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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.”
In 2017, U.S. adults surveyed were virtually split on the question — 49% said a degree was worth the cost and 47% said it wasn’t. When CNBC asked the same question in 2013 as part of its All American Economic Survey, 53% said a degree was worth it and 40% said it was not.
The eye-popping shift over the last 12 years comes against the backdrop of several major trends shaping the job market and the education world, from exploding college tuition prices to rapid changes in the modern economy — which seems once again poised for radical transformation alongside advances in AI.
“It’s just remarkable to see attitudes on any issue shift this dramatically, and particularly on a central tenet of the American dream, which is a college degree. Americans used to view a college degree as aspirational — it provided an opportunity for a better life. And now that promise is really in doubt,” said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, who conducted the poll along with the Republican pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies.
“What is really surprising about it is that everybody has moved. It’s not just people who don’t have a college degree,” Horwitt added.
National data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that those with advanced degrees earn more and have lower unemployment rates than those with lower levels of education. That’s been true for years.
But what has shifted is the price of college. While there have been some small declines in tuition prices over the last decade, when adjusted for inflation, College Board data shows that the average, inflation-adjusted cost of public four-year college tuition for in-state students has doubled since 1995. Tuition at private, four-year colleges is up 75% over the same period.
Poll respondents who spoke with NBC News all emphasized those rising costs as a major reason why the value of a four-year degree has been undercut.
Jacob Kennedy, a 28-year-old server and bartender living in Detroit, told NBC News that while he believes “an educated populace is the most important thing for a country to have,” if people can’t use those degrees because of the debt they’re carrying, it undercuts the value.
Kennedy, who has a two-year degree, reflected on “the number of people who I’ve met working in the service industry who have four-year degrees and then within a year of graduating immediately quit their ‘grown-up jobs’ to go back to the jobs they had.”
“The cost overwhelms the value,” he continued. “You go to school with all that student debt — the jobs you get out of college don’t pay that debt, so you have to go find something else that can pay that debt.”
The 20-point decline over the last 12 years among those who say a degree is worth it — from 53% in 2013 to 33% now — is reflected across virtually every demographic group. But the shift in sentiment is especially striking among Republicans.
In 2013, 55% of Republicans called a college degree worth it, while 38% said it wasn’t worth it. In the new poll, just 22% of Republicans say the four-year degree is worth it, while 74% say it’s not.
Democrats have seen a significant shift too, but not to the same extent — a decline from 61% who said a degree was worth it in 2013 to 47% this year.
Over the same period, the composition of both parties has changed, with the Republican Party garnering new and deeper support from voters without college degrees, while the Democratic Party drew in more degree-holders.
Remarkably, less than half of voters with college degrees see those degrees as worth the cost: 46% now, down from 63% in 2013.
Those without a college degree were about split on the question in 2013. Now, 71% say a four-year degree is not worth the cost, while 26% say it is.
Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said enough cracks have proliferated under the long-standing narrative that a college degree always pays off to create a serious rupture.
“Some people drop out, or sometimes people end up with a degree that is not worth a whole lot in the labor market, and sometimes people pay way too much for a degree relative to the value of what that credential is,” he said. “These cases have created enough exceptions to the rule that a bachelor’s degree always pays off, so that people are now more skeptical.”
The upshot is that interest in technical, vocational and two-year degree programs has soared.
“I think students are more wary about taking on the risk of a four-year or even a two-year degree,” he said. “They’re now more interested in any pathway that can get them into the labor force more quickly.”
Josiah Garcia, a 24-year-old in Virginia, said he recently enrolled in a program to receive a four-year engineering degree after working as an electrician’s apprentice. He said he was motivated to go back to school because he saw the degree as having a direct effect on his future earning potential.
But he added that he didn’t feel that those who sought other degrees in areas like art or theater could say the same.
“A lot of my friends who went to school for art or dance didn’t get the job they thought they could get after graduating,” he said, arguing that degrees for “softer skills” should be cheaper than those in STEM fields.
Jessica Burns, a 38-year-old Iowa resident and bachelor’s degree-holder who works for an insurance company, told NBC News that for her, the worth of a four-year-degree largely depends on the cost.
She went to a community college and then a state school to earn her degree, so she said she graduated without having to spend an “insane” amount of money.
But her husband went to a private college for his degree, and she quipped: “We are going to have student loan debt for him forever.”
Burns said she believes a college degree is “essential for a lot of jobs. You’re not going to get an interview if you don’t have a four-year degree for a lot of jobs in my field.”
But she framed the value of degrees more in terms of how society views them instead of intrinsic value.
“It’s not valuable because it’s brought a bunch of value added, it’s valuable because it’s the key to even getting in the door,” she said. “Our society needs to figure out that if we value it, we need to make it affordable.”
Burns said she believes that a lot more people in her millennial generation are “now saddled with a huge amount of debt, even as successful business professionals,” which will influence how her peers approach paying for college for their children.
There hasn’t just been a decline in the cost-benefit analysis of a degree. Gallup polling also shows a marked decline in public confidence in higher education over the last decade, albeit with a slight increase over the last year.
“This is a political problem. It’s also a real problem for higher education. Colleges and universities have lost that connection they’ve had with a large swath of the American people based on affordability,” Horwitt said. “They’re now seen as out of touch and not accessible to many Americans.”
The NBC News poll surveyed 1,000 registered voters Oct. 24-28 via a mix of telephone interviews and an online survey sent via text message. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
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