America's 'Diploma Divide' Hands China The Crown

In 1917, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a Dalit scholar from India's“untouchable” caste, stood before a Columbia audience to dissect castes in India . Born into a system where birth locked one's fate-where wealth or learning couldn't lift a Dalit past the scorn of higher castes-he described an“enclosed class,” a social dungeon.

Later, as a leader in India's independence and the republic's constitution's architect, Ambedkar drew inspiration from America's capitalist promise: vertical social mobility . Unlike in India's ascriptive order, effort and education could propel anyone upward-or let them fall.

This fluidity, what American sociologist Talcott Parsons called“achievement orientation ,” powered America's rise. Hard work, not lineage, shaped status. Robert K Merton saw it as an incentive system-cultural goals matched by institutional means, like education, fostering harmony.

This wasn't just personal ambition; it was the American Dream-life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, a better life-made real through universities that leveled the field, equipping students of all stripes for higher strata, roles and status in society. Education was the key to America's success, a ladder anyone could climb.

For decades, this system worked. Postwar America became a global hub of innovation-semiconductors, personal computers, the internet-because it rewarded talent over pedigree. The Diploma Divide existed but was bridgeable; education was a ladder, not a wall.

By 2018, Columbia's second annual Ambedkar Lectures turned the mirror inward. Scholars likened American racism to India's caste system, noting parallels between Dalits and people of color.

But they overlooked a more profound shift: the Diploma Divide had morphed America's once highly mobile class system vertically into something“caste-like”, rigid and unforgiving. Where once education promised mobility, it now marks a near-permanent divide.

The numbers tell the tale . Since the 1980s, college costs have skyrocketed-tuition, adjusted for inflation, leaped four to five times by 2017–18, per the National Center for Education Statistics. Only 18% of students earned STEM degrees in 2015–16, a ticket to high-earning fields.

Meanwhile, income inequality has widened. Alan Krueger's “Great Gatsby Curve” shows how this stalls vertical mobility; today's youth are less likely to surpass their parents than those born in the 1950s.

Barack Obama, in a 2011 Kansas speech, traced the erosion : postwar, a poor child had a 50-50 shot at the middle class; by 1980, it was 40%; now, it's 33%.“The rungs on the ladder,” he said,“have grown farther apart.”

The Diploma Divide is not merely economic but political and cultural. College-educated individuals-now Democratic-uphold liberal principles, while those without degrees, now more Republican, gravitate toward populism.

This shift began with Donald Trump's 2016 ascension to the White House and was reaffirmed by his election again in 2024. Educated elites create innovation, but their benefits do not trickle down.

Non-college whites, once Democratic stalwarts, now back policies like tariffs, hoping to reclaim lost ground-though economists doubt the fix. The divide has turned class into caste: wealth and degrees beget more of the same, while those without face a ceiling as unyielding as India's old“closed class” hierarchies.

The Diploma Divide has profound implications for the fabric of American society.

This hardening costs America dearly. Adam Segal of the Council on Foreign Relations argues US primacy rests on out-innovating rivals -a feat tied to education and opportunity.

For decades, American breakthroughs set the global pace. Now, China lures talent and pioneers tech while US schools falter. Public education, once a leveler, has weakened since the 1980s reforms. Tax policy exacerbates the divide: the top 0.1% pay historically low rates, per Krueger, leaving a system less progressive than most OECD nations.

Trump's tax records-showing minimal liability-underscore the tilt toward the wealthy. The Diploma Divide is not just a social issue; it's a threat to America's global competitiveness and economic equality.

Military might-fleets in the oceans, tanks on land, drones and armadas in the sky-can't compensate. These are deterrents, not drivers of wealth accumulation and distribution. Supremacy demands innovation, productivity, and a workforce rewarded for effort.

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America loses its edge when the Diplomatic Divide locks millions out of that promise. China doesn't need to conquer; it can simply outpace a nation strangling its own potential.

The decline isn't fate. External foes didn't forge this caste system-America did itself through policy and neglect. Trump exposed the fracture, but he didn't create it. The fix is domestic: a tax code that funds opportunity, not dynasties; an education system that lifts, not burdens; a restoration of the old incentive structure.

Whether the White House swings red or blue on the first Tuesday of November every four years, the priority is clear: dismantle the new“caste system” of the diploma. Only then can America reclaim its leverage abroad.

Echoes of Ambedkar

Ambedkar saw America as a rebuke to India's caste order-where merit could triumph. A century later, that vision dims. The Diploma Divide has birthed a new enclosure, not of birth but of credentials, as rigid as the one he fled.

China's strict meritocracy-rooted in its grueling gaokao exams, STEM-focused education, and performance-driven governance-propels its edge over the US. Producing 77,000 STEM PhDs annually against America's 40,000, China now powers innovations in leading-edge fields like 5G and electric vehicles. It surpassed the US in top scientific papers in 2023, fueled by a system rewarding talent over privilege.

Meanwhile, America's Diploma Divide, soaring college costs and inequality stifle mobility, shrinking rather than expanding its talent pool while deepening internal fractures. America's supremacy wanes not so much from Beijing's rise but from its own drift toward the system it once fought-a bitter irony for a nation once defined by its ladders and now hobbled by its walls.

Bhim Bhurtel is on X at @BhimBhurtel

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