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.”
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?
There are still plenty of jobs that are gated by a college credential. Tech was the biggest way aorund skipping it, and tech is imploding.
its not even worth the time, let alone the cost, plus potential health issue arise from the stress. Unless you are going for degree with an indemand field like health, or something else, and not theoretical work(research) which is mostly filled with people that afford to study all day, afford grad school. even if you go to CC school before transfer, its just as depressing, alot of them dont have an idea about which 4 year school they go to, and many of them struggle and wash out the CC,(ours and 1 near use decided to have very difficult classes for most majors, so the chances of washing it is higher, they alleged its for validating class for nearby UC, personally i think its a bs methods intentionally to make people stay longer because they fail class/drop class, so they have retake or delay thier transfer, therefore its more profit for the school).
Speak for yourself
To be clear, this is an issue with the cost, not with the degrees
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 known colleges that produce elitists, tend to be the ivy league ones. and i heard employers will often reject these candidates based on thier attitudes
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.
The degrees are also bad, they are often filler material now.
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.
I sometimes wished I just lied about having experience.
Experience matters more than a degree, but good fuckin luck getting a foot in the door without either.
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.
employers are probably looking for PHD and masters in the listing, but they are only willing to pay “BS” level wages, or somewhat higher. i think thats why alot of BS majors cant get hired.
IMO, being educated should be at least a minimum wage job, paid by the government. This would allow students to focus on learning their crafts, instead of being distracted by part-time jobs.
This only works if minimum wage is enough to guarantee housing, food, healthcare, transportation, internet access, a small degree of entertainment, etc. you know, basic standards of living and not just modern slavery
The problem is the cost of college is opaque. They show an upfront cost, but something like 2/3rds of students don’t actually pay that price. Schools have learned they can get more out of people by setting a high price and then giving “aid” discounts than charging a flat price that is affordable to everyone. Also, schools measure themselves by “prestige” and that is determined by admission rate. Schools are luxury brands and they do what luxury brands do… manufacture scarcity. The result is they’re looting the livelihoods of young adults by putting them into indentured servitude. Higher education needs to be reformed. It isn’t the fault of professors. It’s the administrators.
Schools haven’t “learned” this behavior, they’ve been incentivized for it. All you’d have to do is make public funding contingent on a flat baseline cost - everybody pays the same minimal amount for tuition and books.
thier target audience is mostly freshman who are likely to pay full tutioons, so almost anyone junior or higher or neglected in terms resources dedicated to help them in career development(intership, volunteer work)
So dramatic. Drahma queens.
Drahma and Greg was a fun show
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.
originally they use softwares to screen out applicants based on nebelous requirements, like keywords. now its done by AI screening which made it worst.
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).
same situation, but minus the interships. biotech, research almost next to no jobs in the field unless you have significant undergrad experience, and getting lab experience while undergrad seems very limited. and when i look at the people employed or in the labs, its almost dominated 1 demographic, which apparently has been given a leg up for years, hence why dominate the biology field(mostly around health).
its meant to be gatekeep for phd,and lesser extent masters
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
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.
The trades seem to be doing just fine from what I can see
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.
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.
This just sounds like IBR with
extrafewer steps.
I should have been an escalator repairman. Those guys look like they have job security.
I notice they always have their shoelaces tied, too.
Well they made college and grad school cost upwards of 200k+ so no shit
even the lower-tier school with cheaper cost isnt worth it, you will end up the same place as the 200k+ tuition, waste the same amount of time, getting the same degree.
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.
besides the research side, which engineering are likely to have jobs
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.
You only go there if your parents are rich or you get scholarships
I’ve known a few MIT guys, they definitely have money.
they are also likely to be more well-off academically too, meaning they have the goods for a grad degree and suceed in it, because they all thse private tutoring sessions plus any nepo connections for better resources like internships, lab experience not to mention nepo-connections to employers. in our HS we only had 1 very gifted student who is more than likely to suceed in his field more than the rest of the 99% of our hs class, and then we have top performers,not gifted but 4.0 upon hs graduation. everyone else, they are on thier own.
remember when they paid for everyones MD school one time at columbia? the school selectively chose certain groups over others, they chose the more well off students over the disadvantaged students(socioeconomic)
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.
yea, the nepo-connections from these school. just having it on your resume without those connections wont do you any good.
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.
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.
feel like he could make more in nursing, has he looked into traveling nursing? i know they make bank off of it, depending on where you are. nursing is one of those degrees, if your stuck in a hospital you are more stressed and likely to have less pay, compared to movign around to different facilities.
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.
“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.
And a bunch of us were still paying off loans when when raising the current high school kids.
Right on target! Keeping the masses uneducated is one of the main goals.
25% of unemployed Americans have a 4 year degree
So 75% don’t?
No, they all have Masters degrees in Anthropology.
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
Thanks!
Here is the time series so you can see the stats for any given month for as long as they’ve been tracking it:
Is that all? It must be higher
