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On Tuesday, I received a surprise bill from a Washington, D.C.–based hospital for a surgery I had already helped cover back in January. The bill, for a couple thousand dollars, arrived seven months later, on top of the $10,000 I had already paid for the surgery itself—an operation insurance deemed “elective” despite its medical necessity—and roughly $1,000 more for a private room. I thought I had covered everything. But the hospital tacked on extra fees for the bed, the overnight stay, anesthesia, and more.
I have yet to connect with the hospital’s billing department or contact my insurance company, but when I do, I know what awaits me: bureaucratic stonewalling. The hospital will claim the overnight stay was a “choice,” while the insurance company will echo the same line. This maddening experience with a bloated, opaque healthcare system will leave me, once again, asking why I bother paying for health insurance at all.
Moments like this—far too common in American life—make it easy to see why young leftists are becoming radicalized against a system that so often seems, and in many ways is, stacked against them. Their grievances are not imagined, as some might argue. They are very real. Young people today face more than just outrageous healthcare costs. (Surprise medical bills are the number-one reason Americans go bankrupt every year.) They are graduating into an economy where secure employment is increasingly difficult to obtain. The gap between wages at the very top and salaries at the bottom has grown so extreme that the United States’s wealth distribution is growing in the direction more emblematic of a third nation than of the prosperous democracy it claims to be. The cost of living climbs relentlessly, stretching every paycheck thinner. And layered on top of all this is a government that is deaf to the demands of ordinary citizens, beholden instead to entrenched interests, foreign powers, and a handful of billionaires.
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We’ve seen protests erupt across college campuses—some calling openly for violence against institutions. Think of campus protests against Israel that have led to Jewish students being harassed or the Black Lives Matter demonstrations from some years ago, which led to buildings being burned down and storefronts being shattered. We, more recently, even saw the Ivy League–educated Luigi Mangione assassinate a healthcare CEO—and he gained widespread support from college students. That support was made clear in December 2024 by an essay from then-Princeton sophomore Maximillian Meyer, “I’m an Ivy League undergrad — here’s why my campus sides with Luigi Mangione.” Meyer described a campus climate where a significant portion of students openly glorified Mangione, framing the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson as “justified” or “deserved.”
The assassination, as well as other acts of violence, are, of course, indefensible. But they are understandable in the eyes of those who recognize that many institutions exist only to exploit them. And that’s the real danger: too few are willing to admit that students’ anger starts with legitimate frustrations.
The problem isn’t that young people are frustrated, or that their grievances—say, over hefty healthcare expenses—aren’t real. The problem is that our educational institutions fail to equip them with the intellectual and civic tools to channel that frustration constructively. As Ian Oxnevad argues, a properly executed liberal arts education could provide that grounding: reason, historical understanding, and civic responsibility. Without those tools, grievances curdle into nihilism and violence.
Receiving that bill for a surgery I’d already paid thousands for—while my bank account hovered near zero and panic set in—gave me every reason to be furious with America’s healthcare system. I could have gone full nihilist, letting rage boil into violence. In another life, with a more radicalized Ivy League education, I might have ended up thinking like a Luigi Mangione. But my non-Ivy, state-university liberal arts education—one that thankfully didn’t host too many radical professors—taught me better. It showed me how to fight with reason, to write instead of lash out, to engage rather than destroy, and gave me the reading comprehension skills to survive the legalese designed to make you scream. And, most importantly, it reminded me that sitting here writing about it is much smarter than storming the streets of D.C.
To be sure, there is an irony in all of this that is worth noting. The very education system that fuels students’ radicalization—turning them to violence to solve problems—is the same one that stokes the culture creating the conditions for their anger. Higher education increasingly reduces learning to return on investment (ROI). When students are taught to value knowledge primarily for its financial payoff, it’s no surprise that many graduates become professionals and administrators who apply the same logic in their work. In healthcare, patients become revenue streams; in education, students become customers; and in countless other fields, profit and measurable returns take precedence. This mindset doesn’t end at graduation—it permeates society, fueling frustration, inequality, and cynicism.
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The radicalization of young people is rooted in real grievances. But the turn to lashing out rather than constructive reform is a symptom of a broken education system. Until we reform America’s educational institutions—as well as value learning for its own sake rather than just its ROI—we will continue to see disillusionment deepen. Worse, we will sustain a cyclical system: on one side, students are radicalized by dwelling on grievances without the tools to act constructively; on the other, graduates assume roles where every decision—no matter what field they begin working in after graduation—is filtered through the lens of return on investment.
This is how we end up with an economy in which institutions chase outrageous profit margins while those left outside the system seethe with justified anger, yet lack the means to channel it into meaningful reform. Society becomes trapped in a cycle of profiteers and protesters, each reinforcing the other and both products of the same university system. Meyer is right to warn that morally confused graduates will one day “take the helm as your governors, senators and presidents.” Unless we break this cycle, they will carry their binary worldview and ROI obsession into positions of power—cementing a society of exploiters and resistors, when what we desperately need are thoughtful reformers capable of fixing what’s broken without breaking more.
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Image: “Photo of Luigi Mangione taken by the Pennsylvania State Police in Altoona, PA” on Wikipedia
