“I’m taking this class because I want to be the president of the United States.”

A student told me that, with a straight face, on the first day of class in a summer session of American Government at Rutgers, back in the ’90s. I responded with something like “I’d better do a good job with this class, then!”

Probably half of the students came in with relatively clear political leanings, and several seemed intent on acting on them. My job, as I saw it, was to provide a common baseline of information and introductions to various ways of looking at issues, but also to encourage them to find their own ways to be political. The students took for granted that they were important; my goal was to help them refine their views and approaches. I didn’t see anybody switch sides, but that wasn’t the goal. I saw some of them get smarter about it, which was enough.

I don’t see nearly as much of that sense of agency among community college students, and that bothers me.

Admittedly, American politics in the 2020s is less inviting than it was in the 1990s. But I don’t think that’s the critical variable. The Gaza protests at high-profile institutions in 2023–24 were certainly consistent with a sense of political agency. Those tended not to happen at community colleges.

In the community colleges at which I’ve worked over the last 20-something years, my overwhelming impression has been that students are too preoccupied with other things to pay attention to politics. The most civic-minded ones do volunteer work, which is great but is a fundamentally different thing.

Scholars from Nina Eliasoph to Arlie Russell Hochschild to Jennifer Silva have documented the ways that political apathy in the working class is consciously produced and encouraged. If the people bearing much of the social cost of upwardly redistributive policies don’t push back—whether because of confusion, hopelessness or busy-ness—then those policies will continue. Over time, they can even become self-reinforcing. Pushing community and state colleges to focus entirely on job training, measured in ROI, crowds out the space for students to ask larger questions. Individually rational responses to an increasingly predatory economy become collectively irrational, as they send a false message of inevitability.

There’s nothing inevitable about the present. Just imagine, for instance, what might have happened if Palm Beach County hadn’t gone with “butterfly ballots” in 2000. Or if a carbon tax had passed in 1993. Or if Ruth Bader Ginsburg had resigned rather than dying in office. For that matter, imagine if Congress hadn’t carved out the light trucks exception to CAFE standards, thereby seeding the ground for the rise of SUVs. Imagine how many more people could start their own businesses if they weren’t terrified of losing health insurance. For my New Jersey readers, imagine if Governor Christie hadn’t tanked the Gateway tunnel project.

None of these require science-fiction scenarios.

And if the present wasn’t inevitable, the future certainly isn’t. The Girl once asked me why candidates always claim that the election they’re in at the time is “the most important election of our lifetimes.” I answered half seriously that it’s because unlike every other election in history, this one hasn’t happened yet. It’s still up for grabs. That’s true with every new election.

Yes, job training is important. But people are more than workers. I’d love to see community college students have as much sense of their own political agency as students in more exclusionary settings. They have the potential to have a say in building the future. Teaching them otherwise, whether intentionally or not, is selling them short.