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, the price of a four year degree skyrocketed, while the financial return for most degrees is essentially zero. Not that there isn’t value beyond monetary compensation to be had in getting alot of degrees but they now come packaged with a lifetime of student loan debt if you’re not wealthy or lucky enough to get scholarship money.
This can’t be that shocking to the news media and “analysts”. Kids have been practically railroaded into getting at least a BS for decades, a lot of the time to the tune of 10s of thousands of dollars in debt if not more. Now that nearly everyone entering the work place has one it is not the selling point to employers that it was once. Supply and demand and all that.
And that’s before you even get into the usefulness of so much of the coursework in a lot of these degree programs. I only have an associates degree and probably half of the program was unrelated to the stated purpose of the degree. I can’t imagine how much junk is required for a 4 year or more in the name of being a well rounded person.
Maybe, just maybe, everyone is starting to wake up to just how self serving the college industry has become.
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.
Dramatic? It was practically manufactured.
I’ve felt like this for over a decade. I don’t even want to know what cost is now.
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.
