In the 2022 midterm elections, white voters without a college degree cast their ballots for Republican candidates by a margin of more than 2-1, an estimated 66%-32%.

Why would these voters, who earn on average half as much as college graduates, support candidates whose policies favor the wealthy? Why would they back GOP representatives who want to raise the age for full Social Security benefits? Why would they get behind a party who passed into law a 2017 tax cut that left the top 0.1% of U.S. households paying a lower tax rate than the bottom 50%?

A hint to the answer came to me as I read through a just-issued study from the National Bureau of Economic Research. It analyzed the admissions policies of 12 universities — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, Cornell, Stanford, MIT, Duke and Chicago. Fewer than 0.5% of all college students are enrolled in these "Ivy Plus" institutions. And yet their graduates are overrepresented by 20 times among Fortune 500 CEOs, 50 times among U.S. senators and 100 times among Rhodes Scholars.

Getting admitted to one of the Ivy Plus sure looks like a golden ticket in the Game of Life. White voters without a college degree by definition didn't win a ticket, and they know only too well their kids won't win either. In contrast, an applicant whose family income placed them in the top 0.1% were 2.5 times as likely to go to an Ivy Plus college as other applicants with the same test scores. The fix was in.

"What I conclude from (the NBER) study is the Ivy League doesn't have low-income students because it doesn't want low-income students," says professor Susan Dynarski of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

It was Republican candidates and officeholders who gave voice to those who resented the fix. On the campaign trail in 2021, now-Senator J.D. Vance said, "I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country." In 2017 when the Republicans held the White House and both houses of Congress, they passed a law that taxes the endowments of the wealthiest universities. In his campaign to regain the White House, former President Donald Trump promised to "reclaim" campuses "dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics."

The NBER study shows students who graduated from an Ivy Plus school get a major boost in their chances of joining the top 1% of earners. So, kids with rich parents have an increased chance of getting into an Ivy Plus school, after college the kids have an increased chance of becoming rich themselves and then their own kids will have an increased chance of getting in. Isn't it monarchies like the United Kingdom where privilege is supposed to be inherited, rather than democracies like the United States? Not anymore. The United States has sunk to 27th in social mobility behind the UK as well as other monarchies such as Japan and the Netherlands.

What can we do? A lot. Here's a start.

First, the United States can settle on policies that increase income for the less affluent. Progress is being made there. Since 2020, the wages of the lowest-paid tier of workers have been increasing more rapidly than other tiers. Biden administration initiatives are bringing back manufacturing jobs that don't require college degrees. Factory construction is booming.

Next, we can improve education in this country, especially for children of the less affluent. In the most recent results from the Programme for International Student Assessment, the United States placed 22nd on average in reading, math and science scores among 78 nations. Nothing is more important in educating our youth than high-quality teachers, and yet teachers are paid 24% less than other college graduates. To attract and retain outstanding teachers, increase their salary. If the Ivy Plus grads are indeed representative of the best and the brightest, it's easy to see why they go to work in consulting and investment banking. They get paid three times more than grads going into K-12 teaching. Wouldn't it be better for them to pass on a great education to many in the next generation rather than an inside track to wealth for a few? Again, the answer is to raise the salary for teachers.

Those white Republican voters are frustrated with good reason. The NBER study implies there's a lock on the doorway leading to the American Dream. Time to pass out more keys — a lot more keys — to them and their children.

In Keith Raffel's checkered past, he has served as the senior counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, started an award-winning internet software company and written five novels, which you can check out at keithraffel.com. He currently spends the academic year as a resident scholar at Harvard. To find out more about Keith and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at creators.com.

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