he is now using his design skills to develop and sell board games. The college degree has endured for a reason. What we need isn’t fewer of them, but better-aligned ones: programs tailored to workforce demand, policies that boost affordability and completion, and institutions that help students translate education into opportunity. The bartender with a doctorate will always be good copy. But the degree remains the surest, sturdiest path to prosperity.  

The post The College Degree Is Not Losing Value   appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In his 1897 essay, “My Pedagogical Creed,” the philosopher John Dewey declared that education was “the fundamental method of social progress and reform.” It was a bold claim, rooted in the radical optimism of American pragmatism: the idea that public institutions could cultivate democratic citizens, not just credentialed elites. Dewey’s heroes—Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, William James, and Eugene V. Debs—were champions of democracy, imagination, and radical inclusion. Schools, he believed, should not mirror society’s hierarchies, but work to dismantle them. If anything, Dewey’s vision is more urgent now—especially in New York, the nation’s fourth most populous state, where vast racial and economic inequality make the stakes of higher education crystal clear. New York colleges are a perfect case study in how schools can either empower marginalized students or entrench privilege under the banner of progressive ideals.

The Washington Monthly’s annual rankings help distinguish between the two. We evaluate colleges based on what they do for the country: their contributions to social mobility (graduating low-income students into good jobs), public service (such as teaching, military service, or social work), and research (see “America’s Best Colleges for Research”). In short, we evaluate how well colleges are producing democratic citizens. In a state teeming with storied institutions and underrecognized gems, our data reveals which New York colleges are really advancing Dewey’s vision—and which are coasting on rhetoric.

Start with Boricua College (ranked 45th out of 1,421 institutions), a private nonprofit school with campuses in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and the Upper West Side. (See Boricua College in “25 Best-in-Class Colleges.”) Boricua enrolls just over 400 students, most of them Puerto Rican or Latino, most low income, and many parents or working adults. There’s no manicured quad, but the outcomes are quietly remarkable. Despite their challenging circumstances—nearly all students qualify for Pell Grants—they graduate at rates significantly above the national average, with, on average, just $6,313 in debt (student debt rank: fourth). Unlike their peers in Morningside Heights, Boricua grads don’t dive straight into lucrative careers in consulting and finance. They are more often going on to serve their communities by working as teachers, day care providers, and activists. And with some of the lightest debt loads in the country, they have room to maneuver, too. 

Eight miles south of Boricua’s Bronx campus, in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, where a studio apartment rents for $5,000 a month, another New York college offers a different kind of education. The New School (ranked 1,379) was created in 1919 as a radical experiment in democratic learning. Its Progressive Era founders—John Dewey among them, along with Thorstein Veblen (the economist), and Charles Beard (the historian)—all shared the belief that universities could be incubators of democratic life. The New School reflected the priorities of its founders. It became a haven for Jewish intellectuals fleeing fascism and a platform for groundbreaking courses in psychoanalysis, women’s studies, jazz, and film. Margaret Mead, the legendary anthropologist, taught there. Hannah Arendt did too. In its early decades, the school was practically open-access, with low tuition and a focus on adult learners. Most school funding went toward research and education instead of administration. At its best, it was Deweyan education incarnate.

Some things haven’t changed. The New School still has a reputation for innovative teaching and radiates a radical ethos. But it’s less democratic. The school is more selective now—admitting 63 percent of applicants—and far more expensive. The net price for students from median-income families is a staggering $41,403, one of the highest in our rankings. Worse, its graduates earn less, on average, than those from far cheaper public New York colleges like CUNY Hunter College (number 41) or SUNY New Paltz (338). Ten years after enrolling, the typical New School student earns just $45,478—a meager return on such a steep investment.

That cost might be defensible if graduates entered socially vital professions, like they do at Boricua, Hunter, and New Paltz, where 33, 37, and 26 percent of graduates, respectively, major in service-oriented fields. But at the New School, not a single graduate in our data pursued a service major like education or social work, placing it near the bottom of our public service metric. And for all its democratic rhetoric, the school ranks 914th in enrolling Pell Grant recipients. 

The socialist magazine Jacobin put it bluntly: “While students and faculty preserve and contribute to the radical legacy of the New School, its administration now uses this legacy as a marketing device—while practicing a cold neoliberal calculus in its day-to-day operations.”  Dewey’s name may still hang in the air, but his values no longer anchor the institution. Christopher Lasch, the communitarian historian and social critic, might have called the school a training ground for “a new aristocracy of talent”—fluent in the language of equity, but far removed from its material demands. 

This mismatch—high cost, low return, maintenance of social inequity—typifies too much of American higher education. Our rankings offer a way to see that clearly. By examining the best and worst performers in New York, we can identify which institutions truly serve the public and which merely serve themselves. 

Sarah Lawrence College (1,095), located just north of New York City in Bronxville, follows a similar arc. Like the New School, it has a noble legacy. Founded in 1926 to provide a rigorous liberal arts education to women, its pedagogy was also inspired by Dewey’s progressive ideals. From the outset, it rejected the impersonal lecture hall in favor of one-on-one tutorials, small seminars, and “productive leisure” workshops in the arts and humanities. Among the possible options: “French conversation, modeling, art appreciation, crafts, make-up, athletics, music, tap dancing—and also natural dancing—observing stars, typewriting, shorthand, literary club, bird club, public speaking and gardening.” In the 1930s, students ran literacy and civic programs in Yonkers; during World War II, more than 250 joined the College War Board to serve needs in the surrounding communities brought about by the war. The activism continued into the 1960s with civil rights and anti–Vietnam War protests.

But like the New School, Sarah Lawrence has drifted far from its roots. These days, the college has gotten more press around the story of a cult-like scheme orchestrated by a student’s father, which became the subject of viral podcasts and a recent Hulu miniseries, than for its social values. (Less known: Rahm Emanuel—future White House chief of staff, Chicago mayor, and ambassador to Japan—studied ballet there.) The average net price for a student from a median-income family is $22,121—better than the New School, but worse than 1,173 other colleges we rank. The payoff isn’t much better: A decade after enrolling, alumni earn barely more than the average American with only a high school diploma. Just 12 percent of students receive Pell Grants, ranking the college 1,199th on that measure. And just 10 percent graduate with service-oriented majors, ranking the college at number 1,092 on that measure. 

In theory, schools like Sarah Lawrence and the New School promise something nobler than job training. They teach students to think critically, challenge orthodoxies, and resist conformity. And in many ways, they succeed. But for institutions that once defined themselves in opposition to social hierarchy, they now do surprisingly little to disrupt it.

Not all elite colleges fail that test. Columbia University (number 34) enrolls nearly 2,000 Pell Grant recipients and charges them less than $2,500 on average—lower than many public institutions. While the school has recently drawn criticism for its handling of campus protests and now faces serious funding threats under the Trump administration, the school proves that prestige and equity aren’t inherently at odds. Similarly, Cornell University (13) manages to keep costs and debt low for median-income students who make it through the rigorous admissions gauntlet. New York University (ranked 155) is more of a mixed case. It enrolls over 5,000 Pell students—more than any other private university in New York—but charges them nearly $20,000 annually. The result: NYU’s ranking is lower than most elite schools but far from the bottom.

Still, the most faithful stewards of Dewey’s legacy, like Boricua College, are often the least celebrated. John Jay College of Criminal Justice (at number 88), part of the CUNY system, has no glossy monthly magazine and few celebrity alums—with the exception of, perhaps most notably, NYC Mayor Eric Adams. But it enrolls a student body that is over 75 percent nonwhite, half first-generation, and largely working class. The net price for median-income students is just $2,661, and its graduates pursue public service careers—law enforcement, social work, legal aid—at rates that elite colleges can’t match.

Other high-performing New York colleges include SUNY Old Westbury (213), SUNY Geneseo (98), and CUNY Lehman College (65). All combine solid affordability, solid outcomes, and diverse student bodies. Hunter College (41), one of the highest ranked in our system, educates over 9,000 Pell recipients—more than the entire undergraduate population of Columbia.

“There has always been a privileged class, even in America,” Lasch wrote in his 1995 book, The Revolt of the Elites. “But it has never been so dangerously isolated from its surroundings.” That’s the true scandal of elite progressive colleges today. It’s not that they’ve strayed from their values—it’s that lesser-known institutions are living those values more fully, and getting none of the glory. 

Dewey believed democracy had to be renewed in every generation. That work is still being done at some New York colleges—but just not where most college rankings would have you look.

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For the past two decades, the Washington Monthly has included in its annual college rankings measures of a university’s research prowess—its record of producing the new scholarship and scholars that drive economic growth and human flourishing. This year, we’ve put those metrics into a separate ranking, the Best Colleges for Research, which appear at the end of this article. It is the only such ranking published by a journalistic outlet—and a necessary one, given the Trump administration’s unprecedented attacks on university research.

There are other reasons why we created this new research ranking. This spring, the organization that categorizes colleges, the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, rewrote its definitions of what constitutes different types of institutions, including major research universities. We also decided this year to compare research universities to other types of institutions, like small liberal arts colleges that focus on teaching rather than research, to see which institutions are best at helping students succeed in their careers and engage as democratic citizens (see Best Colleges for Your Tuition (and Tax) Dollars). The only fair way to do that was to pull our research metrics into their own ranking. 

But most of all, at a time when the Trump administration is decimating funding for academic research, we wanted to illuminate the incredible benefits that America’s research universities provide to the country at large and to the states and regions where they’re located—and the unfathomable damage these cuts are likely to bring. 

Before we delve into the ranking, it’s important to understand how the United States built its world-class system of federally funded university-based research—a system that was neither inevitable nor, as we are now learning, invulnerable. In the early 20th century, Europe was the undisputed engine of scientific discovery. Aspiring top scientists didn’t dream of going to Harvard or Stanford. They went to Göttingen, where Max Born and Werner Heisenberg were pioneering quantum mechanics; to the Sorbonne, where Marie Curie revolutionized chemistry and medicine; or to Cambridge, where Ernest Rutherford and Paul Dirac rewrote the laws of atomic theory. A young New York–born physicist named J. Robert Oppenheimer followed that path—studying at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory before earning his doctorate under Born in 1927. At the time, American universities were respected teaching institutions. But they stood on the periphery of the global scientific frontier.

That changed abruptly when the United States made scientific supremacy a national strategy during World War II. In 1939, Oppenheimer was lecturing at chalkboards at UC Berkeley. Just four years later, as part of the Manhattan Project, the University of California was contracted by the federal government to operate the Los Alamos Laboratory, with Oppenheimer leading thousands of scientists in one of the most ambitious research efforts ever under-taken. It wasn’t just the birth of the atomic bomb. It was also the birth of the modern American research university—powered by a new kind of partnership between public investment and university-led inquiry. For more than 80 years, that system has fueled nearly every major scientific and technological breakthrough of the modern era.

That success was the result of deliberate postwar planning—shaped in large part by Vannevar Bush, the former MIT engineering dean who oversaw wartime science policy. In 1945, Bush submitted a report to President Harry Truman titled Science, the Endless Frontier, which called for sustained federal funding of universities to conduct research both for specific goals—to combat disease, ensure national security, and raise living standards—but also to advance scientific knowledge for its own sake. “Basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress,” he wrote. 

The system was designed to be decentralized, competitive, and entrepreneurial. Unlike European countries, in which most universities are operated at national or regional levels, the United States has a geographically dispersed array of state-owned and private nonprofit colleges and universities. Different federal agencies—the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the National Institutes of Health, and so on—set the broad parameters for grants based on their own agency’s goals. But scholars anywhere in the country could propose specific research projects, and decisions on which would get funding were made not by federal officials but by peer review panels of scholars, also from around the country. The system incentivized states to invest their own tax dollars in their public universities by recruiting top scholars who could win federal research grants and top graduate students who could work on those grants. It was, in short, an American-style, market-based solution to the task of building scientific capacity. 

The scale of this transformation is hard to overstate. Before World War II, federal spending accounted for just 20 percent of all U.S. research and development. By the 1960s, it made up two-thirds. Federal support for university research rose from under $70 million in 1940 (about 1 percent of today’s levels, adjusted for inflation) to more than $20 billion by 2000. By then, American university labs had given the world the polio vaccine, the internet, satellite navigation, the MRI, and much more.

As of 2023, U.S. universities spent over $108 billion on research and development—more than half of it funded by the federal government. That spending underpins not just scientific progress but entire regional economies. It trains the STEM workforce, fuels innovation, and creates good jobs far from the coasts. According to economists across the political spectrum, university-based R&D delivers one of the highest returns on investment of any federal expenditure. It produces breakthroughs, but also pipelines: of talent, of human capital, and of opportunity.

The Best Colleges for Research ranking is like an MRI of that system. It rates 139 institutions that each spend at least $100 million annually on research based on four equally weighted indicators: total research spending, science and engineering PhDs awarded, faculty receiving major national awards, and the share of faculty elected to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 

But a word of warning: This MRI was taken when the patient was at peak health. All the underlying data is from before January of this year, when Donald Trump was inaugurated. Since then, the NDF has frozen or canceled more than 1,700 grants, many of them focused on recruiting more women and racial minorities into STEM fields. The NIH faces proposed cuts of up to 40 percent for the fiscal year 2026 budget—jeopardizing over $10 billion in funding. The Trump administration effectively dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, canceling the billions in grants it once dispensed. The Departments of Energy and Defense have shifted green energy and climate funds elsewhere. And the Department of Education has opened more than 60 campus investigations and frozen billions in grants to universities. Trump officials have also proposed slashing university overhead reimbursements from 50-60 percent to 15 percent—effectively making much research unsupportable. 

The first thing you’ll notice when looking at the ranking is that the three universities at the top of the list—Stanford, MIT, Harvard—are precisely the kind you would target if you were Donald Trump and your aim was to punish elites in blue states. Another prestigious university, fifth-ranked Johns Hopkins, in deep blue Maryland, receives more federal research dollars than any university in the country. Those grant funds allow the institution to support more than 30,000 jobs in Baltimore and run the Applied Physics Laboratory, a critical player in U.S. missile defense and cybersecurity. But since Trump took office for the second time, Johns Hopkins has lost over $800 million in global health research—most of it when DOGE pulled the plug on USAID. The fallout: 600 clinical trials disrupted and vaccine development halted midstream. Consider those libs owned.

The second thing you’ll notice is that it’s not just elite private universities in blue coastal cities that rank highly on the list—and stand to lose big from Trump’s defunding of research universities. Like much of Trump’s second-term agenda, the cuts end up punishing the very people and places he claims to champion.

Five of the top 20 universities (including the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of Michigan) as well as two dozen more on the list are in swing states that Trump barely won in 2024 and that will likely determine who wins the presidency in 2028. Nearly 50 other institutions that make up the Best Colleges for Research ranking are in red states, including Texas A&M (number 16), the University of Florida (27), and Purdue University in Indiana (29).

These universities are not just major recipients of federal research dollars. As our ranking shows, many of them outperform Ivy League schools in awarding the STEM PhDs that keep the economy humming and America competitive in the world. (See chart). 

These institutions, most of them public, train the bulk of the engineers who build America’s infrastructure, the chemists who power our labs, and the computer scientists who staff defense contractors and clean energy start-ups. They, too, are facing devastating cuts. Between February and March, DOGE slashed more than $74 million in federal research grants going to 19 colleges and universities in Georgia, including the notoriously woke Georgia Institute of Technology (note to Georgia Tech grads: that’s a joke!). Case Western paused hiring and travel to brace for a projected $39 million loss. Louisiana State University imposed a campus-wide hiring freeze and withheld 2 percent of all department budgets as a buffer. Penn State lost $10 million in grants—halting projects on HIV prevention, cervical cancer vaccines, and diagnostics for newborns. Administrators now advise faculty to strip keywords like diversity and climate from proposals to avoid triggering more cancellations.

A third pattern you might notice is that many of the universities at the top of our ranking are in a handful of the fastest-growing states—California, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Florida. That’s no coincidence. Remember that the system Vannevar Bush devised created incentives for states to invest in their public university systems. Not all states, however, acted on those incentives with the same intensity and focus. Those that made long-term bets on higher education, built centralized public university management systems, and kept in-state tuition low tended also to garner more federal research dollars and the corresponding economic growth. (See Christopher M. Mullin, “Florida’s Fresh-Squeezed Colleges.”) 

Other, smaller states never made that bet on a similar scale and simply do not have as many options. In places like Montana and Nebraska, the local land grant is often the only serious research institution. As Joseph Parilla, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, put it, “For a lot of places, [research] is the last remaining economic and innovation engine that gives them relevance in a modern, technology-driven economy.” In other words, federal research funding isn’t just science policy—it’s regional development policy. When it dries up, entire communities, not just institutions, suffer the consequences.

Our ranking reflects a system still running at high capacity. But the damage is already visible, and not just at Ivy League schools. Job offers to new PhDs are being rescinded. Labs are consolidating. Faculty are leaving. 

In Mississippi, a state Trump won by over 22 points, the mayor of Starkville is sounding the alarm. “Every time you touch the university, you, in effect, touch Starkville,” Mayor Lynn Spruill told The New York Times, after Mississippi State lost funding for a USAID aquaculture project. The school, which spent more than $150 million in federal research money last year, is now bracing for deeper cuts to engineering and agriculture programs—key anchors of the local economy.

And as our ranking shows, the consequences won’t be limited to blue states. The very regions Trump claims to fight for—rural America, red America—may be the ones hit hardest. What took 80 years to build won’t take 80 years to unravel. But it may take that long to build again.

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Six months ago, New York City seemed to be in crisis. Donald Trump’s inroads into working-class and immigrant neighborhoods had scrambled political assumptions. The intersection of crime, homelessness, mental illness, and a surge of refugees played out on subway platforms and in news headlines. Republicans and the New York Post did their best to stoke the outrage, seizing on flashpoints like the Midtown assassination of a UnitedHealthcare executive. Some on the left hailed the alleged perpetrator, Luigi Mangione, as a vigilante hero. Others on the right championed Daniel Penny, a white former Marine, who choked a mentally ill Black man named Jordan Neely to death after a confrontation on a subway car. The mayor, who was battling corruption charges, seemed ill-equipped to respond.  

A few months later, a 33-year-old democratic socialist—who had once called for abolishing the police—swept to the Democratic mayoral nomination, brilliantly using social media to pitch an optimistic vision and drown out the tabloids and career politicians maligning him. They ran on anger and fear. He ran on affordability and hope. 

In that context of civic breakdown and potential transformation, Jonathan Mahler’s The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990 arrives with uncanny relevance.  

Mahler, a longtime staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, previously chronicled the city’s chaos of a decade earlier—arsons and rubble, the Son of Sam killing spree, the 1977 blackout, and the Yankees World Series victory—in his book Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning (a real quote from Howard Cosell as a camera in the ABC Sports helicopter hovering over Yankee Stadium cut away to show nearby fires). He returns to the same city here, but with a wider lens and a more explicitly political purpose. 

In Mahler’s telling, New York’s financial collapse in the 1970s and its soaring crime and middle-class exodus set the stage for a more profound transformation: a shift in power away from public officials and organized labor toward a new class of private elites—real estate barons, media moguls, Wall Street financiers, and a constellation of street preachers, race-baiters, crusading lawyers, and backroom fixers who reshaped the city’s narrative. As a New York Times Magazine cover story would put it in 1985: 

“The people who are making the deals and shaping the future of the city are, more than ever, private individuals.”

Ed Koch had won election as mayor in 1977 as the embodiment of blunt-spoken, liberal pragmatism. But by the mid-to-late ’80s, New York’s surface glitter—its real estate boom, its rising skyline—masked a much deeper erosion. The public hospital system teetered on the edge of collapse. AIDS ravaged the city. Homelessness surged (from 1982 to 1987, the number of New Yorkers living in shelters increased 250%). As an epidemic of crack cocaine tore through Black neighborhoods, racial strife was everywhere. Major episodes included the Howard Beach racial attack, the Tawana Brawley rape hoax, the killing of Yusuf Hawkins by a white mob of teenagers in Bensonhurst, and the Central Park jogger case.  

Mahler portrays Koch as well-meaning but insufficient to the moment, as he unraveled both physically and politically. City government was rotten with corruption. Koch’s Queens ally, Borough President Donald Manes, known as the “King of Queens,” wielded vast influence through his seat on the city’s Board of Estimate and was instrumental in doling out municipal jobs and contracts. Federal investigators, led by Rudy Giuliani, uncovered a sweeping bribery scheme that Manes ran at the city’s Parking Violations Bureau. Manes had installed his friend Geoffrey Lindenauer to run the office and funnel contracts in exchange for kickbacks. When Lindenauer flipped, agreeing to testify in exchange for a lighter sentence, Manes’s world collapsed. Three days later, while speaking on the phone with his psychiatrist, he asked him to hold for a moment, pulled a fourteen-inch knife from a kitchen drawer, and stabbed himself in the chest. Giuliani, focused on burnishing his reputation, swiftly prosecuted Stanley Friedman, another of Manes’s alleged co-conspirators, as the public face of municipal rot.  

By that point, Koch had come to resemble an aging actor struggling through his final performances, Mahler writes. The mayor who once personified the city’s bounce-back spirit looked isolated and increasingly brittle (he suffered a stroke in 1987). After the 1987 Black Monday crash, he had little choice but to spend the remainder of his third term overseeing municipal austerity. Instead of fixing problems, Koch tried to control the optics.  

This is where Joyce Brown enters the picture. Brown, a schizophrenic Black woman who had been living and defecating on an uptown sidewalk, became the test subject in Koch’s controversial attempt to institutionalize the homeless forcibly. But she hadn’t committed any crime; she simply refused to move. Mahler shows how Brown—unexpectedly media-savvy—turned her fight with Koch into national theater. With the help of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Brown defended her rights in court, appeared on talk shows to decry the lack of affordable housing in the city, and told reporters that she just wanted to be left alone. (Ronald Reagan even gave her a shoutout as a symbol of civil liberties when he met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for the March 1988 Moscow Summit.) The court ultimately ruled in her favor, and she returned to her favorite stoop. Without making the point explicitly, Mahler is clear that Brown would have been better served by getting treatment for her schizophrenia.  

Koch’s battles against AIDS activists, affordable housing advocates (“If you can’t afford to live here, mo-o-ve!”), and opponents of the NYPD followed similar trajectories: they defeated him through media spectacle. Larry Kramer, the playwright and co-founder of ACT UP, campaigned against what he saw as criminal indifference by the Koch and Reagan administrations in their response to the AIDS epidemic. His rhetorical style was volcanic: He called Koch and Anthony Fauci—a young infectious disease expert helping lead the government’s AIDS response—“murderers.” Mahler doesn’t flatten the conflict; he lets it breathe. Kramer’s anger and Koch’s paralysis get equal sympathy and scrutiny.

Koch, tarred by the city’s escalating racial tension (not aided by his poorly calculated remarks directed at the beloved Jesse Jackson), lost his bid for a fourth term in the 1989 Democratic mayoral primary. Democrats turned instead to Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins, an elegant Black lawyer and politician who had marched for Soviet Jewry and seemed like he could cool the city’s racial cauldron.  

While Koch spiraled, Donald Trump soared. The developer’s first major publicity triumph came with the Wollman skating rink, a municipal project that had languished unfinished for six years. Trump promised to fix it fast and under budget, and he did.  

Koch made no secret of his contempt for the real estate scion, and Trump relished the enmity. As Mahler shows, the feud helped Trump craft his chosen persona: the can-do outsider who delivered while politicians bickered.  

But behind the headlines, Trump’s business empire was a house of cards. He had poured money—mostly borrowed—into Atlantic City casinos, financed with junk bonds. When Time magazine asked him to estimate his net worth in 1989, he replied, “Who the fuck knows?”  

By the late 1980s, Donald Trump’s marriage to the Czech-born socialite Ivana was unraveling under the weight of his affair with Marla Maples, a 26-year-old aspiring actress. The affair had become increasingly conspicuous—Maples had spent the summer living on Trump’s yacht in Atlantic City, and a custom suite was being built for her at Trump’s Plaza Hotel. In December 1989, during a family ski trip to Aspen to celebrate Donald Jr.’s twelfth birthday, Trump invited both women, and ultimately a confrontation ensued between the two women that lives on in tabloid infamy.  

Trump, incapable of shame, just kept going. “It had seemed like [Trump] would never recover from the damage he’d done to himself in the second half of the eighties,” Mahler writes, “In fact, those years would prove to be his crucible, fixing his brash billionaire’s image in people’s minds and turning him into an enduring ideal of what it looked like to be rich and successful in America. He had learned the power of publicity, but he had also learned the power of shamelessness.”  

That was true of Trump’s intervention in the Central Park Jogger case. On April 19, 1989, a white woman jogging in Central Park was brutally beaten and raped. Within hours, five Black and Latino boys—aged 14 to 16—were arrested and coerced into giving false confessions. Four days later, Trump paid $85,000 to run a full-page ad in all four New York dailies: “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE.”  

“What happened to our city?” the ad read. Trump “was now refashioning himself into the city’s white id,” Mahler writes. The tabloids had already followed his lead. The Daily News and Post ran front pages calling the teens a “WOLFPACK.” Jimmy Breslin, the longtime columnist, called Trump’s ad an indictment not just of him but of the media that had built him up:  

“The curious thing … is not that he destroyed himself yesterday—for all demagogues ultimately do that—but why he became so immensely popular with the one group of people who are supposed to be the searchlights and loudspeakers that alert the public to the realities of such a person. That would be those who work in the news business. . . . With the one quality Trump has, amazing brashness—‘I just bought the sky!’—he has overwhelmed the newspapers and television more than anyone we ever have had in this city.” 

(The boys were eventually exonerated, but Trump never apologized.)

If Trump dominated the city through wealth and media, others wielded power through confrontation and spectacle. Enter Al Sharpton and Alton Maddox.  

By the mid-1980s, Sharpton was a fixture in New York’s Black political life—a 300-pound former James Brown protégé turned street activist and preacher, almost always in tracksuits and a gold medallion. He was a far cry from today’s rail-thin political pundit in bespoke suits now seen on Morning Joe. Mahler recounts Sharpton leading a 28-car motorcade into the Howard Beach neighborhood, where a black man was killed by a mob of white teenagers, improvising a protest march that ended at New Park Pizza, where the victim had sought help. With reporters watching, Sharpton slapped a $100 bill on the counter: “Start serving up the slices … and don’t stop until the hundred’s gone.” Alton Maddox, meanwhile, was “either a superhero or a menace,” Mahler writes—a “bomb-throwing Black defense lawyer” known for fusing legal advocacy with insurgent politics. He sometimes called himself “attorney-at-war.” Born in the segregated Newnan, Georgia, Maddox had been beaten by police in his youth.  

Their most infamous partnership came in 1987 with the case of Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old Black girl from Wappingers Falls, New York, who claimed she had been abducted, assaulted, and smeared with racial slurs and feces by a group of white men. Sharpton and Maddox (with their colleague C. Vernon Mason) became her advocates. Rather than cooperate with the official investigation, they used the case to launch a broader crusade. Maddox and Sharpton demanded that Governor Mario Cuomo appoint a special prosecutor for racial crimes, or that Attorney General Robert Abrams personally try the case. When that didn’t happen, their rhetoric escalated with Maddox accusing Abrams—with no evidence—of “masturbating looking at Tawana Brawley’s picture,” and going further: “You’re no longer going to go into the men’s room with your perverted mind and rape our daughters!”

As Brawley’s story fell apart (her former boyfriend told Newsday that she had invented the allegations, apparently to avoid a beating by her mother’s boyfriend after running away from home for four days), Sharpton would double down and go on to accuse Dutchess County Assistant District Attorney Steven Pagones of the crime, also without any evidence. 

Ultimately, a grand jury concluded in October 1988 that Brawley had not been the victim of a forcible sexual assault and that she likely staged the appearance of such an attack herself. Sharpton and her other advocates never apologized.

Amid the din of New York’s late-1980s political chaos, emerged Dinkins, a longtime Harlem political fixture, known for his calm demeanor and dignified presence. His campaign, managed by his aide, the formidable political strategist Bill Lynch, set out to build a grassroots multiracial coalition. “Lynch would need to construct his coalition more methodically,” Mahler writes, “neighborhood by neighborhood.” He housed the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters between a liquor store and a boarded-up grocery, focusing on field organizing rather than media buys.  

Dinkins’s campaign distanced itself from polarizing figures. Mahler notes that “publicly keeping his distance from Black activists and Black-owned media outlets” was a key tactic. It meant not campaigning with Jesse Jackson, for fear of being overshadowed, or Sharpton, for fear of being associated with his tactics. Though some Black politicians grumbled, most understood the path to becoming New York’s first African-American mayor required steadiness, not militancy.  

“Lynch didn’t want [Sharpton] anywhere near his candidate. But he also didn’t want him trashing Dinkins to his supporters or the media,” Mahler writes. Lynch turned to Jesse Jackson to help privately deliver the message to Sharpton. They met the rotund reverend at a soul food restaurant in southeast Queens, where Jackson reportedly said: “Black power is attainable, but only if you keep your distance.” Lynch added bluntly: “Don’t fuck with me, Al.”  

Meanwhile, the mayoral campaign of Rudy Giuliani, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was unraveling. Missteps had undercut his reputation as a hard-charging prosecutor, and he was a much less compelling figure on the stump than he’d been at his news conferences going after mobsters. He had “the demeanor of an undertaker and the verbosity of a lawyer,” one columnist wrote. Another wrote that if Giuliani “held up a baby, it might cry.” President George H. W. Bush, expected to be an ally, publicly mispronounced his name at a fundraiser—“Gerlani”—before giving up and calling him “Rudy.”  

By midsummer, Giuliani’s lead had evaporated. He turned to Roger Ailes, the former Nixon aide and Republican media consultant who engineered Bush’s 1988 presidential win (think Willie Horton). Ailes reframed the campaign around race and fear. “Rudy’s going to get one percent of the Black vote by mistake,” he told reporters. Guliani ditched his fusion messaging of social liberalism and focused on crime, welfare fraud, and Jewish voter outreach. “Crime, Crack, and Corruption” and “Rudy to the Rescue” became the new campaign slogans. 

The campaign ran a full-page ad in a Yiddish-language newspaper pairing Dinkins with Jesse Jackson. The goal was to frame Dinkins as an antisemite.  

Dinkins tried to stay above it, but eventually responded with an open letter to Giuliani:

“You and Mr. Ailes may have bullied people in the past. But if you persist on your present course, you will learn something I learned in the Marine Corps: Marines aren’t very good at picking fights, but they certainly know how to end them.”  

The 1989 mayoral election was the closest in more than 80 years. Dinkins won by just 3 points—roughly 44,000 votes. The narrow margin made his victory feel fragile, not triumphant. While Giuliani absorbed the loss upstairs at the Roosevelt Hotel, some 700 supporters gathered in the ballroom below, insisting the election had been stolen by “rampant voter fraud in Black neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy and Harlem.” When Giuliani finally addressed them near midnight, he was met with jeers and calls for a recount. Unlike in 2020 when he helped lead Trump’s “Stop the Steal” ruse, he did the right thing. “Quiet, QUIET,” he shouted, trying to restore order. But even as he urged the crowd to “unify behind the mayor of New York,” many of his own supporters shouted back: “No!”   

Mahler doesn’t treat the 1989 election as a climax, but a denouement. Dinkins’s narrow victory—a far cry from the 78% percent of the city Koch had carried just four years earlier—marked the collapse of New York’s postwar liberal consensus and the rise of a new politics of optics, grievance, and media manipulation. In August 1991, a car in a Manhattan Rabbi’s motorcade struck and killed a seven-year-old Black boy in Crown Heights, triggering three nights of unrest in which a Jewish man was fatally stabbed, more than 150 police officers were injured, and Mayor Dinkins was faulted for a slow, ineffective response. Giuliani would return in 1993 and capitalize on the chaos, even fanning the flames of a riot led by off-duty police officers at One Police Plaza, to defeat Dinkins. Trump parlayed his tabloid presence into global branding. Andrew Cuomo would rise and fall as his father’s heir. Eventually, Michael Bloomberg would govern New York as a “luxury product.” The city, Mahler suggests, had chosen its storytellers—and in doing so, chosen its trajectory.  

Reading Mahler now, it’s easy to marvel at how much the city has changed. But it’s also unsettling to see how little has changed, not just because New York’s ‘80s icons are still in the news. Hyperbolic media narratives are still the drivers of politics, and there’s no such thing as nuance. In that way, The Gods of New York is a stunning record of how power changes hands when institutions fail. What Mahler captures is not just a city’s past, but the country’s political future, already well underway. His scenes, brimming with color, speak for themselves.  

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