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.”
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?
When you come out of school carrying six figures of debt into an economy where you will never afford a house and won’t pay off the debt until you are 50. An entry level job that requires 5 years experience and pays 35000 a year. Yeah. That checks out.
I’ve felt like this for over a decade. I don’t even want to know what cost is now.
Dramatic? It was practically manufactured.
Because it should be more affordable
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!
Why work hard and study to die poor? Work lazy and die happy
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?
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
Ah, murika: where its bad to be elitist, but being a racist is just fine
depends on what kind of racist. We’re racist about our racism.
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.
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.
I don’t doubt what you say is true, but could you list some examples of jobs that are gated by a college credential?
Anything in healthcare, which are the last college degree jobs that consistently pay over average.
I approve of our healthcare providers having college educations & being paid well :-)
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.
Degrees and grades only matter for younger and less experienced folks.
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.
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.
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.
I sometimes wished I just lied about having experience.
You know. I also lied about my experiences. But I took a crash course on the software or the job I had to do. For about 5 years, 90% of the time, I get fired for being incompetent. After bouncing around with my lies, I sorta getting good at my job until I end up quitting after learned everything.
Just lie. The worst thing they can do is fire you. Who cares. You’re still alive and can just keep applying until some other company hires you.
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)
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.
It sounded awesome.
Maybe only to US-americans? To me it sounds equally, but a tiny lil less, horrible than it is now.
Why not fund it entirely by the state? You know, the one profiting very much from a good paying job you’d get. Maybe just invest a few billions less in Military, but more in education and its own people. Like a civilized nation should do. It could do wonders to a society.
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.
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 is kinda the way australia works for citizens: the government sets the cost of courses (usually about $10000-$20000AUD per semester) and then pays for them entirely, and you get a HELP debt with the government which is kinda like an interest free (though indexed so it doesn’t get cheaper with time) loan which is automatically taken out of your paycheque pre-tax and only after you start earning a certain amount… if you never earn that bottom limit, the debt disappears if you die
This just sounds like IBR with
extrafewer steps.
Well they made college and grad school cost upwards of 200k+ so no shit
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
I appreciate the suggestions. He is aware of traveling nursing. I think he has some specific goals, although obviously those can change over time. The biggest thing he has to deal with is his medications require him to work consistent shifts. He can’t go back and forth between days and nights, and a lot of positions require more flexibility.
He’s not doing terribly — he just bought his own house, which is more than a lot of guys under thirty can say. But he hasn’t yet caught up with the rest of us pay-wise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And a bunch of us were still paying off loans when when raising the current high school kids.
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
