The Greatest Con in American History: How Universities Destroyed the Middle Class
Middle-class families spend decades doing everything right. They save relentlessly. They drive their cars until the wheels fall off. They skip vacations, work overtime, sacrifice everything; all for one promise: send your kid to college, and they’ll have a better life than you did.
That promise was a lie. And the institutions selling it knew it was a lie.
We’re facing the worst job market for college graduates in five years. Student loan debt has reached $1.77 trillion. Young people with degrees are competing with high school graduates for the same jobs and losing. The American Dream isn’t just dying, it’s being actively killed by the very institutions that promised to deliver it.
This isn’t about the economy. This isn’t about AI or globalization or any other convenient scapegoat. This is about a system that takes billions from families who can’t afford it, delivers a product that doesn’t work, hides the evidence, and then asks for donations.
Universities are running the biggest con in American history. And it’s time someone said it.
Part I: The Setup — How They Sell The Dream
The pitch is perfect because it’s wrapped in aspiration. “Invest in your child’s future.” “Education is the pathway to prosperity.” “A degree pays for itself.”
For decades, that pitch was true. College was the reliable escalator to the middle class. You got the degree, you got the job, you built the life. The system worked.
But something changed. Universities discovered they could keep raising prices without delivering results, because by the time families realized they’d been conned, they’d already signed the loans.
Between 1999 and 2020, average tuition and fees at public four-year institutions jumped from 18% of median household income to over 35%. They doubled the financial burden on families in just two decades. And they did it while the product was getting worse.
Today, a middle-class family earning $80,000 to $120,000 appears to have decent income, but after covering rent, groceries, and healthcare, there’s almost nothing left for tuition. But financial aid formulas assume these families can contribute far more than they realistically can. So what happens? Parents take out PLUS loans. Students graduate with $40,000 in debt. And universities keep cashing checks.
The con works because of the lag time. You don’t discover you bought a broken product until four years and $200,000 later, when your kid can’t get hired.
Part II: The Product Doesn’t Work Anymore
Here’s what universities don’t advertise in their glossy brochures:
52% of recent four-year college graduates are underemployed one year after graduation, working jobs that don’t require a degree. Your kid could spend four years studying business and end up managing a Starbucks. But wait, it gets worse. A decade after graduation, 45% still don’t hold a job that requires a four-year degree. This isn’t a “rough first year” problem. This is structural failure.
The Class of 2026 is about to walk into a catastrophe. Over half of employers rate next spring’s hiring outlook as “poor or fair,” the most pessimistic reading since the pandemic. Job postings on Handshake fell 16% year-over-year while applications surged 26%.
And here’s the kicker: For the first time since 2000, college graduates are taking just as long to find jobs as people with only high school diplomas. The “college premium”; the thing your family mortgaged their future for, has evaporated.
Universities watched this happen. They saw entry-level job postings that used to provide training now requiring 2–3 years of prior experience. They watched AI eliminate the junior roles that trained new graduates. They knew employers were prioritizing experienced workers.
And they raised tuition anyway.
Part III: The Statistical Cover-Up
Universities aren’t stupid. They know their product is broken. So they manipulate the data to hide it.
When schools report “85% of graduates are employed within six months,” they’re lying by omission. That statistic includes:
The graduate working at Starbucks while applying to grad school
The kid living in your basement taking online courses (“engaged in further education”)
Anyone with any job, regardless of whether it required a degree
It’s not employment data. It’s a cover-up wrapped in a press release.
48% of 2025 graduates feel unprepared to apply for entry-level positions. 33% of 2025 graduates are unemployed and actively seeking work. But universities won’t tell you that, because if middle-class families knew the real numbers, enrollment would crater.
Instead, they market aspirations. They show you the 15% who land great jobs and hide the other 52% who are underemployed. It’s the oldest con in the book: show people what they want to see, hide what they need to know.
Part IV: Where The Money Actually Goes
So if universities are charging more and delivering less, where’s the money going?
Not to education. Not to preparing students for careers. It’s going to build an empire of administrators who have nothing to do with teaching.
Let me break down the scam with numbers:
Between 1976 and 2018, full-time faculty increased by 92% while total student enrollment increased by 78%. That sounds reasonable — universities grew their teaching staff roughly in line with student growth.
But here’s the con: During that exact same period, full-time administrators increased by 164% and other professional staff increased by 452%.
Read that again. While faculty grew 92%, administrators grew 164%, and other non-teaching professionals grew 452%.
They’re not hiring teachers. They’re hiring bureaucrats.
Between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students grew by 39%, while employees engaged in teaching, research or service only grew by 18%. And it cost a fortune: spending on administration per student increased by 61%, while instructional spending per student rose only 39%.
The result? The percent of total university spending on instruction decreased from 41% to 29% since 1980. They’re spending less of each tuition dollar on actually educating students.
Administrative costs now account for nearly a quarter of total spending at American universities. A quarter. Of every dollar you pay in tuition, 25 cents goes to administrators; not professors, not career services, not job placement. Administrators.
They’re building lazy rivers and luxury dorms to attract students. They’re paying university presidents salaries comparable to Fortune 500 CEOs. They’re creating entire departments of people whose jobs have nothing to do with education.
Meanwhile, career services, the department that’s supposed to actually get your kid a job, gets the leftovers.
Part V: The Athletic Department Tells You Everything
Want to know what universities are really about? Look at what happened when student athletes realized they were being exploited.
For decades, universities made billions off college sports while athletes couldn’t earn a dime from their own names, images, and likenesses. The athletes were generating revenue, filling stadiums, driving TV contracts and getting nothing but scholarships while coaches made millions.
Then the athletes said enough. They fought back. They exposed the con. And suddenly, universities figured out how to make it work.
Now Power 4 schools are maxing out at $20.5 million revenue sharing caps to pay athletes. Top college athletes are getting NIL valuations of $4.7 million. Universities built entire infrastructure systems — compliance offices, legal frameworks, payment processes, oversight committees; practically overnight.
They negotiated with the NCAA. They worked with boosters and collectives. They figured out the tax implications, the Title IX complications, the regulatory maze. When student athletes demanded to be treated fairly, universities found a way.
So let me ask you this: If universities can build a $20.5 million distribution system for athletes, why can’t they guarantee job placement for the students paying tuition?
They can negotiate NIL deals with Nike. They can manage complex revenue-sharing formulas across hundreds of athletes. They can create entire departments to handle compliance for sports.
But they can’t get your kid a job interview?
The athletic department doesn’t expose greed, it exposes priorities. When young people stood up and said “you’re exploiting us,” universities found the resources to fix it. They proved they CAN solve complex problems when they want to.
But regular students? The ones taking on $40,000 in debt for degrees that won’t get them hired? Those students don’t have leverage. They already signed the loan paperwork.
It’s not that universities can’t invest in career outcomes. It’s that they don’t have to. Because unlike athletes who could transfer or go pro, your kid has already paid, signed non-dischargeable debt, and has nowhere else to go.
The athletes exposed the pathology. Universities absolutely can find money, build infrastructure, and deliver results when they’re forced to. They just choose not to for the students who need it most.
Part VI: The Debt Trap
Here’s where the con becomes catastrophic: the debt.
45 million Americans owe nearly $1.6 trillion in student loan debt. The average federal student loan debt is $39,375 — double what it was in 2008. 3.6 million borrowers owe over $100,000; 1.1 million more than in 2018.
And here’s the brutal reality: The average student borrower spends more than 20 years paying off their loans.
Twenty years. Paying for a product that didn’t work. Servicing debt from a degree that didn’t deliver the promised outcome.
10.16% of student loan debt is already 90 days or more past due, and 13.03% became 30 days or more past due in Q2 2025. People can’t pay. The jobs don’t exist or don’t pay enough to service the debt they took on to qualify for those jobs.
Universities created an entire generation of indentured servants. And they did it knowingly.
Part VII: Banks Have More Ethics Than Universities
Let’s be clear about something: When a bank lends you money, they assess whether you can pay it back. They have underwriting standards. They calculate risk. If they lend irresponsibly, they take losses. They have skin in the game.
Universities? They’ll admit your kid into a communications program with a 60% underemployment rate, encourage them to take out $200,000 in non-dischargeable debt, and never once mention that the degree won’t pay for itself.
When a bank misleads customers about loan terms, we call it fraud and people go to prison.
When universities do it, we call it higher education and they ask for alumni donations.
Universities have less accountability than payday lenders. At least payday lenders are honest about the terms.
Part VIII: How Universities Broke America
This isn’t just about individuals drowning in debt. Universities have systematically broken the mechanisms that built the American middle class.
They destroyed economic mobility. The pathway from working class to middle class used to run through higher education. Now it runs through debt and underemployment. Families are spending more to get less, and the return on investment has collapsed.
They created credential inflation. Universities lobbied for degree requirements on jobs that don’t need them, creating artificial demand for their product. This shut out capable workers and forced people into debt for credentials that add no value. It’s a protection racket masquerading as education policy.
They diverted resources from productive uses. Imagine if the $1.77 trillion in student debt had gone toward starting businesses, buying homes, raising families, or saving for retirement. Instead, it went to fund administrative bloat and luxury dorms while delivering degrees that don’t lead to careers.
They broke social trust. Middle-class families believed in the system. They did everything right. And the system betrayed them. When the institutions you’re supposed to trust turn out to be cons, what’s left to believe in?
Part IX: The Solutions They’ll Never Implement
Universities could fix this tomorrow if they wanted to. Here’s how:
Publish real employment data by program. Not “employed within six months.” Show us: What percentage work in their field? What’s the median starting salary? What’s the debt-to-income ratio? If a program can’t justify its cost with outcomes, shut it down or make it free.
Job placement guarantees or refunds. If a program doesn’t place 70% of graduates in field-relevant jobs within a year, students get 50% of tuition back. Watch how fast universities start caring about outcomes when their revenue depends on it.
Match athletic spending with career infrastructure. If you’re spending $20.5 million on athletes, match that for career services. Build employer partnerships. Create apprenticeships. Guarantee internships. Actually prepare students for the job market instead of treating career services like an afterthought.
Cut administrative bloat in half. Administrative costs account for nearly a quarter of total spending. Fire half the administrators, redirect that money to instruction and career outcomes. Stop building empires and start delivering education.
End credential inflation. Stop lobbying for unnecessary degree requirements. Admit that most jobs don’t need four years of college. Let people prove competence through alternative credentials, apprenticeships, and work experience.
But here’s the truth: Universities will never implement these reforms voluntarily. Why would they? The current system is obscenely profitable. They get paid upfront, face zero consequences for failure, and operate with less accountability than any other industry in America.
Part X: What This Means For You
If you’re a middle-class parent saving for your kid’s college, understand what you’re buying. You’re not buying education. You’re buying a lottery ticket where the house always wins.
Your kid might be one of the lucky ones who land good jobs. But there’s a 52% chance they’ll be underemployed a year after graduation, working a job that didn’t require the degree you mortgaged your future to buy.
Universities won’t tell you this. They’ll show you statistics carefully crafted to hide the truth. They’ll market aspirations while delivering debt. They’ll take your money and wish you luck.
If you’re a student drowning in debt with a degree that didn’t deliver, understand that you’re not the failure, the system failed you. Universities sold you a broken product, hid the data, and left you holding the bag.
If you’re an employer watching this disaster unfold, understand that the credential arms race is killing your industry. Most jobs don’t need degrees. You know it. Start hiring for competence instead of credentials and watch the university business model collapse.
And if you’re a university administrator reading this, understand that the game is almost over. Enrollment is dropping. Public trust is cratering. The debt crisis is becoming politically untenable. You built an empire on a con, and the middle-class families you exploited are starting to figure it out.
The Bottom Line
For two generations, middle-class families believed that education was the path to prosperity. They saved everything. They sacrificed everything. They took on crushing debt. They did it because they trusted the system.
Universities exploited that trust. They raised prices while outcomes collapsed. They hired administrators instead of investing in education. They manipulated statistics to hide failure. They created a debt crisis that will haunt American families for decades.
And they did it all knowingly. They watched the job market deteriorate. They watched outcomes collapse. They watched families drown in debt. And they kept raising prices because they could.
This isn’t failure. This is fraud.
The sacred ground of higher education was supposed to build the middle class. Instead, it became a machine for extracting wealth from middle-class families while delivering less and less in return.
At least when you get conned by a street hustler, you know you’ve been had. Universities hand you a diploma, a six-figure debt, and a smile; then ask you to donate to the alumni fund.
The middle class built American universities. They believed in them. They invested everything.
Universities repaid that faith by destroying the very class that created them.
That’s not education. That’s betrayal.
Why A Matchmaker Cares About This
You might be wondering: what does any of this have to do with matchmaking?
Everything.
I spend my days working with successful professionals in their 30s and 40s who are finally ready to find a partner and build a family. And you know what I hear constantly? “I wish I’d started earlier.” “I spent my entire 20s just trying to survive.” “I didn’t have time to date seriously.”
The university con doesn’t just destroy financial security. It destroys the foundation for family formation.
When you graduate with $40,000 in debt into a job market that doesn’t value your degree, you don’t think about relationships. You think about survival. You work 60-hour weeks just to make minimum payments. You take on side hustles. You move back home. You delay everything: relationships, marriage, children, because you can’t afford the life you were promised.
And when the debt doesn’t go away? When you realize you need a master’s degree just to compete? You sacrifice another two years and take on more debt. Your late 20s disappear into classrooms and internships and trying to build the career you thought your bachelor’s degree would deliver.
By the time you achieve some financial stability, if you achieve it, you’re in your mid-30s. A decade and a half of your personal life postponed to accommodate work demands that only exist because universities failed to prepare you the first time.
There’s less incentive to have children and create family than ever before in American history. Not because people don’t want families. But because universities sold them a future that doesn’t exist, buried them in debt, and forced them to spend their prime relationship-building years just trying to achieve basic financial security.
The people I work with aren’t commitment-phobes. They’re people who postponed their personal lives to fix a financial disaster they didn’t create. And now they’re trying to compress a decade of relationship development into a few years before their fertility window closes.
When I see a 38-year-old woman finally ready to find a partner but worried about her timeline for having children, I see someone who spent 15 years cleaning up a mess that universities created and profited from.
When I see a 35-year-old man who’s been so focused on building his career that he never learned how to build a serious relationship, I don’t see someone who “wasn’t ready.” I see someone who was doing exactly what he had to do to justify the investment his family made in a broken promise.
This isn’t just an economic issue. It’s a social crisis destroying the fundamental building blocks of society; relationships, marriage, family formation. Universities aren’t just taking money. They’re taking time people can never get back.
That’s why I’m writing this. The matchmaking industry exists largely to help people build the relationships they should have been building earlier, if they hadn’t been drowning in debt from a system that conned them.
Sources
Job Market & Graduate Outcomes:
National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), “Job Outlook 2026 Survey” — https://www.naceweb.org/job-market/trends-and-predictions/hiring-flat-for-the-college-class-of-2026
Handshake job platform data — Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/2026-graduates-job-market-7928bcd7
Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, “Are Young College Graduates Losing Their Edge in the Job Market?” Economic Commentary, 2025 — https://www.clevelandfed.org/publications/economic-commentary/2025/ec-202514-are-young-college-graduates-losing-their-edge-in-the-job-market
Strada Institute for the Future of Work & Burning Glass Institute, “Talent Disrupted” Report — https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/academics/2024/02/22/more-half-recent-four-year-college-grads-underemployed
Cengage Group, “2025 Graduate Employability Report” — https://www.cengagegroup.com/news/press-releases/2025/cengage-group-2025-employability-report/
The Hechinger Report, “Opinion: Too Many College Graduates Are Stranded Before Their Careers Can Even Begin” — https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-too-many-college-graduates-are-stranded-before-their-careers-can-even-begin-we-cant-let-that-happen/
Tuition Costs & Financial Aid:
State Science & Technology Institute (SSTI), “Why is the Cost of College Rising So Fast?” — https://ssti.org/blog/why-cost-college-rising-so-fast
Edvisors, “How the High Cost of College is Squeezing the Middle Class” — https://www.edvisors.com/blog/high-cost-of-college-squeezing-middle-class/
Administrative Bloat:
Goldwater Institute, “Administrative Bloat at American Universities: The Real Reason for High Costs in Higher Education” — https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/administrative-bloat-at-american-universities-the/
Progressive Policy Institute, “How to Cut Administrative Bloat at U.S. Colleges” — https://www.progressivepolicy.org/how-to-cut-administrative-bloat-at-u-s-colleges/
Bowdoin Review, “Death By a Thousand Emails: How Administrative Bloat is Killing American Higher Education” — https://students.bowdoin.edu/bowdoin-review/features/death-by-a-thousand-emails-how-administrative-bloat-is-killing-american-higher-education/
College Sports & NIL:
NIL-NCAA.com, “NCAA Revenue Sharing & NIL Estimates 2025” — https://nil-ncaa.com/
ESPN, “What is NIL in college sports? How do athlete deals work?” — https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/41040485/what-nil-college-sports-how-do-athlete-deals-work
Student Loan Debt:
EducationData.org, “Student Loan Debt Statistics” — https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-statistics
BestColleges, “Average U.S. Student Loan Debt: 2025 Statistics” — https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/average-student-loan-debt/
The Motley Fool, “Student Loan Debt 2025: Statistics, Forgiveness, and Outlook” — https://www.fool.com/research/student-loan-debt-statistics/
