Since the insurrection at the Capitol in Washington, DC, I have heard people emphasize how poorly educated Trump supporters are. They argue that if his followers were “more educated,” they would not have voted for him.

Many Trump supporters do have college degrees and higher. Look at who is in government, in the media, and on his donor list. Donors with big money funded the transportation of all of those domestic terrorists at the Capitol. Trump himself graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

If you are going to critique the educational background of his followers, critique the educational background of Trump himself.

Stop romanticizing what higher education actually does for society.

I say this as someone who believes strongly in the potential that higher education has to improve the world. As much as I support the ideals of higher education, I do not overlook the realities of how it fails in fulfilling those ideals.

When I was in college, I took a sociology course on social stratification. My instructor reviewed a list of factors that affected social inequities. When she listed education, she told us to put a star by it in our notes. She stated that education had both the ability to break cycles of inequity and the capacity to perpetuate them.

If we truly want to learn from the insurrection at the Capitol, we have to move beyond overgeneralized depictions of who Trump supporters are as well as the academic degrees that they may or may not hold.