Can Chadron State grad Tim Walz save the American dream of college?

They are Midwesterners with hardscrabble working-class roots who love Diet Mountain Dew. The similarities between Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Ohio Sen. JD Vance pretty much end there, but there’s one disagreement between the two men now vying to become America’s 50th vice president in 2025 that could literally redefine the American dream.

Vance — whose nearly free ride to Yale Law School forged the connections in Silicon Valley and publishing that brought him wealth and fame yet carries around the classist indignities he claims he suffered on an Ivy League campus in his back pocket — rose in the MAGA GOP by literally declaring U.S. universities “the enemy.” Vance’s dark vision for higher ed would wreck the academy, slam the door on any future “hillbillies” looking to better themselves, and end all efforts at campus diversity — an odd dream for a man who met his Indian American wife at Yale.

Walz’s college story harks back to a now nearly lost moment in America when higher education was affordable, accessible, and a clear path for young people from all backgrounds to do a little better than their parents did. A teen enlistee in the Army National Guard, the Nebraska native earned GI Bill benefits that allowed him to attend a college that neither you nor I had ever heard of before this week: Chadron State College, the only four-year university in his rural western corner of the Cornhusker State, which admits anyone with a high school diploma.

The Chadron degree is what gave a kid from West Point, Neb., whose dad died when he was 17, a chance to become a beloved high school teacher and coach, then a U.S. House member, then governor of his adopted Minnesota, and now the presumptive Democratic nominee for vice president. In a stunning contrast with the Ivy League self-hater Vance, Walz has used his platform to expand college opportunities so today’s kids can have the same shot that he had.

Amid a flurry of progressive legislation that Walz and one-vote Democratic majorities have passed in Minnesota, the governor signed a law that guarantees a free state public university education for families earning less than $80,000 a year and for Indigenous people living in the Gopher State. What’s more, he boosted higher education funding by $650 million, made it easier for adjunct professors and other university employees to unionize, took on the crisis of student food insecurity and resisted efforts to end diversity programs that have caught fire in other states.

Sara Goldrick-Rab, the Philadelphia-based college reform expert currently a senior fellow at Education Northwest, told me that both the personal experiences of Walz and presidential nominee Kamala Harris — whose undergrad degree is from Howard University, an HBCU — and their policy record “give me hope … If there’s ever been a shot at real transformation, this ticket is it.” She, too, was stuck by the contrast with Vance and Donald Trump — a 1968 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School — who “attended the very institutions their constituents most claim to despise!”

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Indeed. You could argue that, historically, a vice president only has marginal impact — if any — on the policies of the White House they serve. But the 180-degree difference between Vance and Walz on how they view the role of higher education in today’s America also says a lot about the man and the woman at the top of their respective tickets who selected them, and whether they think the country’s increasingly bitter college divide is something to cynically exploit for votes, or whether we can save the fading idea that a diploma is the American dream.

The TV pundits don’t see college as a front-burner issue. They should. Every election cycle, whether or not you earned a college diploma is more and more likely the factor that determines whom you vote for, as Republicans become the party of rural and exurban grievance while Democrats cling to an increasingly stale, faux meritocracy that uses a bachelor’s degree as currency.

A GOP that supported privatizing college as a backlash to protests in the 1960s — the policies that created an unconscionable $1.7 trillion mound of student debt — has recently decided instead to blow the whole thing up. Republicans desire to make it harder for Black and brown kids to attend, return to 1950s’ social mores, and delegitimize the academy as a molder of critical thinkers who might dare question the gross inequities of 21st century America. And frankly, a lot of Democratic parents are more invested in getting their kids into the best schools than in restoring the equitable spirit of college after World War II.

Vance’s hypocritical cynicism about the higher education that lifted him from poverty pretty well captures the sad state of the debate over the role of college in America. He’s an ex-Marine who — like Walz — used his GI Bill benefits to graduate from Ohio State University, then got a nearly free ride at least for his early years at Yale Law School, which presumably relished the — dare I say it — diversity that a working-class young man from the edge of Appalachia brought to New Haven.

Vance’s subsidized Ivy League education forged priceless elite connections like his professor and best-selling author ”Tiger Mom” Amy Chua, who urged him to write Hillbilly Elegy, and billionaire Peter Thiel, with whom Vance connected after a 2011 campus speech and who became his business and then political sponsor.

But the cultural slights Vance has said he endured on the snobby Yale campus — as trivial as a joke that a “state school” kid was needed to tap a keg, as deep as disagreements over politics like affirmative action — somehow burned a deeper negative impression than any positives of world-class learning and elite bonding. The Republican Party to which Vance aspired no longer saw college as a ladder up for blue-collar constituents, but as a cesspool to trash in order to anger those folks and get their votes.

The title of the keynote address that then-Senate hopeful Vance delivered at a 2021 National Conservatism Conference said it all: ”Universities Are the Enemy” in which he trashed professors and claimed colleges are dedicated to “deceit and lies, not to the truth.” And as a senator and now VP candidate, his agenda has not wavered. He’s threatened to massively hike taxes on university investments and investigate any school defying the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that struck down affirmative action, and has even praised the crackdown on universities and their academic freedom by the Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán.

Trump, meanwhile, has threatened to defund schools over pro-Palestinian protests and deport students who take part, and has endorsed radical changes in college accreditation that seem intended to crush any liberal orthodoxies on campus.

This Republican war on the very notion of college, in a time when university administrators and their failures to hold down tuition haven’t done themselves any favors, has fueled a drop in public trust in higher education to an all-time low. But the sudden emergence of Walz, and his turnaround policies on college access and affordability, are the brightest ray of hope to hit campuses in some time.

In 2023, Walz signed into law the North Star Promise Scholarship Program, which covers 100% of Minnesota public university tuition and fees, after existing financial aid is included, for students whose family income falls below $80,000 a year. Officials predicted it would benefit at least 15,000-20,000 current students while hopefully enticing more — especially when combined with a similar benefit for the state’s tribal members, a funding boost for academic programs, even increased child care for students who are parents. No wonder public enrollment in Minnesota jumped 2% last year while it dropped elsewhere, with a bigger surge likely this fall as the North Star programs takes effect.

“I do think he’s passionate about it,” Jake Schwitzer, executive director of North Star Policy Action, a Minnesota-based progressive think tank, told me. “He strongly believes in the role of government and its ability to improve people’s lives.”

It might seem ironic that — after decades of mostly Ivy League grads running the country, for better or often worse — the pride of tiny, obscure Chadron State could work with Howard alum Harris to seek restoration of the golden age of college that flourished in America from World War II into the 1970s.

But it seems fitting to me. As I learned researching my 2022 book about the toxic intersection between today’s politics and higher ed, the first beneficiaries of the 1944 GI Bill that provided veterans with free college were grateful for the helping hand and believed powerfully in giving back to society. Walz is the modern embodiment of that nearly forgotten egalitarian spirit. No wonder so many voters are suddenly feeling hope for the first time in so many years.

And Walz knows it. Just listen to his powerful words when he returned to receive an award in 2014 at Chadron State, where he marveled that “the door was always open for us to grow and learn.” He added: “A healthy and educated populace creates economic and national security. We have the right of self-governance which was paid for with blood. We need more critical thinkers like the students who graduated from [Chadron State College] today.”

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