For much of the last century, higher education was seen as a unifying force in American life. Colleges promised not only economic mobility, but exposure to diverse ideas, backgrounds, and social experiences. Attending college was meant to broaden perspectives and create a shared civic foundation.
Instead, higher education has increasingly become a sorting mechanism—separating Americans by class, geography, culture, and outlook. While college attendance has expanded, its social effects have grown more divisive, reshaping who interacts with whom and how Americans understand one another.
Expansion Without Integration
College enrollment has grown dramatically since the mid-20th century. What was once an elite experience is now a common expectation, particularly for those seeking middle-class stability. Yet expansion has not produced uniform integration.
Institutions differ sharply by selectivity, cost, mission, and student composition. Elite universities draw disproportionately from higher-income families, while community colleges and regional public institutions serve more economically diverse populations. These students rarely interact, despite all being labeled “college educated.”
As a result, higher education has expanded vertically rather than horizontally—creating parallel tracks rather than shared experiences.
Sources:
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National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), enrollment and attainment data
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Chetty et al., Mobility Report Cards
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Pew Research Center, education and class studies
Education as a Social Divider
Education increasingly functions as a marker of social identity. Research shows that educational attainment now predicts attitudes, cultural preferences, and social networks as strongly as income or geography.
College graduates are more likely to live in urban areas, delay marriage, marry other graduates, and work in professional occupations. Non-graduates are more likely to remain geographically rooted and socially embedded in local networks. These patterns reduce cross-class interaction and reinforce distinct worldviews.
Importantly, these differences emerge not only from what is taught, but from who attends college and how campus life is structured.
Sources:
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Pew Research Center, education and social divides
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Reeves, Richard. Dream Hoarders
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Autor, David, labor market polarization research
The Sorting Starts Before College
College sorting reflects inequalities that begin much earlier. Access to advanced coursework, test preparation, extracurricular activities, and guidance counseling varies widely by school district and family resources.
Selective admissions processes reward signals that correlate with advantage, even when institutions aim to promote diversity. Over time, this creates feedback loops: elite colleges produce networks and credentials that reinforce their own exclusivity.
Students who do not attend college—or who attend less selective institutions—often experience this stratification as exclusion rather than choice.
Sources:
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Brookings Institution, education inequality research
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NCES, K–12 resource disparities
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Opportunity Insights, education and mobility studies
Civic Consequences of Educational Sorting
Higher education’s sorting effects extend beyond the labor market. Studies show that college graduates participate in civic life at higher rates, including voting, volunteering, and institutional engagement.
While this participation is often framed as positive, it also concentrates civic influence among a narrower segment of the population. When leadership pipelines disproportionately draw from college-educated networks, institutions may grow culturally distant from large portions of the public.
This dynamic can deepen mistrust, particularly when institutions are perceived as serving the interests or values of a specific educational class.
Sources:
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Pew Research Center, civic engagement by education
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Putnam, Robert. Our Kids
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National Conference on Citizenship reports
Did College Fail—or Was It Overloaded?
It would be misleading to describe higher education as a failure. Colleges continue to generate research, train professionals, and provide opportunity for many students. The issue is not decline, but misalignment between expectations and outcomes.
Higher education was tasked with too many roles at once: workforce preparation, social integration, moral formation, and economic equalization. As labor markets changed and inequality widened, colleges absorbed pressures they could not fully resolve.
Sorting was not the goal, but it became the result.
Sources:
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Goldin, Claudia, and Lawrence Katz. The Race Between Education and Technology
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OECD, education and inequality reports
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Pew Research Center, public views of higher education
Rethinking Education’s Social Role
Addressing educational sorting does not require abandoning higher education, but reconsidering its place within a broader system. Strengthening non-college pathways, improving regional institutions, and reducing the social distance between educational tracks may matter as much as expanding access.
The question is no longer whether college unites Americans—it often does not—but whether American society can rebuild shared experiences that do not depend on educational credentialing alone.
In a country where education increasingly defines opportunity and identity, that challenge may be as civic as it is economic.