In his Morning Jolt of December 28, Jim Geraghty wrote, in the context of populism’s enragés:

If you drop out of high school, or only have a high-school education, you will have a difficult time getting ahead in life. That’s not a value judgment or snobbishness, it’s just a reflection of who’s hiring and what they’re paying. This is the case today, it has been the case for quite some time, it will be that way for the foreseeable future, whether the next president is Donald Trump, or Hillary Clinton, or someone else. We can argue about whether employers overvalue a college education or require it for jobs that don’t really need it, but the mentality of the hiring class is unlikely to change quickly. If your definition of “Making America Great Again” is to somehow return to an age where a high-school education was sufficient to live the good life, you’re going to be disappointed.

His condemning high-school grads to permanent Morlock status is not unrealistic, given present realities, but it misses a couple factors that need to be brought in.

First, as my mother, a teacher, used to point out, the high-school diploma was once considered a ticket to entry-level white-collar, as well as blue-collar, employment. It represented a minimum standard of literacy, numeracy, and the rudiments of punctuality, discipline, etc., employers expected. This state of affairs unhappily no longer obtains. The meaning of a high-school degree has been devalued, both by external factors (the increasingly competitive economy) but internal ones as well, principally the collapse of elementary and secondary education. The latter is more to blame, to my mind, as if you go into any prosperous town’s high school, you’ll see new computers, well-outfitted science labs, etc. I suspect there’s literally no impediment to the median (or below-average) student from one of these school’s getting an entry-level training position in any corporation, other than the corporation’s college-degree requirement which is there to protect the company from having to consider or hire kids from the other public schools with metal detectors, automatic promotion, and illiterate graduates.

Second, there’s the fact that corporations (and the government) have largely turned those entry-level, training-wheel white-collar jobs into unpaid internships. This is a huge problem if you’re bright and poor. But leave that aside.

Third, there’s underlying demographic—and moral—problem. Unlike Lake Wobegon, half of our children are below average. What are these people to do? The last few generations’ answer, Go to college!, doesn’t work, it turns out. We can paper over the failures of secondary education with remedial “college” work, but because this is (a) done on one’s own dime, (b) relies on virtues (the aforementioned punctuality, diligence) not inculcated by the schools (and the culture!) these folks graduate from, and (c) requires toleration of years’ more school, you get an enormous dropout rate. And more student debt. A secondary problem is that we’re on a credentialization treadmill. High-school diploma becomes worthless? Everyone go to college! Well, now, turns out we’ve got a lot of college grads who aren’t that bright and who basically boozed and screwed their way to the minimal requirements of a business or education degree at Middle Nowhere State, and they’re really not who top employers want. So, hmm, the really good jobs we’re looking for suddenly require an MBA or a master’s degree… Ad infinitum.

So, as good ol’ V.I. famously asked, what is to be done? I dunno. But I suspect reforming secondary education and/or allowing employers to use IQ tests would save millions of people millions of man-years wasted in schools where they don’t really want to be. The larger and more difficult problem is how we can provide people on the left-hand of the bell curve the ability to earn a good living and therefore have meaningful lives. They know they’re not going to live on Central Park South. But they don’t want to be treated like garbage, and they don’t want the lower end of the wage scale constantly eroded for the convenience of the high earners.

To keep the Republic going, we’ve got to keep one eye on the principle that all men are created equal, and that a janitor is as fully an American as a hedge-fund manager. If we allow either group to view their interests as permanently antagonistic to the others’ the democratic project is over, and we’re back to the ancient bedeviling European agony of class. (And, secondarily, since we’ve gone multicultural, the rest of the world’s demon, tribe.)

The really troubling possibility is that we may simply have reached the end of our ability to provide people with meaningful work. It’s not just blue-collar people who face bleak prospects in terms of meaningful lives. The attenuation of religion is likely central to the problem, but it’s not everything. It may just be that in a huge, anonymous country, with an enormous amount of leisure time (whether funded by wealth or welfare), people are just lost. Look at the high-achieving résumés of some of the folks at the dingbat New Age camp Matt Labash visits. Consider the surfeit of print and words these days and its implications for trying to establish any kind of common culture. Intellectually, we may end up as balkanized and narrowcasted as today’s TV audiences. Sure, universities churn out die-hard fans of the equivalent of the Big Three Networks, Social Justice, Sexual License, and Statolatry, but anyone who’s really smart knows they’re just broadcasting reruns of overpraised shows that couldn’t sustain their premises the first time around. (Even there, the university is a troubled institution, kept afloat by gargantuan, government-subsidized tuition, that can’t convincingly articulate its own mission, sustain a common high culture, or employ the grad students it educates.)

Top to bottom, we have a crisis of meaning, and as always, the poorest get hurt the most easily. If we can’t find a way to provide solid, gainful employment for people with fewer than sixteen years of classroom education, we need to rethink our educational system, our labor market, and perhaps aspects of our culture. I am no populist and I agree strongly with Geraghty that throwing meaningless slogans at the problem is a despicable form of political exploitation. But I can’t either in good conscience say, “Well, if you don’t go to college, whaddya expect,” likely because I live in flyover country among plenty of good citizens and good people who weren’t cut out for college by temperament, ability, or money, and are manifestly struggling to find a means to improve their lives and those of their children. If the credentialed turn their back on their less-educated fellow citizens, the former don’t deserve the support of the latter.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.