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
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 value of ivy league is networking with other shitheels and get jobs as a c-suit or politician. They don’t actually learn any skills and their token poor person they admit is no better off for being there compared to a regular 4-year.
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 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?
25% of unemployed Americans have a 4 year degree
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:
So 75% don’t?
No, they all have Masters degrees in Anthropology.
That’s incorrect. Man-man, who has 7.19% of all anthropology degrees, is a statistical outlier and should not have been included.
The majority are art majors, obviously.
Is that all? It must be higher
My job has me on college campuses several times a month, and I often speak individually with over a thousand college students a month.
There is real fear among these students. Many have done everything right, planned a career, took the classes in order since middle school to get there, took out thousands in student loans, all knowing that it will be worth it to get a good job that will pay well for an entire career…
Only to find out halfway through college that corporations are replacing all their software developers with AI, and the career path they’ve been following since they were a kid, no longer exists.
But they still owe their student loans, even if their Plan B career, which they hadn’t considered until they couldn’t find a post-graduation job in their field, pays barely more than minimum wage.
Many north american GenXers had the same feelings in our 20’s, even though it was a better situation then. Being in the voracious demographic wake of the boomers made scrambling up a tippy ladder seem pointless.
And Millennials faced the same thing when graduating college right into the wake of the 2008 crash. Thousands of dollars in debt where paying the minimum could leave you owing more than you started, and into a job market flooded with not just recent graduates but many veteran workers who had lost their jobs. Baristas with Ivy League degrees and no social safety nets.
Told their entire lives that good grades and a college degree were the path to happiness and a job better than flipping burgers at a McDonalds, only to graduate and be called entitled for not wanting to flip burgers with your masters degree.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the real crime here that the government turns a blind eye to. How are these institutions allowed to function as nonprofits?
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?
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)
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.
