The latest NBC News poll shows two-thirds of registered voters down on the value proposition of a degree. A majority said degrees were worth the cost a dozen years ago.
Americans have grown sour on one of the longtime key ingredients of the American dream.
Almost two-thirds of registered voters say that a four-year college degree isn’t worth the cost, according to a new NBC News poll, a dramatic decline over the last decade.
Just 33% agree a four-year college degree is “worth the cost because people have a better chance to get a good job and earn more money over their lifetime,” while 63% agree more with the concept that it’s “not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off.”
I recall a podcast I listened to years ago talking about some schools trying out a new model that worked something like…
Instead of taking out a loan, you just enter into a contract with the school that x% of your paycheck for the first z years after graduation go to the school. Kinda like child support.
Get an unemployable degree and now your making burgers for minimum wage? Then you don’t owe anything.
Get an amazing job that pays a ton? That degree is going to cost you.
Now it’s in the school’s best interest to A) offer degrees that are actually worth something instead of misleading students down a dead end path, and B) help students find and keep good positions after graduation.
It sounded awesome. But what I found infuriating were the people they interviewed that benefitted from the program, now had fantastic high salary jobs, and were whining about how much they were having to pay for the education and program that got them into that high paying job in the first place.
I proposed this to a boomer 15 years ago and man was he so angry at the thought of wages being garnished to pay loans for 10 years.
Like how does that change the situation if I have to pay regardless? If anything it might be great for me to reduce my taxable income.
25% of unemployed Americans have a 4 year degree
So 75% don’t?
It would be more interesting to see the comparison between unemployment rates among 4-year-degree-holders and unemployment rates among non-4-year-degree holders
2.5% for 4 year degree holders
4.2% for those with only a high school diploma and 6.2% for those without a high school diploma
Is that all? It must be higher
Duh, civilized countries make education free because it;s a net win for the country. If your politics makes that a bad, dunno, sorry for your loss…
I was going to make a similar point. More people with college degrees is a big win for any society. And lots of degree programs are incredibly valuable even if they aren’t training for a specific job. The problem is we’ve set it up as a direct profit choice for the individual.
I never did but I’m now middle aged and stuck in my career without one. I’m right now planning on finding a competency based program to try to speedrun, so I can stop working on implementing others peoples broken garbage.
I have bad news for you. You can get a PhD and you’ll still be implementing other people’s broken garbage.
I’m aware, but I’m stuck where I am and can’t climb any further. So, either stop trying or try something else.
Implementing other people’s broken garbage. As I feel I do that every day, what is it that you do for a living? Ha ha. Also, do you have any ideas for the future?
I do, I have a career goal I have been marching towards for some time but the momentum I had has stopped.
I joined the IT workforce during my generals at college, before the .com crash in the 90’s. I dropped out and have been working my way up ever since. I’ve led teams, I’ve been an architect, I’ve been a senior engineer, but I have always been after a director level role. No matter the experience though so far, the door is closed unless I have the degree.
So, I’m thinking about WGU, for an IT Management degree (maybe eventually a masters). It’s what I do every day, so I hope I can test out of a fair bit and the rest I should probably brush up on anyway.
I’m not after Fortune 500, I’ll go be a director for a balloon manufacturer or something, just a role where I can have a little of my own agency.
I think it depends pretty dramatically where you go. It might not be worth it if you go to a school that costs 40k a year. But college in general opens doors to a lot of positions.
Not to say college is the only viable option.
Well they made college and grad school cost upwards of 200k+ so no shit
“They” are the ones who want less education. Uneducated people are more easily controlled.
And a bunch of us were still paying off loans when when raising the current high school kids.
My friends and I talked way back in school about how further engineering education was negatively correlated with pay after a bachelors and was statistically a terrible deal.
An engineering Masters is worth more than zero, but probably not worth the tuition to go to Grad School in the first place. IMHO, nobody should go into debt for any grad school unless they are becoming a medical doctor or lawyer (and even then it’s not a slam dunk.)
If a grad school gives you an assistantship so you can go there for little to no money out of pocket, that’s fine. If you work for a company willing to pay for your grad degree, that’s fine too (although it will take a lot longer than working full time). But it’s a bad idea to pay your own way.
It kind of depends on what you want to do. I worked almost 10 years at a consulting firm that specialized in failure analysis and they loved hiring PhD metalutgists and Masters grads in specific engineering disciplines.
This was partially because that specialization helps in niche cases and partially because it helps market smaller companies as competent if you can say “I have 4 phds on staff for X, Y, and Z, one is a professor at (technical university name here)”
The team leads or project leads were always older engineers who only had their bachelor’s degrees (and experience) but would shit talk professors and advanced degrees when the “academics” weren’t around though. It was a REALLY toxic situation and ultimately led to me leaving. (I’m a BS Mech btw)
Your a bullshit mechanic? Damn that’s a useful skill in this day and age.
Lot of low effort bullshit going on. We could use something right and proper
Professionals have standards. I’m not sure there is an ISO standard for BS but N.I.S.T was probably working on one before the current administration gutted the funding for being woke.
I’m sure it depends on where you go, but going to MIT or Stanford is likely too expensive to justify, even if you are good enough to get and graduate.
It’s exactly backwards. The more prestigious the school, the more money it has to subsidize its students. Advertised price tags only apply to the wealthy. Harvard cost me less than 8k/year.
Yeah I went to a cheap state school for an engineering degree. Sure I still haven’t paid it off yet, but it was definitely financially worth it. Even more worth it if you consider how much I don’t want to do uneducated labor for a living.
Uneducated labor isn’t only manual labor. Lot of uneducated folks have mad skills. We’re just not curing cancer or inventing new batteries or planning trips to Mars.
I’m a technical lead for a software company (that’s not a non-degreed position generally but 30 years of experience can take you far in any field), my wife is a customer service manager / trainer who has presented to a nationwide audience, my oldest daughter is a bank manager.
My son broke the mold and got a nursing degree and currently makes less working harder than any of us. That said, it was 100% the right choice for him. He has a passion for patient care and I’m sure he’ll go far.
That’s fair. I’m in manufacturing so I associate it with physically difficult trade labor, low paid administrative labor, and low paid repetitive and boring labor. Some uneducated people develop plenty of skills, that said, my degree was a shortcut to skills and a direct path to a good career. The deal has gotten worse over the past few decades, but we still need people who have traditional educated knowledge. And I fear that we may face serious problems if education rates plummet.
The general education also had a drastic positive impact on my personal development as well, but I’m not rich enough to pay tens of thousands for that.
Completely agree.
You only go there if your parents are rich or you get scholarships
I’ve known a few MIT guys, they definitely have money.
These high status schools provide lifetime connections and in-groups that are irreplaceable and not found elsewhere.
You are essentially guaranteed to be connected to people in power and wealth by going to these schools.
Sure not everyone is able to capitalize on that but being a Harvard alumus is a legitimate and recognized status among ivy grads and especially among other Harvard alumni. Im sure MIT and Stanford are comparable but this is the real reason people want to go these schools.
I’m sure there are a few at MIT and other prestigious engineering schools that go there for connections, but engineers are typically nerds and want to go somewhere to learn. Unless that’s changed since I was in school 15 years ago.
My job has me on college campuses several times a month, and I often speak individually with over a thousand college students a month.
There is real fear among these students. Many have done everything right, planned a career, took the classes in order since middle school to get there, took out thousands in student loans, all knowing that it will be worth it to get a good job that will pay well for an entire career…
Only to find out halfway through college that corporations are replacing all their software developers with AI, and the career path they’ve been following since they were a kid, no longer exists.
But they still owe their student loans, even if their Plan B career, which they hadn’t considered until they couldn’t find a post-graduation job in their field, pays barely more than minimum wage.
I’ve been telling people this for years: Post-secondary educational institutions are no longer about education; they’re a business. They do everything they can to maximize profits, and don’t really care about the quality of education.
I realized that back in high school, which is why I never went to college. I kept telling people I didn’t want to go into debt when I didn’t even really know what I wanted to do with my life.
Much to the joy of GOP politicians everywhere.
Very noticeable here in the US how much college has become unaffordable and out of reach
Shows in everyday life here from the conversations to just any day to day interaction
In the media all comes out like it is made for young school kids with the words getting smaller and simpler with less sentence structures
Even if voting was not rigged here can tell with way people see our elected officials as football team members to rally behind
Higher education becoming unattainable will lead a country to poorer health, more underpaid factory workers, less quality of life for everyone, less progress, more repeated failures from history, etcetera
It’s an NBC news poll so I’m not sure it’s easy to find much more info on the poll or its history.
Here’s a chart showing previous responses:
The role models are all dumb corrupt sacks of shit that are on the long road of decline until sometime find out again that meritocracy is better at providing quality.
Shame those lessons need learning time and again.
We need to stop saying “American Dream.” It’s really beating a dead horse at this point. It feels like such a fictional concept to me.
it is. total propaganda for the masses.
Good maybe we will finally have some market correction and colleges realize they are not a staple for the American dream anymore.
Of course it’s being seen that way.
If I were to go to my university this year, doing the same course I’d have:
£9250 x 4 = £37000 for the 4 year course £9504 x 4 = £38016 for rental accommodation including bills (I picked a rental property that included bills for ease of calculation) £5000 x 4 = £20000 for food (based on £100/week)
That’s £95016
And how much of my degree do I use day to day? Jack shit. Anyone starting my job technically does not need a degree. I work with a niche piece of software that is well known in it’s field but outside of that is not. No degree would ever cover this
You could not have done that math without a degree.
