OVERPRODUCTION OF ELITES: Degrees of Discontent: How Higher Education Created a Downwardly Mobile Elite: America has produced more credentialed elites than the economy has room for—and the DSA is where the surplus is landing. “Those attracted to the DSA appear to be people whose credentials are misaligned with their economic outcomes. Its members are disproportionately rich in credentials yet occupy positions that fall short of the status and financial success their credentials were expected to deliver. . . . Rather than producing a prosperous professional class, American higher education has produced more graduates with elite aspirations than the economy has elite careers to offer. The result is a growing class of frustrated members of an overproduced elite.”

Kenneth Anderson was onto this back during the “Occupy” Movement (remember that?)

rofessor Kenneth Anderson of American University has suggested that the Occupy movement is best understood as a struggle between the upper and lower tiers of the elite. In recent years, the upper tier, composed of bankers, financiers, etc., has become decoupled from the lower-tier sub-elite of “Virtue Industry” workers in fields like education, nonprofit activism, social work and the like—with the latter feeling betrayed and abandoned.

Mr. Anderson writes: “It was, after all, the upper tier New Class, the private-public finance consortium, that created the student loan business and inflated the bubble in which these lower tier would-be professionals borrowed the money. It’s a securitization machine, not so very different from the subprime mortgage machine. The asset bubble pops, but the upper tier New Class, having insulated itself and, as with subprime, having taken its cut upfront and passed the risk along, is still doing pretty well. It’s not populism versus the bankers so much as internecine warfare between two tiers of elites. The downward mobility is real, however.”

Still true.