The other night I rewatched “American Graffiti.” It’s the 1973 movie that launched a lot of careers – George Lucas directed, Richard Dreyfuss was one of the leads, Harrison Ford had a supporting role.

The premise, for those of you who forgot or didn’t see it, is the final night in a northern California town for four teenage guys. Two of the four are headed off to college “in the East” the next morning. 

The movie takes place in 1962. My summer like that was 10 years later – hanging out with friends until it was time to go off to college. Excited about college, but pretty damn scared about facing the rest of my life.

You might know kids like that now. You might actually be their parents. So you might know the feeling of that transitional summer from watching a dependent high school kid becoming a somewhat independent adult.

The two boys in “American Graffiti” and me in 1972 believed you went to college to improve your chances of succeeding in the world. One boy, Curt, wants to meet President Kennedy and might even harbor hopes of being President himself. I was going to anchor the NBC Nightly News and cover the White House.

Do kids have those types of dreams any more?

My fellow 18-year-olds had an awful burden. We were made to believe that we needed to do better than our parents did. They had sacrificed for us – working ridiculous hours at jobs they weren’t always that crazy about so that we could have easier, more satisfying careers.

Everything in society gravitated toward that notion. If you weren’t going to college, you weren’t really trying. You had to go somewhere, even if it was the local junior college. 

In 1972, according to the research site Statista, only about 13% of the U.S. population had a college degree. That rate has almost tripled in the 54 years since, with the biggest jump coming starting with my generation. 

In recent years, that faith in higher education has been tested. 

For one thing, college is a lot more expensive than it was. A lot. I left college with what I thought was a mammoth $3,500 in debt. Today, way too many students owe tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

That rate of growth far exceeds the rate of inflation. And the jobs graduates get often don’t come close to paying off that debt.

All of that cheers those who believe only the nation’s elite deserve to attend college. 

Trump and his minions have worked really hard to put the college standard out of the reach of middle- and low-income students. The attacks on affirmative action and DEI programs, using the weapon of cutting off federal research funding, have scared many of the nation’s top universities into submission. 

The gutting of the Department of Education was aimed at diminishing the national educational standards that so many people have fought for over the years. They’ve pandered to evangelicals and decided that religion belongs in schools, not history, science, art or literature. 

What the right has championed is a retrenchment. They want workers, not dreamers or innovators. They don’t want them doing anything that pays much more than minimum wage. And they don’t want to raise that – the national minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour for 17 years. 

They want women out of the workplace and home making babies. That would, in their minds, end the dissident movement that challenges their oligarchy. They think people of color are best suited for menial agricultural or industrial work. 

And they sure as hell don’t want any more people coming here from other countries to fill the low-end jobs they’re willing to take and freeing others to pursue higher endeavors.

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The girls are “American Graffiti” are almost an afterthought. None of them talk about ambition or career fulfillment. It’s about getting boys to like them, looking good for them. 

That was changing when I started college. But it’s telling that the movie still reflects a pre-feminist perspective, even taking its 10-year age difference into account. 

There aren’t a whole lot of Black kids in this film. I remember seeing it with a friend who was Black and he could not relate to it at all. In retrospect, that’s not a surprise. The world was shut off to Black and Hispanic kids in 1962 and was just starting to crack open in the early ’70s. 

And what has technology done to the concept of getting a higher education? How many kids decide that artificial intelligence can write that term paper better than they can? Why not just become an influencer – that’s an actual career in 2026 – and skip the college part altogether?

Being a college graduate ranks only below being a father, husband and journalist – and is the reason I can be any of those. It accomplished what my parents wanted for me, and I’d like to think it made them proud to know that they got their son through to a better life.

We should want that for as many kids as we can bring along. We should be striving to find ways to get kids to take education seriously – and to enjoy the process of actually learning. Writing, reading, doing research, calculating.

That’s hard to do when the Secretary of Education used to run a wrestling company – and is trying to end her department.

Curt and Steve in “American Graffiti” were told repeatedly by grownups that there was a big beautiful world out there and going to college would open it for them.

Do kids of 2026 hear that same message? Or are they told that learning and education are no big deal – just get a job, get married and bet on baseball games?

It’s something we need to think about as the 2026 and 2028 elections draw closer.

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