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.
Employers no longer universally take a college degree as a way to skip ahead in the line of employment. A college degree should basically be a ticket to any job within that degree field. In practice, that’s incredibly unlikely. I started at minimum wage with my first job out of college lmao. My second job netted me like 50¢ more.
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.
The trades seem to be doing just fine from what I can see
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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.
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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.
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)
Well they made college and grad school cost upwards of 200k+ so no shit
And a bunch of us were still paying off loans when when raising the current high school kids.
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:
Much to the joy of GOP politicians everywhere.
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.
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
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.
