WHY CONSERVATIVES HATE COLLEGE: It's not just anti-intellectualism. It's also about class.

• Author: Carey, Kevin
• Position: DEPLPRABLE LIVES MATTER

There was a room in my high school where they kept the chopped-up carcass of an old car. You could take the engine apart and put it back together, or slice pieces off the door with a saw that made orange sparks fly. It was a dirty, greasy place in a building where most of the kids wore tied-dyed Grateful Dead T-shirts or early J.Crew.

I rarely went there. Not because I didn't like engines and sparks. I grew up watching my father, an electrical engineer by training, work with a soldering iron and a table saw in our garage. No, I stayed away--was, for all intents and purposes, kept away--because that wasn't where people who were going to college were supposed to be.

We lived in the prosperous suburbs of a decaying city in the postindustrial Northeast. The giant conglomerate my father worked for had stopped manufacturing things in town and built an R&D park nearby where they invented things that were manufactured somewhere else. The whole apparatus of local government, from municipal boundaries to tax rates to deployment of police, was built to funnel money into the suburban school system, where the children of the R&D park employees prepared to follow their parents into one of the good engineering schools or the Ivy League. Almost everyone was white. The room with the old car was for the few kids from the city who accidentally ended up on the wrong side of the school district line.

In the decades that followed, America transformed itself into a continent-size version of my hometown. College graduates flourished while everyone else stagnated or fell behind. People were increasingly segregated by class, geography, and ideology. Higher education became a political fault line, particularly during the Trump years, when college-educated white suburbanites surged into the Democratic Party while white people without degrees ran toward the Republicans.

This realignment, which is far from complete, leaves colleges and universities in a dangerous position. The strong bipartisan commitment to affordable public higher education is at risk if one party sees college as antithetical to its voters and beliefs. Democrats doing electoral math should be mindful that there are 60 million more voting-age white people without bachelor's degrees than with them, and they are concentrated in states with disproportionate political power.

Most diagnoses of this shift are oddly indifferent to the structure of higher education itself. That's a mistake. Many of the failures that led to our fractured political climate are rooted in biases set deep in the foundations of higher learning, which systematically discriminates against people who are most vulnerable to falling behind in the modern economy. We can build something better--but only if we're honest about who benefits now, and what it will take to change.

In the past five years, the political left has galvanized to make college free and forgive outstanding student loans. These are worthy goals. Twentieth-century middle-class prosperity was created, in part, with public colleges and universities that were once affordable but are no longer. It makes sense to restore that promise and help people who were financially injured by surging college prices.

But free college and debt forgiveness by themselves leave much of the structural inequality of American higher education firmly intact. Take, for example, California's widely emulated three-level higher education system. It gives $13,000 in state funding per undergraduate to students in the elite University of California system, which is disproportionately attended by children of the wealthy--kids who have been tracked since birth into prestigious programs. It gives out $8,000 to the less selective California State University campuses. It only gives $2,500 for undergrads at open-access community colleges, where most of the attendees are lower- and working-class students. Free college, then, could ultimately shell out far more money for rich kids than for the poor. (Many low-income community college students already pay no tuition at all.) It is like giving the people eating at Le Bernardin and Burger King the same voucher for a gratis meal.

Private colleges don't get direct state subsidies, so they make up for it with high prices. Sticker price tuition at the University of...