Remember all those people who are resentful (of course that word) towards degree-holders because they wish they had one themselves? Me neither. That’s a they-hate-me-cause’-they-ain’t-me kind of logic.[1]
True othering comes from people living in different worlds and hating the other person’s world.
[1] I did not read the the article but I’ve read this argument in a Graeber article.
> degree holders used to be a minority in white collar work.
That's still nearly true, if not true. 60% of jobs are white collar. 40% of the workforce has a degree. Data quality starts to decline somewhat here, but it is expected that 20% of degree holders work in trades or manual labour jobs. So, degree holders only just barely make up a majority on that basis. And maybe not even that as blue collar is usually considered to be more than just trades and manual labour, not to mention that we haven't even delved into other collars (e.g. pink collar) that further take from the degree holding population.
> because they wish they had one themselves
I don't think the OP actually said this specifically. But the economy truly had, for a while, bifurcated in outcomes for people with degrees vs. everybody else. You shouldn't need a degree to live a decent life, but now we are in a timeline where you can put DoorDash on Klarna installments.
> Remember all those people who are resentful (of course that word) towards degree-holders because they wish they had one themselves?
I think the fair comparison isn't they have a degree and I don't, it's they have a better life/savings/house/car than me, which is enabled in general by getting a degree, which becomes the common contention point.
I don't think you're necessarily drawing the right conclusion from what the GP said. It seems more likely to me that non-degree-holders aren't resentful about not having a degree, but are resentful that white collar work more or less requires a degree these days. It wasn't always that way; degree holders used to be a minority in white collar work.
Why has that shifted? Can we blame the university system and their "marketing" that has pushed a degree as the One True Way of leaving the working class? If so, that's an understandable reason to be anti-university.