Graduation Year
2026
Document Type
Campus Only Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Politics and International Relations
Reader 1
Vanessa Tyson
Reader 2
Susan McWilliams Barndt
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
2026 Ansley M Washburn
Abstract
Over the past three decades, educational attainment has emerged as one of the most powerful predictors of partisan identity in the United States. This thesis argues that the contemporary education divide is not simply an electoral phenomenon, but the political expression of a deeper structural transformation in American society. As the U.S. economy shifted from industrial production to a knowledge-based system, higher education became the primary gateway to economic security, institutional influence, and social status. This shift expanded the size and cohesion of the professional class while simultaneously marginalizing those without college degrees, producing a new form of stratification organized around access to credentials.
Drawing on historical analysis, survey data, and comparative international evidence, this study traces how education evolved from a marginal political distinction into a central axis of partisan conflict. It shows that education now structures political alignment more consistently than income and, in many cases, cuts across traditional racial and economic cleavages. At the same time, the rise of meritocracy as the dominant ideology of the professional class has legitimized this hierarchy while obscuring the structural inequalities that sustain it.
The consequences for democracy are significant. As educational attainment increasingly determines access to opportunity and authority, it has also reshaped how citizens relate to institutions, expertise, and one another. The result is a growing divide between a credentialed elite that views its status as earned and a broader electorate that experiences that authority as exclusionary. This divide has eroded trust, intensified polarization, and contributed to a fractured public sphere, raising fundamental questions about the future of democratic governance in the United States.
Recommended Citation
Washburn, Ansley M., "THE POLITICS OF THE CREDENTIALED DIVIDE: How Credentialism Has Reshaped Class, Identity, and Democratic Conflict" (2026). Scripps Senior Theses. 2793.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/2793
This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.
