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.”
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.
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.
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.
Could easily be hybrid… You pay some up front, they get some on the back end. This and other subsidies might be able to save the arts.
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This just sounds like IBR with
extrafewer steps.
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.
how else am i going to get that perfectly seared and crusted smash burger without 4 years of university experience?
Art majors need jobs too.
Because companies want employees that are in deep debt and are less likely to get uppity. By the time you pay off your student load, you’re suppose to have a mortgage. This is by design.
It’s an issue with cost, but that also extends to the perception of the degree itself. Even a few decades ago I always found American culture to be generally more disdainful towards degrees and degree holders than most of Europe or Asia.
One of the worst things you can be in America is “elitist”; it’s a loaded word that describes a fundamentally Un-American attitude. And you can see why - there’s plenty of idiots with rich parents and a degree, and a lot of intelligent people with poor parents and no degree. So elitism and intellectual snobbery also imply classism and racism.
In countries with free/cheap tertiary education, it’s less controversial to say that people who are qualified to do a thing are likely to be better at that thing, and that getting qualifications is inherently a good thing.
The degrees are also bad, they are often filler material now.
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:
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.
Spot on! Not only for academics, but most 1st World countries have superb apprenticeship programs for the trades.
Maybe a net win, but if the alternative is that elites do, say, 1% better, while everyone else does 5% worse, guess what the elites are going to pick?
Much to the joy of GOP politicians everywhere.
At 18, I went to community college. During my 2 years there, I absolutely fucked my credit by getting credit cards and not paying it back.
So thinking my credit was bad, I decided I couldn’t afford University. So I just decided to lie that I had a degree and just kept doing interviews and when it came down to the background checks, I didn’t lie.
About 20% of the companies I got an offer for talked to the hiring manager who cared about my fake degree. The rest just turned a blind eye or didn’t care.
At 46, I don’t lie anymore. After 20 years in the industry, They just care about places I worked and responsibilities I had.
Most people in my level of industry have masters or PhDs but I only have a bachelor’s. We all get paid the same, my 10 years in industry are worth more than my degree.
I hired a gal who had a PhD in statistics and analytics. After hiring her, she told me that nobody would hire her because of her degree.
She told me she would get more people contacting her if she didn’t put down she had a PhD.
Experience matters more than a degree, but good fuckin luck getting a foot in the door without either.
Lie on both. The worst thing that can happen to you is you not getting the job. If you get the job you have at least three months to learn the job quickly. Usually after the second month, they will start noticing that you’re incompetent.
Degrees and grades only matter for younger and less experienced folks.
Yup, so just lie about everything. But do your homework and learn about the job you’re doing.
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.
Conservatives: Then get a high demand and high paying job!
the field becomes too competitive and saturated and couldn’t find jobs
Also conservatives: Then work in a factory!
factory jobs gets taken over by AI
Conservatives for the final and umpteenth time: Fuck you!
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.
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.
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
Student debt has been increasing faster than ceo pay. Its not a sustainable system but it also will lead to more companies importing workers with hb1 visas, which is probably honestly the corporate plan.
Why pay for workers with rights to go to school when you can just import people who already have a degree you didnt pay for and who you can treat like shit?
Dramatic? It was practically manufactured.
Community college admissions continue to rise because of this. Even students with excellent grades in high school bypass the 4-year institutions as long as possible. It’s the same classes either way. Why pay 10 times more?
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.
Well, most of the people I grew up with are in the trades or just didn’t go to college and they’re not thriving, but they’re doing fine. They can mostly afford houses (in large part because of the low cost of living in their areas) and to have some modest savings, which is more than I can say being tied to high cost of living areas where I can use my degree and being completely unable to save anything thanks to Daddy Student Loan Servicer. I get what you’re saying, but I’m very aware of how those without degrees are doing since those are the people I grew up with and still maintain friendships with.
Are you under 30? The blue collar trades income trajectory is pretty flat over time, so it’s the 30’s where college educated careers tend to come out on top, and the 40’s and 50’s where college grads really start running away with a huge gap.
Plus in any trades job into the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, and you’ll generally see lower median wages (and much lower 25th percentile wages) than pretty much any white collar college educated career.
And living through a few business cycles also shows that non-college jobs, including the trades, are just less stable (and tend to force earlier exits to retirement or disability).
Keep your head up. High pay in HCOL areas tends to pay off over time, because not all costs scale the same, and being able to pay down debt or save a higher number of absolute dollars is better for your long term financial health.
Ah that could be part of it. I’m in my 30s but in a career with a notoriously long ramp up.
The trades seem to be doing just fine from what I can see
That’s just a small subset of non college grads. If you’re going to compare people who are aiming for a specific profession in a specific industry, you should look at the career outcomes of the college path, too, with specific majors that are feeders into specific careers.
Maybe you can argue that plumbers are doing “just fine” with the median wage at around $60k per year (across the entire career trajectory from the age of 20 to 60), or that welders make a median $50k, but those numbers don’t come anywhere close to accountants ($81k), financial specialists ($82k), financial analysts ($102k), electrical engineers ($112k).
And you could argue that I’m cherry picking professions, and I am, but simply by saying “trades” is also cherry picking a profession.
