College students who graduated into the 2009 downturn faced a future for which no one had prepared them, drowning in overwhelming debt taken on for an education that couldn’t reliably get them a job. Journalist Noam Scheiber, who tells their story in Mutiny (FSG, Apr. 2026), spoke with PW about the technological advances and economic shifts that undermined the prospects of a generation. —LS
What made this generation so confident about their job prospects?
They were given the hardest sell about going to college, from parents, grandparents, even President Obama. That message about college guaranteeing success was aggressively transmitted to every altitude of society. Some charter schools used the motto “college begins in kindergarten”—the message was coming from the ground up and the top down. They dutifully did the most to prepare, more homework, more AP classes. Then they got to college, taking on enormous debt. Then the rug was pulled out from under them. The response was frustration, anger, and radicalization.
You write that these students have suffered “not just an economic setback, but a psychological one.” What does this mean?
I don’t want to suggest it was only college graduates that suffered during the Great Recession. It was traumatic for the whole country, and people without a college degree in some cases had an even tougher time. “Go to college and you’ll be set up for the rest of your life,” students were told. It really set them up for disappointment. The tectonic shift actually started around 2004 or 2005, when the tech bubble burst and changing tech led to more automation. You look at jobs that had been done by college-educated folks—accounting, marketing—the software got more sophisticated and so companies needed fewer humans. If you went to college in the ’80s and ’90s, higher education was a true investment and it paid off. So the students a few years younger observed this and thought a different future was coming.
Why are their degrees worth so much less?
Supply and demand. The “college wage premium” is how much more you make with a degree compared with if you only have a high school diploma. That premium took off in the 1980s and grew until about 2005 to 2010, when it flattened out at 75%. By 2015 to 2020, it not only flattened out, but declined. Wage growth is slowing down, demand is softening because of advances in software, and employers don’t feel they have to pay as much. They don’t need to hire as many people, and they have more applicants to choose from. The ones who don’t get hired get either less prestigious jobs in their field or end up in service jobs.
What can we expect next from this cohort?
The sociology and psychology of this generation has changed. Early in my journalism career, when I was a fact-checker and an assistant, I thought of myself in terms of my future career, my future profession. That was my identity. Now people think, I am a worker, not, I am a future professional. They think, My interests are at odds with the interests of my boss. Even if they’re making good money, their careers are precarious in a way they wouldn’t have been before: employers are laying off in mass numbers, using generative AI instead of humans. The sense of security is absent. Even doctors and software engineers see themselves as the working class.
