Over the years I’ve written a couple of pieces on the character and voting patterns of working class voters, among others. During this time, I’ve found that there’s been an increasing tendency among political analysts have started to use the term “working class” and “non-college educated” virtually interchangeably. I find this to be horribly obnoxious. It makes what’s supposed to be a strictly economic term into something that really isn’t, and it packs way too many implicit biases into the term. Worse yet, it’s led to a lot of terrible analysis as to what the working class “wants”. So I want to take a little while to explain why it’s just wrong to use education level as the basic standard for determining working class status, and why you shouldn’t do it.

To be sure, the term “working class” has always been a bit slippery, but the recent tendency to use education level as a standard for working class status really seems to have started after 2016. I’d say it was Nate Silver who unintentionally set the ball rolling on this when he noted that education level, rather than income, tended to most accurately predict whether someone was going to be a Trump supporter.

A lot of people jumped on to this observation to conclude Trump didn’t really have working class appeal (which is basically correct) and dismiss the idea that Democrats didn’t really have a working class problem in 2016 (which is wrong, more on that later). But others just went ahead and changed the standard definition of working class to mean “non-college educated”.

Sometimes analysts would justify this shift by saying that education level tends to be one of the best determinants of economic outcomes over the long term. People with college degrees may experience temporary rough patches, but they have access to greater economic opportunities overall Therefore, education level isn’t just a good metric for judging working class status, it’s even better than income.

This makes some sense, and I’m not going to argue education doesn’t tend to correlate with economic outcomes, but there is tons of room for variation. Enough, in fact, that it’s just wrong to use the terms interchangeably.

Moreover, there’s a systemic bias to those variations. Namely, the types of people who don’t need college degrees to do pretty well are going to tend to be older and more rural/suburban voters. Conversely, highly educated people with severe and persistent economic hardship are going to be younger and more urban.

Since a lot of the demographic groups the standard skews towards are traditionally Republican, this also creates the false impression that the working class is more conservative, and weights cultural issues more heavily, than it really does.

This is all a big problem, because Democrats really do need to work on their working class appeal after 2016. But they can’t do that if don’t even know who those voters are.

There Are Plenty Of Occupations Where You Can Do Well Without A Degree

The first problem with using education level as a standard for working class status is that there are way too many occupations where you don’t actually need a college degree to come come out doing pretty well. Not just as one offs, either, but consistently.

It’s not particularly difficult to think of the types of occupations where this can happen. There are small business owners and other “petite bourgeois” types, like a person who owns a chain of car dealerships or franchises. There are middle managers and people who just did really well in sales occupations. Those types of jobs don’t particularly require an academic background, but they can pay pretty well. Then there are occupations like those in law enforcement, or where people who’ve gain experience through the military, like say pilots. And you can go on and on.

It’s also worth noting that a lot of those technical blue collar professions people tend to associate with the working class, such as repairmen and technicians in extraction industries and so forth are, in fact, highly skilled and knowledge intensive occupations. It’s just that the types of skills involved aren’t academic.

Furthermore, while we have a tendency to think of these as occupations as being rapidly getting left behind by the knowledge economy, they are in many cases actually in very high demand. In fact, overall we might actually have a shortage of people in these types of professions. Nor are these jobs necessarily more vulnerable to things like automation. In fact, a lot of them are less vulnerable because they require a more versatile skill set and deal with unpredictable situations.

Obviously, we shouldn’t treat people who are doing well in these types of occupations as being representative of lower/lower middle class and its anxieties. For one thing, they might not actually have all that many economic anxieties. For another, a lot of the occupations that fit in this category, particularly small business owners (including a good many contractors), middle managers, law enforcement and so forth, have vested interests which would line up very differently from, say, a service worker or a line worker in a factory.

On the other hand there are a lot of occupations which require college degree that don’t bring all that much in the way of wealth or economic security. Again, it’s not particularly hard to think of plenty of examples: social workers, a lot of jobs in education and media, most jobs in design and arts, and so on. These are the sorts of fields people get into for other reasons, namely a desire to change society for the better. And not surprisingly, these are fields that would skew to the left.

You can also imagine that a lot of people in the category of “well to do but not highly educated” are precisely the sort of people who would respond to Republican rhetoric deriding the cultural elite. After all, if you did well despite lacking the benefit of an education, then of course you’d probably be inclined to see student protesters as nothing but a bunch of whiny entitled children. Of course you’d love to flatter yourself with the idea that, unlike you, college professors and government bureaucrats are a bunch of pointy headed elitists who don’t do any real work. Of course they’d be dismissive about millennials struggling with student debt and an uncertain job market. This brings us to my next point…

A Lot Of Those People Without College Degrees Are Really Affluent Older People

Considering that a lot of the reasoning for using educational attainment as a standard for working class support in the first place essentially boil down to “young broke college grads don’t count”, it shouldn’t be surprising that this biases the term towards older workers. But whether this is justified is highly debatable.

For one thing, the change in educational attainment across generations has been stark. A white person in their late 20s or early 30s is about 30% more likely to have a college degree than one over 55. Likewise, while a white person over 55 was about as likely to high school or less as they were to complete advanced degrees, the situation changed drastically for successive generations afterward to the point that a white person under 40 is twice as likely to have a degree as they are to have a high school degree or less.

The timing of this drop-off is relevant. The mid-80s, was about the last time one could enter onto the job market and still expect to do reasonably well. This was a period before various accessible tradition industries collapsed and intense degree inflation put many types of white collar work out of reach. The bottom did fall out in the 90s and 2000s, but by that point the people who’d entered the job market from around the late 60s to mid-80s were largely insulated from this trend.

In other words, a lot of “working class” 45 to 65 year olds are basically Old Economy Steves, technically able to claim “working class” status but without the economic insecurity and limited opportunities the term is meant to imply.

Conversely, while the gap between degree holders and non-degree holders is wider now than it was in the early 80s, as a group degree holders are a lot less privileged economically than they were 30 or 40 years ago. The fact that more people are getting college degrees means that a lot more of those people are coming from a lower class economic background and are attending less prestigious second and third tier schools, or perhaps even shady for profit schools. These college graduates have far less opportunities, and are far more vulnerable to debt, than their peers.

Even for college graduates who come from upper middle class backgrounds and went to good schools, their prospects aren’t necessarily all that great. As a whole, they’re also finding their degrees have become exorbitantly more expensive while also depreciating in value. A lot of the jobs degrees make accessible today are essentially just the same jobs that someone could get with a high school diploma 40 years ago which have just raised their barriers to entry in response to degree inflation. A lot of other jobs which require degrees, like social work, were never that well-paying to begin with. Meanwhile, on the whole college degrees offer less protection against unemployment than they did even a few decades ago.

The point is it’s absurd to say that older non-degree holders automatically have valid economic anxieties while the younger degree holders do not.

And while all this skews the technical definition of the working class away from the very economically precarious people the term is supposed to apply to, it skews it towards conservative generational biases. Steady social progress in the last 50 years more or less ensures that older people are bound to be more socially conservative than their children. That has nothing to do with economic status, but if you define “working class” in a way that emphasizes older workers you might come away incorrectly assuming it does.

We can also add that the specific generational biases of Generation Jones/Gen Xers tend to skew particularly to the right. There’s a reason people aged 45 to 65 pumped so hard for Donald Trump, and I’d wager it has less to do with them being particularly impacted by the economy, and more to do with the fact that they came of age at a time when Reagonomics was considered good policy, calling the Soviets “evil” was considered good foreign policy, jokes about political correctness were considered edgy, Ross Perot was considered an iconoclast populist and Donald Trump was considered the quintessential businessman.

There’s Just Less Need For Rural/Suburban People To Have Degrees, So There’s Also A Geographic Bias

There’s generally a greater incentive for people with college degrees to live in cities. For one thing, living in a big city is a big advantage in terms of finding a job that matches the highly specialized skill set that one tends to acquire through a degree. There’s also a very strong wage premium to living in cities. For example, people in computer and mathematical occupations tend to get paid 38% higher in cities than rural areas, people in media get paid about 42% higher, and people in legal professions get paid a staggering 55% higher. It’s not surprising, then, that these jobs are disproportionately located in cities.

By contrast, there isn’t such a strong pull on the sort of blue collar technical that don’t require a degree. For example, people who work in installation and maintenance only earn about 12% more in cities than in rural areas which, factoring in cost of living, is hardly any advantage. Small business owners would also by and large have little incentive to move to expensive cities. And in general, rural areas and suburbs are going to be less vulnerable to the degree inflation of intensely competitive metropolitan areas.

As a result of all this, high paying jobs in cities are going to skew strongly towards professional degree holders. On the other hand, rural and suburban areas are going to have a much higher proportion of non-professional jobs.

This creates a pretty strong geographic bias in the term “working class” towards rural and suburban areas which doesn’t accurately reflect the economic opportunities available in those areas. Once again, this leads to a lot of well off people in rural/suburban areas qualifying as working class while a lot of low income people who live in cities get undercounted.

And this is a problem in terms of understanding working class politics, because there are a lot of factors involved in living in a rural/suburban area which would naturally tend to make voters more conservative. Rural/suburban communities tend to be more homogeneous, they’re not as exposed to the sort of congestion and pollution issues that makes the benefits of regulation apparent, they’re more distant from national institutions and therefore more likely to view them with suspicion, and so forth. These are relevant considerations, but they’re not working class considerations and shouldn’t be treated as such.

This All Skews the Numbers Significantly…

As all this indicates, education level is a pretty lousy way of capturing the “working class” when compared to a more strictly economic metrics like income. How much exactly? By my estimates, quite a lot.

In order to try to ferret out just how much it privileges high income rural/suburban voters, I looked at how the geographic distribution of people in poverty across various types of communities. Of course, working class status doesn’t equate to poverty, but if working class means modest economic outcomes and opportunities, which it should, them we’d expect them at least correlate pretty closely. If they don’t, that’s obviously a problem.

Next, I figured a similar distribution for people without college degrees. Comparing these two numbers, I got a rough estimate of just how much defining the working class by educational attainment tends bias the term in favor of certain types of communities.

The results tend to suggest that using education level as a basis of working class status tends to bias the term pretty consistently from low income communities to high ones, and from urban communities to rural/suburban ones. When you combine these two dimension, the distortions become very pronounced. Low income urban areas tend to be underrepresented by almost 20%. Meanwhile high income rural areas are overrepresented by about 32%, while high income suburban areas are overrepresented by over 40%.

… Which Distorts Our Understanding of Working Class Politics

I think these numbers speak for themselves in terms of just how badly education level works as a proxy for working class status. Worse yet, it distorts how we would understand working class politics. By lumping in lower/lower middle class voters in with a lot of people who area actually pretty well off we’re watering down the economic concerns of genuinely lower class people while simultaneously giving undue emphasis to the cultural hang ups of particular demographics.

This is doubtlessly a large part of the reason why Republicans tend to do about 10% better with non-college educated voters in terms of vote shares and approval ratings than they do with voters making less than $50,000 a year.

This also changes how one would read shifts in the working class vote. For example, looking at the 2016 election you’d find that whichever metric you use, there was a 7 million vote swing in the working class vote. But how the shift happens changes substantially depending on how you define the working class. If you define the working class income, you get a picture Trump hardly netted any working class votes, and the shift was entirely due to the collapse in the Democratic vote, largely among those in urban areas. However, if you shift the basis of “working class” status to education level, you get an impression where Trump won largely because he won over the enthusiastic support of some 3 million working class voters in rural and suburban areas.

This obviously changes the story of the 2016 significantly, and would lead one to draw vastly different conclusions about what the working class wants.

Let Me Clarify A Few Things Though

So before I go further, I think I should clarify some things.

First off, this is not some tract trying to argue that the Democrats actually did well with the working class in 2016 and there’s no problem. As I’ve already said, Hillary Clinton did equally badly with the working class whether you define it by income or education level. People who try to argue that there isn’t a need to do better with the working class just don’t want to acknowledge the Democrat’s failure or own up to the fact that there predictions were wrong.

I’m also not trying to argue that “education level” is a totally inappropriate vantage point from which to analyzing politics. While I’m sort of dumping Nate Silver here, to be fair he was originally using education level as a cultural identifier, not an economic one. And it is very useful as a cultural identifier, in large part because by skewing towards older, suburban/rural, non-professional but still well off voters. insofar as the sort of older, rural/suburban, non-professional but still well to do voters, it captures the types of voters you would expect to have a fairly parochial worldview, who would be prone to backlashes of resentment against various cultural elites and their cosmopolitan values. That’s why it does such a good job of capturing Trump’s area positive support.

None of this is to say that I’d advocate writing off people without college degrees as a lost cause. Yes, I expect the demo to, on average, skew conservative for a lot of the reasons I outlined. But it’s a large diverse group with significant variation in views across regions, industries, individuals, etc. Likewise, people’s political motives are often multifaceted and complex. Even some of the things that I’ve mentioned as lending themselves to conservative ideology can also be channeled into more liberal ends given the right argument. For example, the same aversion to distant institutions that leads to a disdain for the Federal government can also apply to corporations and wall street.

That is to say, there’s plenty of room to appeal to the non-college educated, and there’s no reason Democrats didn’t need to do as badly with the non-college educated demographic as they did. Again, people who want to reduce the motives down to reactionary racism and act as though spurning it en masse is some kind of virtue just don’t want to acknowledge that there are any flaws in their politics, or worse yet they’re just indulging in the sort of small minded cosmopolitanism conservatives regularly accuse liberals of.

Similarly, I’d argue that Democrats should be distressed about losing support among prosperous technical workers. The loss of support in the demographic speaks to the disastrous consequences of the collapse of labor unions. On the other hand, these are the types of jobs that do tend to offer low income voters a viable path to the middle class, and our failure to adequately value them is a large part of the reason our economic model is so unbalanced. In other words, our tendency to look down on technical career paths as being automatically inferior to academic one leads has led to a lot of bad policy and bad politics.

Conclusions

All that not withstanding, education level is a bad standard for determining working class status. It lumps people who actually are lower/lower middle class in with a lot of people who are actually pretty well off and unduly skews the portrayal of the working class as being older and more rural/suburban than it really is. This ends up obscuring the group’s economic concerns while creating a false impression of innate cultural conservatism.

Moreover, bad analysis can lead to bad strategy. By defining the working class in a way that biases the term strongly towards the Republican base, we’ve played into a narrative that Trump’s reactionary rhetoric has some inherent appeal to working class voters, who really just wanted some sort of “Völkisch equality” all along. This is exactly why so many people tend to conflate the idea of “appealing to the working class” as, at best, making a bunch of pandering gestures towards cultural conservatism and at worst conceding to racism (note that people on the “screw the working class” side are more guilty of this than anyone).

This is all wrong though. Winning the working class doesn’t mean trying to pander to social conservatives, who often aren’t working class in any meaningful way. Nor would would it be fruitful to try to to replace working class voters with affluent suburbanites, in large part because they very often are the same non-college educated voters who really pumped for Trump.

Rather, winning the working class needs to start with a better understanding of who the working class is. Namely, we need to recognize that the group is in fact younger, more urban, and more diverse than is often imagined. By that same token, working class issues are a good deal broader than we tend to imagine. They’re as much about things like student loan debts and employee powerlessness in the face of discrimination/harassment as they are about shuttered factories.

This should also include recognizing that working class anxieties aren’t just people who can’t keep up with the demands of the modern economy. In fact, they are products of the modern economy, which is failing everyone but the most well off. Democrats need to have a convincing answers to all that, and in 2016 they didn’t.