By 2019, more than one-third of Americans over the age of twenty-five had a college degree, the highest proportion in US history.¹ The professional-managerial class (PMC) has made the bachelor’s degree a necessary credential for anyone who wants to enter its ranks.

In colleges, especially small liberal arts colleges, students are learning the language of identity protocols and its ancillary politics, and they are able to exercise their sense of entitlement to forms of social interaction that enable them to function in and dominate the liberal professions. In the meantime, liberal leaders find it all the more easy to dismiss the 64 percent of Americans who fail to earn that degree as backward and guilty of the societal ills that the PMC has individualized, psychologized, and managed.

If the majority of Americans do not attend college, the majority of college students in the United States do not attend private liberal arts colleges: public universities do most of the work of educating students, but we rarely hear about their individual attendees. They are the masses, unnamed and faceless, often evoked in images of spring breakers gone wild, or football fans dressed in Buckeyes regalia. In the popular media and in the popular imagination, attendees of small liberal arts colleges appear as individuals who are culturally significant, if sometimes more spoiled than your average twenty-year-old. What happens in private colleges takes on outsize importance, because these institutions are the training grounds for elite members of the PMC.