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.”
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.
Many college degrees (looking at you, biological sciences) don’t even have jobs available for fresh grads. When I graduated I was competing with thousands of others for like 5 jobs in the country. After my internship ran out I was never able to work in the field again.
Schools keep pushing those degrees though because it gives their professors a constant supply of free labor (interning in a lab is usually required to graduate).
I taught onco research for 6 years (not as a professor, but as a research consultant)… there were professors that would seemingly purposefully give huge and long projects to grad students a few years in and then they ended up not graduating until year 5 or 6.
But you do need one in retail to move from line worker to management in most companies