Community college grads can outearn their "elite university peers"

Teresa Watanable reported last week for the Los Angeles Times under the headline, "The most lucrative majors? Some community college grads can outearn their elite university peers."  An excerpt follows: 

While UC and top private campuses are flooded with applications, students' post-graduation earnings can be as much — or more — with degrees from the more accessible California State University or California Community Colleges, depending on the field, data analyzing California institutions showed.

Among computer engineering majors, for instance, San Jose State graduates earn a median $127,047 four years after graduation. That’s nearly the same as UCLA’s $128,131 and more than USC's $115,102, as well as seven other UC campuses that offer the major, which combines software development with hardware design. Cal State graduates in that field from Chico, Long Beach, Fresno, Fullerton, Sacramento, San Francisco and San Luis Obispo earn more than $90,000 annually. 

“It really pays to look at outcomes and not be blinded by the brand name,” said Martin Van Der Werf of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “The best brand name doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to result in the highest life earnings.”

Itzkowitz said Cal State is a particularly good deal. The CSU annual base tuition is only $5,742, compared with $13,752 at UC and $66,640 at USC, although such variables as financial aid and housing costs affect the actual out-of-pocket expenses. Even if Cal State increases tuition, which some officials are proposing to address a $1.5-billion budget gap, the price would still be thousands lower than UC.

“The CSU system itself has really been shown as a pillar of producing economic mobility for students,” he said. “It enrolls a more economically diverse student body. And it also has been shown to produce strong economic outcomes for lower and moderate-income students. They're really at the top of the list of affordability and outcomes.”

New York Times newsletter again talking class and the Democratic Party

Here's an excerpt from David Leonhardt's newsletter, which begins by asserting that the Democratic Party's biggest challenge today is to win over working-class voters.  Leonhardt is skeptical that working class voters' drift to the Republican Party boils down to racism--at least not to racism alone: 

If the Democrats’ struggles were really all about racism, several heavily Mexican-American counties in South Texas would not have swung to the Republicans this year. Nor would Trump have increased his vote share in the New York boroughs of Queens and the Bronx by about 10 percentage points versus 2016. He appears to have won a higher share of the vote in the Bronx, which is only 9 percent non-Hispanic white, than in affluent Manhattan, which is 47 percent white, Dave Wasserman of The Cook Political Report pointed out.

This pattern leaves Democrats needing to attract a lot votes in traditionally Republican suburbs to win many elections. That’s a narrow path to victory. 

Here's Leonhardt's response to the question what Democrats can do: 

Many working-class voters, across racial groups, are moderate to conservative on social issues: They are religious, favor well-funded police departments and support some restrictions on both abortion and immigration. On economic issues, by contrast, they tend to back Democratic positions, like a higher minimum wage and expanded government health care.

For Democrats to do better with the working class, they probably need to moderate their liberal image on social issues — and double down on economic populism.

Here's a related New York Times April essay by Doug Sosnik on the so-called diploma divide. 

Center for Working Class Politics on the most successful Democratic Party candidates

David Leonhardt writes in today's New York Times newsletter under the headline, "How Democrats can Win Workers" and the subhead, "Teachers, Not Lawyers."  Here's an excerpt:  

About 60 percent of U.S. voters do not have a four-year college degree, and they live disproportionately in swing states. As a result, these voters — often described as the American working class — are crucial to winning elections. Yet many of them are deeply skeptical of today’s Democratic Party.

Republicans retook control of the House last year by winning most districts with below-median incomes. In nearly 20 Western and Southern states, Democrats are virtually shut out of statewide offices largely because of their weakness among the white working class. Since 2018, the party has also lost ground with Black, Asian and especially Latino voters.

Unless the party improves its standing with blue-collar voters, “there’s no way for progressive Democrats to advance their agenda in the Senate,” according to a study that the Center for Working-Class Politics, a left-leaning research group, released this morning.

The class inversion of American politics — with most professionals supporting Democrats and more working-class people backing Republicans — is one of the most consequential developments in American life (and, as regular readers know, a continuing theme of this newsletter).

Today, I’ll be writing about what Democrats might do about the problem, focusing on a new YouGov poll, conducted as part of the Center for Working-Class Politics study. In an upcoming newsletter, I’ll examine the issue from a conservative perspective and specifically how Republicans might alter their economic agenda to better serve their new working-class base.

A key point is that even modest shifts in the working-class vote can decide elections. If President Biden wins 50 percent of the non-college vote next year, he will almost certainly be re-elected. If he wins only 45 percent, he will probably lose.