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.”
To be clear, this is an issue with the cost, not with the degrees
The cost is so high because companies require degrees for jobs that don’t need them.
Right on target! Keeping the masses uneducated is one of the main goals.
As someone absolutely killing themself to barely tread water with a fairly well paying job after getting a graduate degree, the kids are unfortunately correct.
How does that delta compare to people who didn’t go to college?
Most college graduates seem not to fully appreciate just how shitty things have gotten for the non-grads in the past 30 years.
My field requires a graduate degree and a board and fieldwork. I just paid it off at 38.
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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.
This just sounds like IBR with
extrafewer steps.The issue with this is that knowledge should be it’s own reward. Where I live college costs a pittance. If you want to study fine art, that course should be available and is.
What you’re suggesting sounds great in a very practical respect but would only further benefit capitalism at the cost of wider knowledge. Many of the things that are worth learning in life to so many would immediately disappear from college curriculums.
The goal should be to make third level education cheap enough that anyone can do it without crippling themselves financially.
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.
I ended up with the opportunity to get a MS CS for $20k debt and even that doesn’t seem worth it at this point (the university does not have assistantships for MS students)
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…
Spot on! Not only for academics, but most 1st World countries have superb apprenticeship programs for the trades.
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.
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
Here is the time series so you can see the stats for any given month for as long as they’ve been tracking it:
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
Thanks!
Is that all? It must be higher
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.
Someone tried telling me that “they” in parenthesis is antisemitic. Who invented this? I don’t know. Probably “them” to get people to dismiss the discussion.
That’s (((they))) or “”“they”“” generally, as a not so subtle dogwhistle.
Just ‘they’ usually means, you know, like, uhh, The Man. TPTB. The Swamp, oligarchs, and sometimes for the Q klan, the globalists, which then bleeds over into anti-jewish rhetoric.
My friends and I talked way back in school about how further engineering education was negatively correlated (not exactly: see comment) with pay after a bachelors and was statistically a terrible deal.
EDIT: That’s not to say it’s worthless! But it ain’t worth what they’re charging. There isn’t actually a negative correlation in the strict sense but rather there isn’t clearly a premium for the degree in all markets. You can be taking a straight up financial loss. The original statement was inaccurate, but that’s historically what we told each other.
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.
This is the way to do it. If you’re paying for your whole PhD, you’re doing it wrong.
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 didn’t check to see if there’s an XKCD for this, but: This should cover the ISO BS
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.
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.
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.
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.
And a bunch of us were still paying off loans when when raising the current high school kids.
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.
Not that I am suggesting that you do this, but no one checks degrees… especially if they were a while back. Double especially if it’s from an educational institution than has since shut down.
If this is your only setback and you already have the skills needed… 😇
I’m aware, but I am not built for that. Plus, I’m so established as someone without one in the industry that such deception would be instantly discovered.
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.
Many north american GenXers had the same feelings in our 20’s, even though it was a better situation then. Being in the voracious demographic wake of the boomers made scrambling up a tippy ladder seem pointless.
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:
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.
Exactly, see what things like rpkGroup (a particularly heinous example) are doing to colleges to get them running like for-profit businesses. “Restructuring” aka gutting the school and the purpose of a university, which is to give a rounded 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.
